The Weather Company wants to know not just how weather forecasts make people feel, but also how they make people react to ads.
TWC is building a monetization model that treats weather as both a contextual and an emotional signal, its director of measurement, Shannon Ferguson, told AdExchanger.
After about a year of testing with neuroanalytics marketing research firm Neuro-Insight, her team is betting that the dread of a washed-out holiday or the relief of a sunny stretch ahead can shape how people receive ads on TWCโs The Weather Channel app โ and how those ads perform through the funnel.
The goal is to โunderstand how weather triggers the subconscious mind โ basically, which neural pathways in your brain light up when you process particular advertising alongside certain forecasted data,โ Ferguson said.
More specifically, neuroanalytics testing is shaping how TWC thinks about when the ad experience should lean into awareness or nudge users toward a purchase.
Meanwhile, AI measurement and outcomes vendors are multiplying, putting more pressure on publishers to demonstrate their value using new agentic solutions. TWC is navigating that shifting marketplace by combining neuroscience intelligence and internal AI tools with a measurement approach thatโs agnostic on third-party vendors.
The strategy is still a work in progress. But TWCโs approach offers a concrete look at how one publisher experiments with emerging tech like neuro data and agentic AI.
Weather and โemotional targetingโ
TWC has always seen weather as a strong contextual signal for ads. But through its neuro research, TWC has come to see weather as an emotional signal, too.
The company ran a thought-leadership project with Neuro-Insight last year to examine which parts of the brain activate when people view different combinations of forecast data and ads and how this activity affects attention and memory.
To build on the findings from the…