Conventional wisdom might assume that ice cream sales only spike when it’s warm out. But that’s not the case—it turns out that cold weather can also have people craving sweet scoops as comfort food. 

That is an example of the insights The Weather Company—owner of weather.com and the Weather Channel app—is dishing out to clients in a move to help marketers better plan for changing weather patterns. And such analytics have become more important as climate change makes weather a lot less predictable.

“We’re not talking about, ‘it’s raining and so go by rain boots,’—but we’re talking about things that are more nuanced,” The Weather Company Chief Marketing Officer Randi Stipes said on the latest edition of Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast. “So if we take the Ohio Valley, for example, we found that there was up to a 30% [ice cream] sales increase when the temperature dropped below 57 [degrees],” she said. 

That is “not very intuitive,” she added, “but when you really think about it, that’s because when the temperatures drop and people start going indoors, there’s this cocooning behavior.”

Stipes acknowledges that basic weather forecasting data is fairly commoditized. So The Weather Company attempts to go deeper, linking weather data with other analytics to not only help brands target ads, but for activities that go beyond marketing, from inventory and supply chain management to pricing optimization, she said.

Beyond basic ad targeting

The Weather Company has long used weather data to help clients target ads and optimize creative. For instance, it partnered with cosmetics marketer e.l.f in late 2022 for a campaign starting Meghan Trainor to promote its Halo Glow Liquid Filter makeup product. The cheeky effort had the pop star portraying a weather forecaster predicting an “e.l.f.ing glow storm.” One video noted that 8 in 10 women changed their beauty routine based on the weather. Ads included digital out-of-home and buys on the Weather Channel app, with creative tailored to local weather conditionsCreative was tailored to local weather conditions—for instance, if it was raining, images reflected that.

But to help clients do more complex planning and optimization, The Weather Company is debuting new analytics offerings such as the Weather Engine, which it previewed at CES, Stipes said. “It is a platform that our customers can log into and have real-time access to weather intelligence and insights that we're making available really through the application of large-scale data analytics, machine learning AI and using that to produce actionable insights, not only for marketers but for the entire organization,” she said.

The new products come as The Weather Company transitions to new ownership. IBM, which has owned The Weather Company since 2016, is selling it to private equity firm Francisco Partners in a deal announced late last year that is expected to close in the coming days (terms of the deal were not disclosed). The Weather Company says its digital properties reach 415 million people each month. The Weather Channel cable TV network is under the separate ownership of Allen Media Group.

Stipes described the deal as a “conscious uncoupling” with IBM. “We’ve benefited from IBM’s leadership in AI and cloud computing,” she added. “And so our plans are to take the best of what we've learned in our time at IBM.”

On the podcast, Stipes also previewed new functionality in the Weather Channel app that it has begun to roll out, such as integrating data related to skin health and breathing and allergies, as well as cold and flu season. The goal is to “give people a better understanding of how weather impacts their health and then give them the tools to mitigate their symptoms,” she said.