Best Environmental Online Campaign, Best Insurance Online Campaign

Weather.com partnered with State Farm on a Safety and Preparedness campaign designed to help people prepare for severe weather throughout the year, as well as stay safe during severe weather events. The partnership has been in place for a few years now, but this year, Weather.com strived to make its offerings more dynamic without sacrificing on serviceable and potentially life-saving information.

Our 2021 goal was to increase brand awareness by creating more robust content that’s both compelling and accessible for a wide audience. Helping our audience be prepared ahead of weather events is always our priority, but in 2021, we offered more science-forward explainers to help viewers and readers have a better understanding of why specific weather events happen. Considering the escalating climate change crisis, we also focused on creating content that shows how extreme weather preparation is changing, as well as what little changes people can make to adjust to a warming world.

We aimed to have all of our article and video content feel like the unique features weather.com’s editorial team creates and less like typical sponsored content. As such, each piece required more time and effort to produce, but we hoped the end result would show State Farm and any potential prospective partners that sponsored content doesn’t have to feel “branded.”

Aside from bolstering our content catalog, we worked on improving audience engagement and impressions through our rapidly expanding social media base.

Contributors:

Branded Content Editor, The Weather Channel:	Ally Hirschlag
Editor in Chief, The Weather Channel:	Patty Cox
Client Success Manager, IBM:	Cheryl Karpel
Product Marketing Lead, IBM:	Clare Clifford
Digital Video Editor, The Weather Channel:	Mike Ellis

THE WEATHER CHANNEL, AN IBM BUSINESS

Location: USA

About the Agency:

For over 35 years, The Weather Channel has been on a mission to keep people safe and informed. From the daily forecast to tracking a Category-5 hurricane, we're committed to providing the world's most accurate forecast to help people make better decisions.