The future of mobile marketing is local. Ross Webster, international managing director at The Weather Channel, explains why.

“Location and the weather are pretty synonymous. We’re all interested in the weather at our location – why would you want the forecast for five miles away?”

As Ross Webster, international managing director at The Weather Channel, very eloquently puts it, some publishers have a head-start when it comes to creating mobile and location-specific content.

Webster will be joining a panel discussion at next week’s Festival of Media Global in Rome with clients from MasterCard, Mondelez International and GSK, ready to discuss why the ‘future is local’ for one-to-one communications.

Speaking to M&M Global ahead of the event, Webster said the brand that started life on US cable television 30 years ago, and made the migration to desktop with Weather.com, is now fully focused on achieving mobile greatness.

“Globally, the part of the business I look after is mobile almost to the exclusion of everything else. When thinking globally, there are emerging territories which have skipped desktop totally and mobile is where to get people. The vast majority of our energy is going into mobile,” he says.

Agreements such as last year’s deal with Apple to provide the default weather app for iOS 8 have given The Weather Channel “instant global reach”, and helped the media owner move closer to providing actionable location data for advertisers.

And it helps, of course, that the majority of consumers (80% in the case of The Weather Channel app users) are happy to allow the company access to their location data.

“Location is the new cookie, particularly on mobile,” claims Webster. “We are going beyond basic geo-fencing and that approach, and thinking much more about consumer behaviour.

“The advantage we’ve obviously got is that this is first-party data. People are sensitive to giving their location to technology partners, but we’ve established a trusted brand and weather is so synonymous with location. There is a huge amount of data you can gain being in the background.”

Webster said The Weather Channel’s location data-inspired “behavioural clusters” – groups with corresponding behaviour patterns, rather than determined along basic demographics – give it an advantage over rival publishers: “By amassing people’s location over a certain amount of time, you start to build up an understanding of exactly who that person is and what sort of interest they’ve got.

“We’ve built up customer groups like ‘active dad’, who is going to work in the week but at weekends he is on the touchline of a rugby pitch, or going down to DIY stores. If you control first party location data, then that gives you a good profile.

“We’re all trying to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. When you start to understand location data, you can start to have much more interesting conversations with advertisers around how to message consumers,” he adds.

Click here to download the full agenda for next week’s Festival of Media Global