Background

McCann is a leading global ad agency network, operating in over 100 countries. They are behind some of the best-known and most iconic advertising campaigns of the last century. One of McCann’s UK clients is a commuter rail company. They wanted to contextualize their social advertising around the famously changeable UK weather, using warm weather moments as an opportunity to promote domestic ‘sun & sea’ getaways, and wet weather weekends to advertise city breaks.

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Objective

The main objective was to generate traffic to the client’s website via a Facebook Traffic campaign.

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Strategy

McCann devised a strategy of activation around 3 weather scenarios – warm weather, hot weather, and rainy weather. 3 sets of creative were developed with messaging and imagery that corresponded to each scenario. The first set of creative targeted audiences in the countryside and seaside towns. These ads promoted travel into London, and were activated during periods of rain. The messaging focused on things to do in London when the weather was wet (museums, aquariums etc). The second and third set of creative triggered during warm and hot weather respectively. These ads targeted audiences in London, promoting trips to the coast. The message was to make the most of the hot weather by escaping the crowded city for the beach.

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Implementation

Prior to using WeatherAds, the McCann team were manually checking forecasts over and over again, and then producing content reactively based on the forecast. WeatherAds was chosen as the best automated weather targeting platform on account of its “Great UX, prices and attentive support.”

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Results

The dynamic weather based ads performed outstandingly, delivering a CPC 36.6% lower than the campaign average. In addition, WeatherAds increased CTR by 49.4%, vs non-weather targeted ads. Overall, dollar for dollar, the weather targeted ads generated 57.6% more website traffic than the standard ads.

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