Mark’s, a leading apparel and footwear retailer in Canada with 385 stores across the country, wanted to get consumers out of their warm homes and into its stores. We decided to give customers a reason to face the extreme cold and turn it into sales. Mark’s goal is to understand Canadians better than any other retailer, and to do this Mark’s customized its inventory to the specific weather patterns of Canadian regions.

Advertising winter boots during the week of the first snowfall, for example, is much more effective than advertising them while consumers are still enjoying the last warm days of October. That said, forecasting the weather across Canada is a daunting task: changes can be sudden and extreme in each local market.

This case is about how 2nd party data was integrated to every touch points of a campaign…all the way to the cashier system.

We partnered with the number one source for weather in Canada, The Weather Network. The weather feed allowed for automatically activating weather-triggered media actions in digital, out-of-home, Facebook, mobile and web executions across Canada.

The Weather Network feed became the source that determined the daily in-store discount for each market. Every day, the discount changed according to the temperature in each of the markets. Even more complex was the implementation of the variable discount at the store-level, which required daily optimization of the cashier system.

The complexity of this campaign was outstanding. On any given day, discounts were different in each major market. To achieve such a level of excellence, the collaboration of numerous experts was needed.

This campaign not only unlocked the power of data-driven marketing but was also a test to validate if the organization is ready for a new way of retailing. It challenged the company’s supply chain and purchasing operations, but also proved that weather can be leveraged in a positive way to influence and optimize sales.

In light of this success, the organization is now thinking of deploying an annual national program and connecting the weather data feed to their DSP to automatically activate programmatic buys but also integrating this feed with their real-time reporting tool to see the weather forecast impact on sales.

The campaign truly gave Canadians a reason to face the extreme cold and shop at Mark’s:

• Over 67 million weather-triggered impressions were delivered.

• During the time of the promotion, comp sales were up 21% over the previous year, despite the record-breaking cold wave that hit all Canadian regions.

The complexity of this campaign was outstanding. On any given day, discounts were different in each major market. As such, this campaign was a template for collaborative work between the weather feed, in-store activation and paid media to activate the real-time retail campaign.

The Weather Network, with its top five website in Canada, wanted to restrict Mark’s usage of its weather feed, which was after all the network's “bread and butter”!

Lastly, this is a case that shows the power of targeting. Targeting down to the city level allowed for content customization, which was the fundamental element of the

The lower the temperature dropped, the deeper the discount on Mark’s inventory. For instance, if it was -12 degrees Celsius in Toronto, consumers in the city would enjoy 12% off their purchases! At the same time, the deal could be different in Montreal if the temperature there was different.

The strategic decision was made to launch a fully integrated, weather-triggered campaign adapted to current temperatures in each major Canadian market. This is where it became a data power play: the only way to make it happen was to unleash the power of data!

Weather conditions always provided plenty of conversation material for Canadians. This fixation on the weather is a local phenomenon. Targeting down to the city level allowed for content customization, which was fundamental to this campaign’s success. Consumers found the offer appealing because they felt it related specifically to them and their cities.

We are Canadian. We invented snowmobiles, the snow blower and Polar fleece. Canadians embrace winter. We usually go through it with a smile. Usually. The winter of 2015 was recognized as Canada’s coldest in over 115 years, forcing even the most adventurous to barricade themselves at home. It broke records, kneecapped the economy and showed us how extreme weather can have a disastrous impact on Retail. The objective of the campaign was to transform negative year over year sales results into growth opportunities.

Canada is a vast country characterized by many different weather patterns: while Vancouver may be experiencing springtime conditions, Winnipeg could still be under several feet of snow. Within this context, Mark’s sales numbers are extremely sensitive to climate changes and seasonality.