Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The media constellation has become increasingly fractured. The Web produced the initial fissure, but mobile created new cracks in the landscape. Today, no single medium earns more than 45% of our media consumption.

How can you solve this problem? Social media offers a solution....

This past winter, Ace Hardware tested location-based mobile ads before and after snowstorms to pitch items like shovels and de-icers. Buoyed by the results—and underscoring how brands have begun using the weather to target on-the-go consumers—it now plans to buy mobile ads when the temperature is optimal for green thumbs to get planting, hoping they'll need the retailer’s fertilizers and other garden products.

"We want to reach folks in real time and help them deal with the weather as it's coming," said Jeff Gooding, Ace’s marketing director. "The idea of helping has traditionally been part of our brand, and it’s becoming a part of our mobile strategy."

Sensing a chance to nab more ad dollars, Twitter and The Weather Channel (TWC) last week announced an agreement centered on a new weather-based ad-targeting product. Twitter says that 60 percent of its massive audience derives from smartphones—where users will be seeing Promoted Tweets thanks to the TWC deal.

And 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....