Weather Channel Expands Mobile Offerings

At this point in time, the Mobile Media Company has held the series of Weather Channel lifestyle alerts back from reaching this level of complexity. "What we do is when you sign up for the service, you submit your zip code, so all the information you receive is relevant to that zip code," says Svalesen. "Obviously you can subscribe to different locations, but chances are you’re no more than half an hour from that space. We’ve chosen to do it that way because it’s very simple for the end user. We could’ve offered more dynacism, but we couldn’t have offered it across all carriers. It’s a tradeoff between the technical complexity and the ease of use for the end user."

Eventually, there will be a model in place whereby consumers are served ads based on their proximity to businesses at a particular point in time. "It could be very close. I think you’ll see location-based services will become very relevant once there are ad campaigns that are relevant to local advertisers," says Svalesen. "These stores would like to have a tool to drive customers into their stores." But to cajole potential customers to stop by, these local companies will likely have to make it worth their while. "I don’t think that simply saying ‘buy our product’ will work," Svalesen continues. "There has to be some sort of incentive."

Once there’s a universal mechanism through which consumers can give access to information about themselves to a trusted third party, these incentives will be able to be targeted for individual users. "For example, I’m a certain age, with certain interests, and I’d like to receive information about hiking," says Svalesen. "I could be served an ad where, for the next two hours, if I come into store XYZ I can receive a 20% discount on hiking boots. Mobile marketing can be understood as spam if you just purchase a database and send out messages all at once. But I don’t mind getting promotional messages to my phone as long as there’s a benefit to me."

The Weather Channel’s most recent lifestyle alert offerings don’t rely on advertising, as the market has yet to mature to the point envisioned above, but instead cost 75 cents per message/alert. "You can obviously go to any Website and get more information than what will be provided to the phone, but people are willing to pay because of the time factor," says Svalesen. "In five seconds you can have that information in your pocket, and that’s where a service like this provides the most value."