TACODA Closes Deal with Weather Underground, Inc.

TACODA Closes Deal with Weather Underground, Inc.

Online Weather Innovator Serves Over 120 Million Monthly Page Views

NEW YORK, Nov. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- TACODA, the online industry leader in behavioral targeting and audience management, today announced that the web's first online weather service, Weather Underground, Inc. has become a customer of TACODA's Audience Management Service.

Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com/) serves more than 120 million monthly page views to an audience of almost seven million unique visitors from all over the world. It provides weather data for over 60,000 U.S. and international cities in over 60 languages.

TACODA's AMS will help Weather Underground collect non-personally- identifiable data on its enormous audience and segment visitors by interests as indicated by the stories read and the information viewed by users. This in turn will enable Weather Underground to present its audience to advertisers in traditional metrics with which media buyers are familiar. Advertisers can then target audience segments with ads that are relevant to the user's interests. User-relevant ads generate a far higher response than any other type of online advertising.

"Increasingly we are being asked to respond to RFPs that include behavioral targeting," says Chuck Prewitt, Weather Underground's Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "We decided after reviewing all of our options that TACODA offered the best value, the best support and was the only company providing a team of media professionals to help us place more advertising. We look forward to a rewarding relationship."

"Weather Underground has been an online innovator since it started in 1995," says TACODA's CEO, Dave Morgan. "We are pleased that they have taken the next evolutionary step in online advertising by partnering with TACODA."

Weather Underground is one of the most popular and comprehensive weather sites in the world, delivering the most reliable, accurate and timely weather information possible to consumers and businesses via cutting-edge, interactive services. The company specializes in real-time delivery of current weather conditions, detailed forecasts, and severe weather advisories and is the market innovator for web-based weather delivery including historical conditions, city searches, weather stickers, marine weather, and astronomy.

More than 2,700 TACODA-enabled Web sites reach over 80 percent of the US Internet audience each month. TACODA has nearly three dozen corporate customers, mostly Fortune 1000 businesses, and includes thirteen of the top 20 newspaper companies in the US. Among its other clients are: NYTimes.com; Boston.com; IDG's Infoworld; Cox Newspapers; The Weather Channel's weather.com; Gannett's USAToday.com; iVillage; The Tribune Company; The Associated Press; E.W. Scripps Company's Scripps Networks and Scripps Newspapers; McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek.com; Primedia's About.com; Belo Interactive; USNews.com; Forbes.com; Advance Publications' Advance Internet; Media General; Hearst Corporation's Albany Times-Union.com, Houston Chronicle and SFGate.com; Hollinger International's Chicago Sun Times; Landmark Communications' Pilot Online; 2,000-site ad network BURST! Media; Morris Communications; Tech Tracker; PlanetOut; Canada's Torstar; Bizjournals.com, the new media division of American City Business Journals and The Copley Press Inc.

In November 2004, TACODA launched AudienceMatch Network that enables direct marketing and search advertisers for the first time to use behavioral targeting in combination with non-personal demographic data to reach defined audience segments of significant size across a network of top, branded internet sites. By mid-January, TACODA expects the network to reach more than 85 million individuals, about 60 percent of the monthly US Internet audience.


Source: TACODA

CONTACT: George H. Simpson of TACODA, o: +1-212-309-9068,
m: +1-203-521-0352, or george@tacoda.com

Web site: http://www.tacoda.com/


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