Turn a customer deterrent into a traffic booster.

January and February are typically difficult months for winter clothing retail stores as sales decrease and stores try to get rid of their remaining winter stock. Mark's Work Wearhouse didn't want to have just another end of season sale among a plethora of other seasonal deals. They wanted to come up with a creative way of breaking through the advertising clutter.

Mark's figured out how to use cold weather to their customer's advantage and came up with "The Colder it Gets" campaign which offered discounts equal to the daily low temperature. A daily low of -15 degrees translated into 15% off at retail stores. The colder it got, the better the discount. A partnership with the Weather Network enabled Mark's to post the temperature in real-time on programmable displays such as screens outside bus shelters and highway billboards and updating that number in in-store cashier systems.

In a case study conducted by the OMAC (Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada) the campaign was a success and it states:

"The flagship stores in Toronto experienced a 21% increase in comparable sales from the previous year, surpassing the original goal of 10%. The 21% increase was 13% higher than non-participating Ontario Mark’s stores and nearly four times greater than the national category norms, which came in at only 4.7% during the month of February."

The campaign was a unique approach to get customers outside on even the coldest of winter days. Their innovative use of real-time data earned them a bronze in the creative data category of the Cannes Lions awards. Out of 715 submissions, 73 made the shortlist and Mark's took home third place.

Although the campaign was only tested in Toronto and Montreal, Mark's hopes to expand this idea into other large cities using other real-time data like rain or snowfall to determine the day's in-store discount.