Who knew The Weather Channel was such a hot commodity?

It turns out that the cable network's online and mobile properties are hot beds for advertising trends and a launch pad for hyperlocal marketing initiatives for major advertisers like Taco Bell, Delta Airlines and Jeep.

Twitter and The Weather Channel (TWC) have developed a weather-based ad-targeting product, leveraging 60 percent in the twitterverse that accesses the microblogger via smartphone, to receive Promoted Tweets related to… weather. “Based on certain forecasts, Taco Bell, Seamless, Delta Airlines, Farmers, Goodyear and others have fallen in line with Ace Hardware, targeting nearby consumers via mobile ad networks such as MoPub and Jumptap and—in a lot of cases—TWC's popular smartphone app,” notes AdWeek.Continue reading...

In naming storms other than hurricanes, The Weather Channel may have created an irresistible juggernaut, much like one of those giant Nor'easters to which the TV channel has been attaching monikers for several months now.

Even General Motors' OnStar service joined some large media outlets like The New York Post (right) in using the name "Nemo" for Friday's storm, reminding customers that its advisors were poised to assist subscribers who ran into weather-related emergencies during "Winter Storm Nemo." New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg started calling the storm "Nemo," too.

Such lurches down slippery slopes have added to the apparent critical mass behind The Weather Channel's efforts to institutionalize the Greek and Roman names that it selected for a handful of giant storms over the last several months. Channel executives assert that having a storm handle available makes it much easier for weather authorities and the general public to glean the best information and take appropriate cautions before and during a storm.Continue reading...

When 1985’s Back to the Future blew the doors off of the box office (eventually pulling in $303.87 billion), two sequels were automatically set into motion and released in 1989 and 1990. And somewhere in there, someone got fully turned onto the joy of product placement. 

Back to the Future II was particularly chockfull of brand names, including Pepsi, Texaco, Mattel, Pizza Hut, Black and Decker, The Weather Channel, 7-Eleven, and AT&T, among others. But fans salivated most over the special shoe that Nike designer Tinker Hatfield created for the film, the Nike MAG shoe, with its glowing LED panel and an electroluminescent “Nike” for Michael J. Fox to wear as the film’s hero, Marty McFly.

Sneaker aficionados had been begging the company for years to release the same shoe to the mainstream. So in a highly-publicized eBay auction in September, Nike made only 1,500 to auction off on eBay to raise cash for Michael J. Fox’s Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. The result was $4.7 million from consumers, which a matching initiative doubled to $9.4 million.Continue reading...

The great hurricane of last weekend has left a mess in its wake. We're not talking about Irene -- this is all about the media coverage of the storm as Irene pulled a veni, vidi, vici act that was unparalleled in the annals of weather examination. And the mess it left? An unresolvable controversy over whether the hurricane coverage was all too much, or whether you never can have enough.

George Will dubbed it "synthetic hysteria," and Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast made no bones. "Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon," Kurtz concluded. The Washington Post's former media critic wrote that "the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings" because TV producers were afraid to switch away from 24x7 coverage of Irene. "Does anyone seriously believe the hurricane would have drawn the same level of coverage if it had been bearing down on, say, Ft. Lauderdale?" Continue reading...