The Weather Company and Toyota Drive First Cognitive Ads for Auto Industry

New York, NY - 15 Jun 2017: The Weather Company, an IBM Business (NYSE: IBM), announced today the launch of the first cognitive ads for the auto industry. Toyota and The Weather Company have teamed up on a new Watson Ads experience to introduce the Prius Prime. Watson Ads for the Prius Prime are available in The Weather Channel App and weather.com.

Watson Ads are an industry-first cognitive ad format that enables consumers to organically connect with brands, and allows marketers to have a personalized, one-to-one conversation with their audiences at scale. The cognitive ad format combines machine learning, natural language understanding, and integrated dialogue tools designed to deliver a personalized user experience. Through Watson Ads, Toyota is harnessing the power of AI to engage and educate consumers about Prius Prime - addressing consumer questions, sharing new car information, and guiding decision making during the purchase consideration stage.

Toyota has an organized system for their data management along with internal processes, which allowed them to recognize and leverage Watson innovation in advertising. They were quick to recognize the benefits of leveraging Watson Ads to not only engage consumers, but also extract valuable insights gained from those interactions, said Sarah Ripmaster, head of automotive sales, The Weather Company. Because Watson Ads learn over time and get smarter with every interaction, this not only helps educate consumers and ultimately help them make more informed buying decisions, but it also helps the brand itself to understand consumer questions, concerns and interests. Those insights can then inform overall planning and strategies - from product to supply chain management to marketing.

In the competitive automotive market, the ability to showcase a helpful and beneficial customer experience is invaluable. We are entering the next frontier of marketing, with cognition and AI poised to take consumer engagement to the next level, and Watson Ads is a prime example of that shift and the great potential we have, said John Lisko, executive communications director, Saatchi & Saatchi. We have leveraged IBM Watson in other areas of our business such as the programmatic video campaign of 300 custom pieces for Toyota RAV4 and most recently, the Mirai campaign on Facebook in which the tool wrote thousands of ads and we continue to uncover valuable insights.

Saatchi & Saatchi handles creative as well as media planning and buying for Toyota.

In 2017, eMarketer expects the U.S. automotive industry digital ad spending to reach $10.66 billion dollars. Automotive will continue to rank as the second-largest industry segment in the U.S. for digital ad spending, keeping it near the forefront of digital marketing for at least the next several years. (eMarketer)

Learn more about Watson Ads at watsonads.com.

The Weather Company, an IBM Business

The Weather Company, an IBM Business, helps people make informed decisions and take action in the face of weather. The company offers the most accurate, personalized, and actionable weather data and insights to millions of consumers, as well as thousands of marketers and businesses via Weather's API, its business solutions division, and its own digital products from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com).

The company delivers tens of billions of forecasts daily. Its products include a top weather app on all major mobile platforms globally, a network of 250,000 personal weather stations, a top-20 U.S. website, one of the world's largest IoT data platforms, and industry-leading business solutions.

Weather Means Business . The world's biggest brands in aviation, energy, insurance, media, and government rely on The Weather Company for data, technology platforms and services to help improve decision-making and respond to weather's impact on business. For more, visit theweathercompany.com.

Toyota

Toyota (NYSE: TM), creator of the Prius and the Mirai fuel cell vehicle, is committed to advancing mobility through our Toyota and Lexus brands. Over the past 60 years, we ve produced more than 30 million cars and trucks in North America, where we operate 14 manufacturing plants (10 in the U.S.) and directly employ more than 44,000 people (more than 34,000 in the U.S.). Our 1,800 North American dealerships (nearly 1,500 in the U.S.) sold almost 2.6 million cars and trucks (2.45 million in the U.S.) in 2016 and about 85 percent of all Toyota vehicles sold over the past 15 years are still on the road today.

Toyota partners with community, civic, academic, and governmental organizations to address our society s most pressing mobility challenges. We share company resources and extensive know-how to support non-profits to help expand their ability to assist more people move more places. For more information about Toyota, visit www.toyotanewsroom.com.

More pictures available: http://bit.ly/2shsISj

LINK:	http://www-03.ibm.com/press/uk/en/pressrelease/52641.wss...
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