North American Winters offered us the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the power of weather data to increase VIA’s share of the transportation market.

Our strategic solution started with analytics. We analyzed VIA Rail’s daily sales reports and compared them to historical data from The Weather Network.

Our findings noted a significant increase of visits to the VIA Rail website 5 days before snowstorms.

So we turned this into a data-driven campaign to keep Canada moving – no matter the weather.

Storm messaging to business travellers was activated through dynamic display, mobile and OOH campaign, which all pre-warned our audience of impending travel chaos caused by the weather.

We progressively upweighted this messaging as we got closer to the storm, and we personalized our messages in real time according to user location, expected destination, day of the storm, and type of storm.

We also integrated a booking engine into our digital placements so travellers could book straight from the ad.

Additionally, for mobile we partnered with The Weather Network and Waze to access their heavy weather-app users and driver audiences respectively and a layer of hyper-location segmentation around airports was also added to reach travellers stuck at airports.

Lastly, strategically located digital Out-Of-Home billboards were activated within three hours of weather alerts. Each buy was planned for five days, but we negotiated the ability to cancel if the storm was small.

• Demonstrating VIA Rail is the Winter way to travel helped gain 43% more passengers during the period following the storms on its lucrative route between Toronto and Montreal.

• The media activation also created an increase of up to 319% in conversions versus VIA’s regular campaigns.

By smartly using data and media, VIA Rail had helped thousands of Canadian travellers outsmart winter and get to their meetings.

Winter ways to travel campaign is a real demonstration of how to manage data and media to solve a real people's problem with a relevant client service solution. We capitalized on the power of data and adapt dynamically the campaign to the joys of winter in order to demonstrate the reliability of the train even in the worst winter conditions.

We were able to leverage our new audiences through different touchpoints all activated by the weather. The orchestration required unprecedented negotiations with suppliers and adjustments until the very last minute to allow the triggering of a perfect scenario.

We set out to create massive reach against car drivers, starting exactly five days before the storm hit a specific region.

In a country as vast as Canada, it meant that the campaign was never activated at the same time across the different regions.

The launch of each campaign was activated by The Weather Network storm alert.

To reach weather-sensitive business travellers we cross-segmented VIA Rail’s data with our DMP technology, utilizing 2nd and 3rd party data to intercept and retarget the segments most responsive to weather changes.

We then leveraged these new audiences through a fully-integrated display, mobile and OOH campaign, all activated by the weather.

Despites its high appreciation rate, VIA Rail, Canada's national rail passenger service, is still a small player in transportation. In fact, 77% of the transportation between the cities of Toronto and Montreal, VIA’s most lucrative corridor, is still travelled by car. VIA Rail needed to find a new way to increase their share of the transportation market.

Canadian travellers can expect the worst during winter time. Blizzards, heavy snowfalls and freezing rain all impact their travel plans. Each winter, a lot of Canadians miss their appointments because of the weather. This is felt hardest by business travellers.

However, amid these harsh conditions, trains have proven to be a reliable and superior means of transportation, unlike cars or airplane.