• April 11, 2008

The Weather Channel Interactive has completely revamped its Desktop application featuring interactive weather maps, new and improved content areas and four forecast options on the home screen.

The Desktop also introduces an array of advanced ad products that will enable sponsors to better target Desktop users. The Weather Channel Desktop is a free ad-supported application that lets users stay one click away from up-to-date weather information and severe weather alerts. It provides the current local temperature and severe weather alerts in the PC system tray.

New features include interactive maps with selectable weather layers, pan and zoom capabilities, and the ability to see weather in motion. It also offers more comprehensive coverage of breaking weather news stories, such as storms and hurricanes, and revamped hourly, 36-hour, daily, and weekend forecasts.

Users can now personalize the desktop with colorful skins and features that are most relevant to their daily lives. This includes driving conditions, rush hour traffic conditions, business travel forecasts, outdoor exercise forecasts, golf course conditions, and allergy and pollen levels.

Also included is the option to customize Desktop with Major League Baseball (MLB) team colors, logo and content. Once customized with a team choice, users will see live scores, and forecasts and current conditions for each stadium. Other baseball content includes links to MLB.com for team information, including team sites, breaking news, schedules, team stores and tickets.

The new desktop also includes an enhanced lineup of ad products to include the Adaptor© ads previously only available on weather.com. This feature allows advertisers to contextualize their message based on the environment where the advertisements are served and the location of the user. For example, an advertising message could "adapt" by pulling in the Desktop user's city name and their current temperature and placing it into the ad message, "it's 28 degrees in Chicago--a great time to travel to Aruba where it is currently 85 and sunny."

Other advertising products available on the Desktop application include Geo-targeting, Demo-targeting, Weather Triggering and Lifestyle targeting advertisements.

--Tanya Irwin