Title	THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS BAD WEATHER
Brand	IKEA NORWAY
Product/Service	IKEA
Category	A09. USE OF OTHER DIGITAL PLATFORMS IN A MEDIA CAMPAIGN
Media Agency	MEDIACOM Oslo, NORWAY
Entrant Company	MEDIACOM Oslo, NORWAY
Media Agency 2	MEDIACOM Oslo, NORWAY

Name	Company	Position
Dan Ruben Johansen	Mediacom Norway	Performance Manager
Stein Vegusdal	IKEA Norway	Digital Communications Manager

Results and Effectiveness

The implementation of the weather management software allowed us to buy traffic and advertising with higher quality due to improved context. The outspending of competitors on days and locations that mattered the most did also lead to 31% lower costs per click. This allowed us to buy 40% more clicks within the same marketing budget. Later, sales-modellings has showed that the ROI of this marketing activity increased by 24% compared to previous period. Thus proving that the consumer context and lower prices has increased revenue for IKEA, by reaching consumers when the context was ideal.

Creative Execution

The entry of RTB in marketing allows us to adjust media spending just as we like throughout the day, for instance when it rains. But a manual task of optimizing real time bidding each hour throughout the day would be too time-consuming. And weather forecasts are not an exact science we could use to predict the rain per hour. We needed real time marketing based on big data. We created a real time marketing software that automatically adjusted our real time marketing spend within programmatic buying based on local and current weather. If it rained in one city, but was sunny in the next, we would always maximize the reach in the rainy city. This would also allow us to outspend our competitors since we could use our allocated budgets for rainy days on that specific day and location, after our competitors budgets was consumed. Consequently buying clicks without competition.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

IKEAs objectives for FY14 - Digital Communication: Increase traffic to site by 15% - Marketing: Increase ROI of marketing spending by 2,1% - Business: Increase traffic to store and sales by 2,0% Our explorative analyses showed that consumer behavior changed massively when it rained. This non-controllable and external factor increased sales in store by 2,16%, direct traffic to website by 5,95% and online conversion rate by 9,09%. The change in behavior indicated an improved context for the consumer, where rain and bad weather increased time spent indoors, and the need for improved interior furnishing increased. We wanted to utilize this context by maximizing our media spending on rainy days, thus reaching the consumer when the context was ideal and the need for interior inspiration where high. This would help IKEA reach top of mind when consumers where most likely to choose their interior store.