Toyota’s weather media activation shows brands’ focus on testing cookie-less targeting, despite Google’s reversal

When temperatures are cool and clear along the Illinois shore of Lake Michigan, for example, AccuWeather users that check the app will find Toyota’s messages that encourage them to head out for a hike in Indiana Dunes National Park.

“It’s about really humanizing the weather and making it actionable,” said Bill McGarry, svp of advertising sales and strategic partnerships at AccuWeather.

Toyota’s bespoke activation, created by the carmaker’s agency-of-record Saatchi & Saatchi, has been running since June and will last until the end of August. A wider campaign in support of the company’s Tacoma pickup truck has been running since February across linear TV, streaming, CTV, digital, digital programmatic search, audio and experiential, according to Ann Dragovits, marketing manager, media, for Toyota North America. She declined to share details of the advertiser’s media budget.

The bespoke partnership aims to reach a demographic of “adventure-seekers” over the age of 40, living in zip codes within key designated marketing areas (DMAs), according to AccuWeather chief business officer Matt Gillis. Areas include New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Houston and Lubbock, Texas; Seattle and Tacoma, Washington; and Manchester, New Hampshire.

Toyota’s marketing team believes that emphasizing the Tacoma’s off-road capabilities to customers with the disposable income to pursue outdoor hobbies such as sport fishing or water sports will help the brand stand out. “We were looking to show how the Tacoma can serve as an enabler to getting out into nature in pursuing your passion, whatever that passion is,” said Dragovits.

But the partnership has also brought Toyota the “added benefit of being able to capitalize on [AccuWeather’s] data to leverage for a personalized experience that is native to their platform,” Dragovits added.

“After Apple did away with PI [personal information] data, especially on the Safari browser, on any Apple device location pretty much goes away. But our users choose 100% of the time to enter their exact location so they can get the most accurate forecast possible,” explained McGarry.

Given Google’s new policy on cookie deprecation — which has essentially delegated the decision to sunset the tech to consumers and browser users — closely resembles the one Apple adopted, approaches like Toyota’s AccuWeather partnership might become more common. Dragovits said that, despite Google’s about-face on deprecating third-party cookies from its browser, the brand’s motivation for pursuing the AccuWeather experiment hadn’t been dampened.

An internal task-force at the carmaker was reviewing its approach to cookie deprecation and contextual targeting, she added.

Toyota’s not the first advertiser to attempt to use geographic data as a means of personalizing messages for consumers. Last year, WPP media agency Mindshare began using localized commercial data and census population figures to tailor media buys for KFC’s U.K. delivery business.

Industry experts told Digiday that Google’s policy change might spur more advertisers and agencies to explore such unusual targeting approaches. “I fully expect these experiments to continue,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis.

He noted that, although it’s unclear now how many users might choose to enable cookies on their browsers, “the supply of cookie-enabled inventory will tighten. As it becomes more difficult and costlier to target users across the open web, more brands may decide to test the effect of less granular but more reliable datasets, particularly where these align with the campaign objectives.”

Tom Scott, executive director of media at Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency behind the work, told Digiday in an email: “Saatchi & Saatchi’s POV is that cookie-less solutions should continue to be tested and leveraged, considering that Google’s cookie deprecation pivot also came with the announcement that users will have more options to opt-out of cookies and data tracking.”

Executives at Saatchi & Saatchi’s Publicis sister agency Epsilon, have also called for clients to maintain their focus on first-party data in the wake of Google’s cookie decision.

Scott’s position matched MacEwan’s view that life without the cookie should still be planned for. “Although cookies will remain in Chrome, we would still expect to see significant drop-off in audience sizes and data tracking due to the prioritization of user choice. This implies cookie-less solutions will continue to have value, especially as it relates to first party data,” he said.

Toyota’s AccuWeather work is intended to raise brand awareness of the Tacoma amid a competitive market for pickup truck models. According to Douglas McCabe, MacEwan’s colleague and Enders’ CEO and director of publishing and tech, approaches such as Toyota’s — which stop short of direct personalization — have a better chance of fulfilling their objectives than ones that use more precise targeting.

“Personalization is a less effective means of reaching an audience to land that message at scale than responding to precise circumstances like weather, and then applying some high-level demographic matching,” he told Digiday. “These techniques deliver marketing goals that direct targeting — however precisely deployed — will never be the right tool for.”

Dragovits said AccuWeather was helping Toyota monitor web, mobile and app user behavior, keeping an eye on behavioral metrics such as viewability and click-through rates.

Though she declined to share traffic figures, Dragovits said: “So far, based on the engagement that we’ve seen, that also points to this being a successful partnership.”

But with the activation still ongoing, Toyota is waiting to see how it pans out before choosing to extend it. “Once we have evaluated at the conclusion of the campaign, it could be considered for a future campaign,” Dragovits said in a follow-up email.

Though they haven’t lined up further clients, AccuWeather’s executives are open to repeating the experience with other advertisers. The company’s U.S. userbase numbers some 45 million Americans. “Users care about the weather, and advertisers want to drive that engagement with those users,” said Gillis, who added the company believes that any advertiser subject to weather-variable demand could be a valid partner.

“We know what the context is, in every one of these DMAs. We know if it’s dry, if it’s humid, we know how much rain has happened in the last 24 hours, we know how much rain might come in the next three days,” he said. “The scale of the audience, the fact that we have location, and the fact that we have context, I think that’s what makes it special.”