The Weather Company (TWC) has partnered with Lotame to target ever-narrower segments of audiences across PC and mobile screens. Lotame, the seven-year-old data management platform, beat out four other DMPs for the assignment, TWC Chief Revenue Officer Curt Hecht confirmed.
Hecht declined to say who the other contenders were, but sources indicate Lotame bested Bluekai and eXelate.
“We’ve been very focused on how we leverage the data we have around our weather-related content, and that will remain a big part of what we do with our enterprise solution with WeatherFX,” he said. “But we also want to make sure, from an audience-based buying perspective, we have the best technology to leverage data for things other than weather. That’s where Lotame comes in.”
Hecht described the relationship with Lotame as “primary, but not exclusive,” indicating that the company may look to other vendors for specific assignments, especially as the company ties its data and advertising into a wider cross-platform TV/PC/mobile loop. Earlier this month it introduced the TV-facing “CableFX” tool to marketers at its upfront presentation.
Hecht said he and his team were impressed by Lotame’s “hundreds of off the shelf” audience segments, depending on the marketer and their needs at a given moment. He also praised Lotame’s scale.
Specifically, Lotame’s Crowd Control product will power weather.com’s AudienceFX, the site’s audience targeting solution for brands. In addition to getting more consumer insights apart from the weather, TWC will avail itself of Crowd Syndicate, which allows Lotame’s DMP customers, on a permission basis, to share information with each other.
“We consider Crowd Syndicate to be a shot over the bow to the third-party ecosystem,” Lotame CEO Andy Monfried told AdExchanger.
So how will the two “go beyond” the weather in aiming ads at consumers? For starters, the data gathered will start with weather and try to determine what’s bringing the user to TWC’s digital properties. Can it be connected to a local lifestyle marketer?
“Our value is in being able to collect difficult, multivariate first-party data segments all in one session,” Monfried said. “TWC was already collecting geo-based data. We can collect and layer event-level data to see how a consumer is interacting with weather. That’s a value to TWC, to their marketers and to their users.”
