Anyone who has received a tornado warning from their phone or TV knows full well the vital role local stations play in alerting communities about impending weather threats. Lives are often literally at stake in these moments, but increasingly, the challenge for broadcasters lies in getting this pertinent information to their audience no matter where they are.
“You can’t assume your audience is just sitting in one place,” said Ethan Dreilinger, Client Solutions Engineer for The Weather Company, an IBM Business. “We’re all mobile, we’re all transient.”
Stations need a multi-platform strategy that enables them to quickly send alerts to many different devices, Dreilinger explained, but in an increasingly competitive media landscape, they can’t stop there. They need an alerting strategy that expands their relationship with viewers, keeping them informed about how weather, traffic and other things will affect their lives on any given day and at any given moment.
Speaking with NewsCheckMedia Co-Founder Kathy Haley during a webinar presented by TVNewsCheck and The Weather Company, Dreilinger explained how a comprehensive cross-platform alerting strategy is key to audience engagement in the current news landscape. The good news: Weather, which ranks at the top of reasons people tune into local TV, can serve as the leading edge of such a strategy.
A Weather-Forward Alerting Strategy
“Weather is the original influencer,” Dreilinger said. “It drives decisions that we make every single day,” he said. “Are you going to go outside or not? Are you going to wear a mask if