The Weather Company and Lotame Partnered to Forecast Deeper Insights Using AWS Clean Rooms

The Weather Company, a leading global provider of weather data, forecasting and insights, delivers scalable solutions for consumers through its flagship consumer brand, The Weather Channel, as well as for businesses across the advertising, aviation, media industries, and more. Its digital properties reach more than 360 million people monthly, and its APIs help customers integrate weather data into their applications, business processes, or custom models.

Lotame is a technology company that makes data smarter, faster, and easier to use for digital marketers. Its data collaboration platform, Spherical, and Data Marketplace empower thousands of marketers, agencies, and media owners to access, analyze, and activate the data they need to understand and engage consumers.

The Weather Company has partnered with Lotame for over 10 years working with their data collaboration platform. In order to provide real-time insights to their customers in travel, auto and retail, they relied on Lotame for advanced insights about campaign performance and personas.

The Weather Company team had an optimal real-time data collection process for The Weather Channel web properties, but their mobile app properties were not leveraging Lotame’s ecosystem yet. As its mobile data was already in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data lake, The Weather Company and Lotame partnered with AWS Clean Rooms to find actionable insights about campaign performance for a travel vertical customer. AWS lets customers and their partners easily and securely collaborate and analyze their collective datasets—without sharing or copying one another’s underlying data.

“We have this rich first-party data that we want to make available to both advertisers and business users,” says Dave Olesnevich, head of data & advertising products at The Weather Company. “Using Lotame and AWS Clean Rooms, we can glean insights for customers and get new products to market quickly.”

Together, The Weather Company and Lotame ran a proof of concept on several data segments to see how they could provide real-time insights to their travel customer using AWS Clean Rooms. With access to the clean room, the companies could quickly try out ideas and perform analyses on the test datasets.

The Weather Company and Lotame found that the speed at which insights could be gleaned from first-party data improved because of the operational and engineering hurdles removed. A process that previously took The Weather Channel months for engineering resources to prioritize could be expedited to a couple of days.

“Previously, an insight for a customer could get deprioritized in an engineering queue,” says Dave. “As a product manager, I can now go into AWS Clean Rooms, do a couple of very basic SQL queries, and get insights within two days.”

Using AWS Clean Rooms, The Weather Company and Lotame see the potential to increase the level of data granularity in their analysis. To better understand its customers across various verticals, The Weather Company can set output constraints and manage the segment granularity in query results. Then, it can make that data available to Lotame to further enrich the depth of the analytics.

For example, to better understand its travel audience that uses The Weather Channel app, The Weather Company team can compare the lifestyle and brand propensities of lower- and higher-frequency travelers, as well as frequent air versus land travelers. Those detailed insights help drive the way The Weather Company positions its products for its travel vertical.

When organizations collaborate on sensitive data, privacy is another main priority. As the marketing technology space continues to evolve, The Weather Company and Lotame can meet data protection needs using the privacy-enhancing controls in AWS Clean Rooms.

“What we’re seeing in the industry is a more privacy-forward future through combining two or more datasets in such a way that both parties retain individual control,” says Alexandra Theriault, chief growth officer at Lotame. “AWS had the right infrastructure for us to work seamlessly with Weather’s requirements around data control and engineering hurdles.”

After the successful proof of concept, The Weather Company and Lotame see other potential applications of AWS Clean Rooms. Having enhanced the depth of data, both companies plan to reach different customer verticals and work alongside other businesses that use similar first-party data services.

“It has been beneficial to work alongside our longstanding collaborator Lotame and the AWS team to be an early adopter of AWS Clean Rooms,” says Dave. “This is a foundational technology for building data collaboration solutions and various commercial products.”