Home Social Media Brand Networks Teams With ‘Business Weather Intelligence’ To Make It Rain For Social Marketers

Brand Networks Teams With ‘Business Weather Intelligence’ To Make It Rain For Social Marketers

SHARE:

brand-networks-tedfordTaking a page from the Weather Company, which has been trying to convince brand advertisers that meteorology is about lifestyles, not umbrellas, Brand Networks is partnering with Planalytics to build out its “social marketing stack” around connecting local and national retailers with data about weather patterns and consumer behavior.

The deal comes a few weeks after Brand Networks, which has positioned itself as a hybrid social marketing  software provider with “high-touch” managed services, raised $68 million to capitalize on its profile as a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer. In the meantime, Planalytics, has carved out a niche for itself as a source of “business weather intelligence,” with a promise to help marketers better plan for rainy days and beyond.

“We have a handful of shared customers who expressed interest in connecting the dots between the weather intelligence they get from Planalytics and the real-time social publishing and ad optimization they get from Brand Networks,” said Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford. “After conversations between our teams, we realized there was a market opportunity that the two of us were uniquely positioned to tackle together.”

In addition to bringing it data on weather and consumers, Planalytics can connect Brand  Networks with “hundreds of customers” in both retail and consumer packaged goods. These businesses go to Planalytics for services such as inventory management, staffing levels, and to a lesser degree, broad marketing programs.

In terms of what Brand Networks brings to the table, in addition to its own clients and Facebook presence, Tedford said that his company can make its partner’s data more actionable for real-time marketing. Brand Networks will offer access to Planalytics’ WeatherSmart tools as part of it’s the company’s existing “social stack.”

That would seem to come as a challenge to The Weather Company, which in addition to its flagship cable TV network, The Weather Channel, has also been working to for the past year to build up its display and mobile ad services. Rather than take the stance as an alternative to the multimedia metrological giant, Tedford expressed hopes of partnering with it at some point.

“As consumers increasingly get their news from their own networks via social feeds on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., we feel it’s important to distribute personalized, weather-triggered content to them in this format,” he said. “In the future, we see the Weather Channel as another potential distribution point for hyper-local weather intelligence, rather than a competitor.”

Overall, Brand Networks is not so much interested in “conquering” weather-related advertising, as opposed to finding ever-more focused touchpoints around consumer data. It just so happens that weather happens to everyone and businesses have recognized that its influence is more than just mundane.  In that sense, the deal with Planalytics is about creating more building blocks of connected data.

“Data feeds of events, local news, and inventory can also be used to personalize social publishing and advertising at scale,” Tedford said. “Matching data feeds with distribution channels is at the foundation of all the buzz around ‘programmatic ad buying’ on platforms like television, online video, etc.”

Must Read

Comic: Gamechanger (Google lost the DOJ's search antitrust case)

Judge Mehta’s Remedies For Google’s Search Monopoly Won’t Cure What Ails Publishers

Remedies in the federal search antitrust case against Google landed with a thud earlier this week. Most publishers and ad industry pundits were sorely disappointed.

Conversion APIs Are Becoming Table Stakes – But Not All Brands Have Bought In

CAPI integrations have moved from a nice-to-have to a necessity for anyone operating within walled garden environments. Now they’re laying the groundwork for an outcomes-driven ad ecosystem.

Peppa Pig

The Media And Retail Deals Behind The Peppa Pig Franchise Expansion

Peppa Pig is everywhere. Whether or not you have children, you likely know the little girl pig from the kid’s cartoon show. But the Peppa media franchise is just getting started.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters

How A For-Profit College Is Using CTV Ads To Win Over New Students

The American College of Education partnered with performance TV company MNTN to better reach its audience of adults seeking higher education.

Critics Say The Trade Desk Is Forcing Kokai Adoption, But Apparently It’s Up To Agencies

Is TTD forcing agencies to adopt the new Kokai interface despite claims they can still use the interface of their choice? Here’s what we were able to find out.

Why Big Brand Price Increases Will Flatten Ad Budgets

Product prices and marketing budgets are flip sides of the same coin. But the phase-in effects of tariffs, combined with vicissitudes of global weather and commodity production, challenge that truism.