The brewer company has found success in an experiment that ties the social network’s Facebook Advertising with city’s temperature. It was a marketing campaign Molson Brewing Co. came up with this summer to examine the correlation between weather and beer sales, and the ties between social media advertising and cost-per-click rate for advertiser.

The amount of time people spend on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets is way more than television and other traditional advertising channels nowadays. Research shows that the  marketing budget spending in social network platforms will increase 35.3% this year as there is more emphasis on social network marketing.  Therefore, companies have to think of alternative ways to better target and reach out to their consumers.

Basically, Molson Brewing Co came up with a digital advertising tool for two of its products that marketed heavily in the summer. The tool was built into the programming interface of the online forecasting service Weather Underground. Using the service’s coding, it checked into the weather of eight Canadian cities every 15 minutes. When the weather was above 23 degrees and sunny, it triggered delivery of Facebook mobile ads for the products that mentioned the weather – for example, “Summer heat? Simply say ‘Cider.’”

The ad, which was run for a month, tested those weather-targeted ads against generic ads.

Result showed that the click-through rate on these ads were higher than those generic ones. Also, it achieves a lower cost-per-click rate for advertiser as there was higher engagement. Specifically, the CPC rate for Molson’s weather specific ads was 67% lower than generic ones. Nevertheless, 93% people would share the ad as they spoke to how hot it was outside.

The result was outstanding. The reason why Molson’s marketing team chose to run this campaign in the summer was  because they already noticed the strong correlation between hot weather and beer consumption. Furthermore, they also realized that people tend to share weather-related feeds on Facebook during heat waves.

What can we learn from this campaign? First of all, user generated content on social media platform will be more and more important in marketing and advertising as it becomes the main stream of how people express and input their opinion these days. Nevertheless, by understanding the trend in beer consumption and correlation between social network and city’s temperature, Molson launched the advertisement at the right time (summer, where beer consumption is high), and at right place (Facebook, where people incline to talk and complain about hot weather). Last but not least, the concept of cost-per click rate was introduced in class. We familiarized with this concept by running google adwords for our final project too. We still have a very high CPC rate, low Click through rate and impression rate. The Molson experiment inspired me that maybe I could improve the CTR by running the ad during the period that my product is most needed. Instead of running the ads for a long time and receive a little CTR and low impression, we could do more research on when and where our product is most needed, and design our adword campaign tailor to that need. For example, we could emphasis more and market heavily for our nutritionist consulting services during flu season, where people might need nutritionist consulting service the most.

 

We’re always looking for smarter ways to target users.