Channel Bakers Turns Snowfall Into A Marketing Superpower And Increases Roas By 165%

Relevance is crucial in marketing. Delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time can ensure your marketing efforts resonate with your target customers connecting with their needs, interests, and context. When marketing is relevant, it’s more likely to capture attention, drive engagement, and ultimately lead to conversions. For many seasonal advertisers, creating relevance is a bigger challenge because they must operate in shorter timeframes. Adding in the different regions, that’s a lot on a marketer’s plate.

Channel Bakers took relevance to a new level, taking home the ShopAble Award – Innovation in Data, they turned unpredictable winter weather into a huge competitive advantage for its client.

Known for its  traction cleats that reduce the risk of slips and falls while walking on slippery snow and ice,  the brand historically saw significant sales spikes in regions experiencing active snowfall. Initially, its agency partner, Channel Bakers, took action on these insights by testing a manual geo-targeting approach to Amazon DSP campaigns.

The results were promising, Total sales increased by roughly 200%. But the process was far from sustainable or scalable.

Every time a snowstorm hit, someone had to scramble to identify areas and turn on ads in areas with recent snowfall. Miss the storm’s timing, and they’d miss out on reaching shoppers when purchase intent was highest and lose sales to competitors. The key was ensuring ad relevance in delivering the right message about traction devices precisely when customers were experiencing icy conditions and actively seeking solutions. Start advertising too early, and they’d burn through the budget on people who didn’t yet need the products. The manual approach was burning out their team and restricting them from capitalizing on the early results.

Instead of feeling stuck in a cycle of watching the weather and manually adjusting campaigns across cities, Channel Bakers wanted to explore a smarter, more automated solution to activate ads dynamically.

Instead of chasing weather reports, the Channel Bakers team worked with Skai Labs to engineer a custom solution that let the weather itself trigger the ads. The fully automated weather-responsive campaign strategy was powered by Skai’s advanced automation and API integrations.

How it worked:
The team started with 300 pre-built Amazon DSP line items mapped to individual U.S. cities. This ensured precise control and flexibility to respond to hyper-local snowfall events in real time. Each line item was assigned its own default bid, allowing for variable aggressiveness depending on weather severity. This hyper-local approach ensured maximum ad relevance by matching product messaging to real-time weather conditions in each specific market.

Skai API Integration for Real-Time Snow Data: Working with the Skai development team, we integrated real-time snowfall data via Skai’s API. Two custom dimensions were added to the platform:

• Historic Snow Condition – populated as “Snow” if snowfall occurred within the past 72 hours, and “No Snow” otherwise.
• Snow Severity – auto-filled as “Light,” “Medium,” or “Heavy” based on accumulated inches.

 
Using Advanced Automated Actions, Channel Bakers set up decision-tree logic to scan snowfall data morning, noon, and night. The automation would then activate ads in relevant cities as soon as snowfall occurred and maintain ads for 72 hours post-snowfall. Dynamic Bidding was layered based on snowfall quantity (light snow – default bid, medium snow – 2X bid, and heavy snow – 3X bid).

And when the snow stopped? It automatically paused after 72 hours of no new snowfall.

By marrying weather data with automation, Channel Bakers moved from reactive to predictive, scaling impact without scaling effort. Most importantly, this approach maximized ad relevance by ensuring customers saw traction device ads exactly when they needed them most, during and immediately after snowfall events. The weather-responsive framework delivered impressive results for the client compared to the previous winter season.

• 165% increase in ROAS
• CPA decreased by 42%
• Manual effort was reduced by 90%

The team gained operational efficiency as time spent on manual campaign adjustments dropped, freeing up to 4 hours per week  that the team can now use to focus on strategy instead of weather monitoring.

Because the framework is versatile, the team is now exploring how to expand it to other weather-sensitive brands such as food delivery services during rainstorms to other outdoor gear companies.

Founded in 2015, Channel Bakers, today is a full-service, global agency with offices on four continents. The agency was founded upon a core tenet to help innovative brands find the right audience at the right time and tell their story to drive sales. Named an Amazon Ads advanced partner, the agency utilizes its decades of experience leveraging insights and analytics to grow revenue within specific retailers and verticals. With this strategy Channel Bakers has leveraged its initial success to become a true omnichannel online retail media and marketing consultancy. Visit www.channelbakers.com for more information.