This week saw severe weather sweep across southern Britain as the St Jude’s Day storm descended on the UK. The storm, named by The Weather Company’s meteorologist Leon Brown, brought with it a surge of online activity across weather platforms, and demonstrated an evident opportunity for advertisers to reach a highly engaged audience using weather-targeted advertising.

On the eve of the St Jude’s Day storm, Sunday 27th October 2013, The Weather Company saw a huge increase in UK traffic, making it the highest traffic day month-to-date across its web and mobile platforms. Overall, the UK site page views and daily unique visitors were up 111 per cent and 82 per cent respectively from the month-to-date average. 

Our mobile platforms saw a significant upsurge of users; compared to the average Sunday in 2013, unique users to the UK mobile site were up 134 per cent, respectively. UK unique visitors across our suite of apps for smartphones and tablets were up an average of 40 per cent.

With this increased engagement across platforms, our advertising clients can further utilise weather data to deliver tailored messages to customers, to suit the real-time weather where the user is located. Knowing that a storm like St Jude’s Day is going to hit, marketers can ensure that adverts for insurance, take-aways or online retail for example, can reach the audience at exactly the right time. Online programmatic PMP allows advertisers to buy severe weather conditions and in a similar way to search, this enables advertisers to place the right advert in the right place, at the right time.

With winter on its way, we can expect further opportunity for brands to develop weather targeted campaigns and let advertisers leverage the power of weather. In the winter for example, if a user of The Weather Channel app is located in an area with snowy conditions, the advert delivered to them would be relevant for severe weather, for instance, car tyres. With the increased engagement across weather platforms at moments of severe weather, the audience is engrossed in the conditions and offering targeted adverts with appropriate messaging can enhance the user experience.

At The Weather Channel we believe that the future of mobile advertising should always offer a rich and dynamic experience, being as relevant as possible. Adverts should always be tailored specifically, making full use of location, demographic and big weather data. Like mobile devices, weather is personal, local and with us everywhere we go, and we’re on a mission to go further and deeper into the weather than anyone else. 

Ross Webster is managing director, EMEA, at The Weather Channel