Clear Skies, Ad Buys: New Weather-Based Advertising Platform Fueled By AI
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At this point, you may have become acclimated to seeing online advertisements based on your browsing history or social media activity. But online ads based on your weather? The service-in-production by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and Nielsen Holdings PLC is offering an AI-based system that utilizes machine learning models to find connections between weather conditions and sales/spending behaviors in ZIP codes across the United States.
Digital advertising sales are expected to total more than 134 billion this year, forming a significant portion of US gross domestic product. As competition solidifies in the digital advertising market, companies are looking for new ways to outperform giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Thus, a transition away from the traditional third-party cookie method of collecting marketing information has accelerated. The combination of resources from the IBM Weather Co. arm and Nielsen’s Retail Management Services will allow the system, dubbed Watson Advertising Weather Targeting, to analyze hundreds of weather patterns, but also find correlations with specific sales data from more than 900,000 retailers. IBM claimed that experimentation thus far has proved promising, as they found a near-fifty percent increase in outdoor pest control sales upon the emergence of clearer weather conditions in central United States.
While artificial intelligence is often thought of as a dangerous and possibly invasive technology by many, it is actually offering a novel alternative to the currently individual based, hyper-targeted, nature of advertising. Instead of having businesses focus on the behaviors of individual consumers, it allows for success by examining what a group of consumers have in common, which in this case are the weather conditions that they are experiencing. Businesses are then able to use such data to tailor their marketing strategies to each specific group of consumers based on their circumstances and experiences.
