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.