• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, May 15, 2017

Few variables affect purchase behavior and sentiment as uniformly as the weather.

Last week, The Weather Company rolled out its partnership with LiveRamp, through which marketers have access to expansive audience segments informed in real time by up to 2.2 billion location data points every 15 minutes.

“We aim to use our data, together with LiveRamp’s audiences, to develop cognitive profiles of our millions of users,” Mark Risis, VP of partnerships at The Weather Company, told Real-Time Daily. With huge volumes of real-time weather data, WEATHERfx, the company's event-based data set, offers purchase signals to marketers.

For example, WEATHERfx data found that coffee sales in New York City rise during winter when it’s less cloudy and windy -- providing direction for a coffee brand to hone its messaging, among other marketing suggestions.

Beyond the LiveRamp partnership, the Weather Company, as an IBM-owned company, makes use of Watson’s “augmented intelligence” technology to further enhance marketing opportunities.

“As opposed to artificial intelligence, we want to help enhance and extend human capability, expertise and potential -- not replace humans,” explained Risis as he discussed the company's approach to using IBM Watson data.

“With each interaction, the Watson Ads get smarter. This helps brands understand consumers like never before, because they are finally able to listen to what their consumers are thinking and looking for,” continued Risis. “These insights can then be used to inform future creative, product, and messaging strategies and deepen relationships with their audience.”

Using weather triggers, marketers build robust predictive audience segments based on weather events, which can be repeated on a cycle.