When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association delivers its final winter forecast next week, fuel company executives, farmers and coat makers will no doubt pay close attention.
So will Dave Kenny.
Kenny, the CEO of private- equity-backed Weather Channel LLC, will no doubt be hoping for a fair number of storms and blizzards — the better to drive eyeballs to the company’s TV channel, websites and apps.
Last winter’s mild temperatures and relative lack of storms cut TV ratings by 22 percent.
“Weather is more interesting when there’s a story,” admits Kenny, picked by PE owners Bain Capital and Blackstone Group and by a third stakeholder, Comcast, in January to give the company a digital edge and ultimately make the cross platform media outfit much more saleable in the long term.
Toward that end, Kenny has been growing a B2B revenue stream delivering weather data to government agencies, energy businesses, airlines and even rival broadcast TV stations.
Kenny, a former Bain partner and advertising executive, is also working to grow TWC’s mobile business, principally its app, and expand its primetime TV viewers.
Part of the TV effort will be on view tonight with TWC’s launch of “Coastguard Florida,” a spin-off of its most popular series, “Coastguard Alaska.”
“In TV the challenge is bringing back the big weather story,” says Kenny. “The center of the [overall] strategy is to reinvest in the best science and best presentation of the weather forecast and to use technology and computing power and science to advance that in the accuracy and the way we tell the story.”
Kenny scooped up rival Weather Underground in July, one of two recent acquisitions. The other was Weather Central.
Weather Underground provides, among other things, crowdsourced weather collected by meteorological fanatics.
While TWC takes advantage of freak weather year round, last year’s relatively mild winter showed its Achilles heel: ratings dropped 22 percent in the key 25-54 demographic, to 85,000 from 109,000 the previous, more stormy winter.
Meanwhile Web traffic during the period showed the opposite track, growing year-on-year, peaking in January at 58 million unique users, according to ComScore versus 43 million in January 2011.
Kenny is slicing and dicing weather data to better target marketing dollars.
“Advertisers can buy specific locations and specific weather — sunny weekends around your resort or rainy days around your retail store,” he said in a recent interview.
For example, crafts retailer Michaels has its digital ads served the minute rain is forecast.
TWC backers paid $3 billion for the company in 2009. There’s been frequent speculation it will be sold sooner rather than later — but the arrival of Kenny and the acquisition of Weather Underground suggests the backers aren’t yet ready to put it on the block just yet.
One knowledgeable Wall Street executive pins Weather’s current valuation around $3.5 billion.
Blackstone Senior Managing Director Peter Wallace told The Post he hopes the speculation about an imminent sale has been put to bed.