IBM, Nielsen Global Consumer Business Expand Data Targeting with AI

IBM launches Watson Advertising Weather Targeting, a new suite of triggers designed for marketers to help them make the connection between weather and product sales actionable at scale without the use of third-party cookies or identifiers. The offering supports new advertising targeting triggers powered by Nielsen.

Facilitated through the Nielsen Connect Partner Network, the open ecosystem of solution providers for retailers and manufacturers in the CPG industry, these new triggers leverage IBM Watson to aggregate and analyze large and complex data sets like weather and product sales to create more effective and efficient targeting opportunities while addressing new privacy standards. As part of their collaboration, IBM and Nielsen, through its Global Consumer business, will work together to combine the power of weather insights from The Weather Company with Nielsen's Retail Measurement Services (RMS) data to generate future reports for marketers.

Watson Advertising Weather Targeting leverages enterprise-grade AI to analyze over 500 advertising triggers with up to six variables per trigger across 42,000 zip codes every hour, increasing the amount of actionable insights the company generates for brands. With this collaboration, IBM Watson Advertising will introduce a new suite of triggers and insight reports that will harness Nielsen's RMS data and weather from IBM's The Weather Company to provide brands with actionable advertising solutions that do not rely on personally identifiable information, third-party cookies or identifiers.

The solution is designed to help brands:

• Anticipate and activate digital campaigns based on weather's influence on consumer behavior and emotion according to zip code.
• Improve effectiveness by automatically serving meaningful, relevant ads to consumers.
• Reduce media waste by triggering messages only when and where consumers might appreciate the brand message and find it to be relevant.
• The targeting solution will be available across the digital advertising ecosystem, including programmatic, display, social, search, video, email and digital out-of-home.

The Weather Targeting data tool is part of a suite of AI-driven targeting solutions. Most recently, IBM Watson Advertising used the technology to assist with the COVID-19 pandemic by enabling brands to run relevant and locally sensitive digital ads based on fluctuating infection rates. This effort was done in combination with The Weather Channel's COVID-19 tracker that was distributed across properties to provide Americans with general public health and safety information in the face of the global pandemic.