Innovators Unscripted With The Weather Company

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The Weather Company’s Randi Stipes on weather data, AI, and the future of marketing

The Weather Company is in a unique position where you have access to vast amounts of weather intelligence and first-party audience data. How do you leverage these assets together to help marketers deliver more effective campaigns?

When we think about the influence of weather, it’s the second-greatest influence on consumer behavior, only after the economy—which is pretty tremendous.

We’re sitting on 40 years of weather data. What we’ve been able to do is correlate that with consumer behavior to help brands understand and better anticipate how certain weather conditions impact how we feel, what we try, and what we buy.

“We’re all swimming in data, and while data is valuable, what makes it invaluable are the insights we can extract. Taking that weather intelligence, we work with marketers to help them better anticipate consumer behavior and use that in their marketing.”

Given weather’s influence, brands can either fall victim to Mother Nature or harness her power. Weather data helps brands determine the right timing, the right execution, and the right stories that they can use in their marketing.

When you think about future innovation, how do you see the intersection of weather data and advertising evolving?

I see it accelerating in three different ways.

The first way I just touched on—predictive modeling and being able to better leverage weather data to understand what’s going to drive certain behaviors.

Second is hyper-contextual targeting. After you have those insights, how do you activate them at a really local and contextual level? What’s going to drive certain behaviors for you, based on where you are geographically and your preferences, is going to be different than what drives behavior for me.

You’re based in New York, or right outside New York? What would you consider to be a hot temperature? I’m based in Florida—80 degrees is pretty mild to me. A hot temperature for me is going to be around 100 degrees. So, weather is super relative. Being able to understand those nuances—that’s what I mean by hyper-contextual.

The third accelerant where I really see weather continuing to play a role is in data-driven storytelling.

“Weather is a utility, but it also drives emotion. For brands to be able to leverage that is pretty powerful.”

Give us the CMO’s perspective: How are you thinking about leveraging data and making data-based decisions?

The short answer is all day, every day—you’re probably living that, too. We’ve talked about how we work with brands, but I’m a brand, too. At The Weather Channel, we’re fortunate to have over 330 million people who come to The Weather Channel app and our other brands every month.

It’s our responsibility to use data to figure out how to bring in a greater audience, and to do that with tremendous precision. But also, once we have that audience, how are we targeting them—eating our own dog food, if you will, as a brand—whether that’s using weather or other signals to reach them in effective ways and keep them in our experiences longer.

Like I said, weather is a utility. People come to us daily, sometimes twice a day. We’re using data to determine how we make our experiences more sticky, more relevant—and we’re testing and learning at every turn. So, using the data in real time to optimize.

Through our partnership and Index Marketplaces, you’ve been able to activate weather intelligence and curated deals on the sell side. How does that help you get more value from your data assets? And what new opportunities does that unlock for marketers?

First of all, we love our partnership with Index, so thank you for that. It’s really a win-win.

So, the first part of your question—how does activating intelligence on the sell side help us?

“All of the intelligence we’ve garnered, we can now extend that off our properties.”

Say a brand comes to us, let’s say OFF! Mosquito Repellent—a great partner of ours leveraging our weather data to help people understand when mosquito activity is prevalent.

They can use that intelligence within The Weather Channel app in a contextual environment. But that’s not the only place their media is running. So, we can extend that value anywhere off-property across the entire advertising ecosystem.

And in turn, the second part of your question is how does that help brands and our partners? It gives them the freedom and flexibility to treat their marketing strategy truly as one versus having a weather strategy that sits in a silo. It’s kind of the anti-walled garden.

“Index is a really important partner in helping us scale that value.”

AI: Everyone’s talking about it. You integrated AI into your business early on—can you share some real examples of how AI is transforming advertising today?

Will you indulge me—I’m going to talk a little bit about how we’ve been using AI for decades, as I think it would be helpful to provide that context and then we can talk about more recent use cases.

I like to call it kind of the OG AI—machine learning—which we were using long before anyone was calling it AI, because again, we’re sitting on a ton of weather data. We have over a hundred meteorologists on our team who analyze more than a hundred weather models every day to deliver the world’s most accurate forecast.

They’re absolutely brilliant at what they do, but they could not do their jobs as effectively or efficiently without AI.

And because weather is becoming increasingly volatile, we can’t just look at seasonal norms and say, it’s going to be springtime and so it’ll be in the mid 60s to low 80s. Weather doesn’t follow rules. Weather follows patterns, and those patterns are changing.

And so, technology has become—and AI in particular—even more integral as our weather becomes more erratic. That’s the ongoing and foundational use of AI in our business.

It’s funny, we hear brands or businesses talking about using AI for operational efficiency and then innovation—we’re doing it in reverse. We’ve had the innovation. Where we’re using it across the business now is in the consumer experience.

How do we make a more personalized experience and use AI so that we’re creating a different experience when you go to the Weather Channel app versus when I go to the Weather Channel app? Not just based on location, but also through content curation to ensure that it’s personally relevant.

“In our advertising solutions, we use AI to derive weather intelligence, create those insights, and bring it forward to brands. It’s embedded throughout the business.”

If we were sitting down again one year from now, what’s one thing you hope the industry’s achieved?

There are so many things. But if I was narrowing it down—can I say two?

“First, I hope brands stop interrupting and start helping.”

That’s not to say it’s not being done, but I hope we see more examples of that. If our marketing isn’t providing something that’s useful—whether that’s practically, culturally, or emotionally—chances are it’ll be forgotten. I hope we evolve from a “look what we’re doing” mindset to a “look how we’re helping” mindset. I think that would be pretty powerful.

Second, and I cannot even claim it as my own—I wish I could I could properly quote where I heard this. Someone said it, and it really resonated with me, so I want to amplify what I heard.

I hope we’re talking less about AI. And that’s not meant to say I don’t believe in AI—I’m a huge proponent of AI—but I hope we’re not talking about it as the new shiny object in a year from now.

I hope it’s become more commonplace and baked in to our workflows and operations, or at least that we’ve gone beyond the “wow” to more of the “how.” Maybe it’s not that we’re talking about it less, but we’re talking about it less as a novelty and more as a really great practical reality with more use cases.

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