While Pelmorex is currently pivoting its position in Canada from a pure-play media owner to a big data player, its new consumer-facing campaign shows media – video specifically – remains an effective revenue driver for its business.

Pelmorex’s new campaign for its Weather Network and MétéoMédia properties invites consumers to dive deeper into its weather tools to encourage engagement.

Hoping to get its app users and website users beyond merely checking the temperature or chance of rain, the in-house cross-platform campaign promotes the service’s local forecasts, customized alerts, and its user photo and video sharing platforms.

Sam Sebastian, Pelmorex’s CEO, says video is performing “extremely well” for the company. The company often features footage from users showing the effects of extreme weather or environmental issues of regional interest.

“CPMs and the rates the overall market can bear right now continues to increase because the video market’s actually a bit small in Canada,” Sebastian said. “There’s only a handful of publishers that have good video content.,” and advertisers have an “insatiable appetite” for video views.

Pelmorex won’t disclose revenues tied to specific sources like video, but Sebastian said views are “exceeding all our internal targets.”

“Given the market, we’ll continue to do everything we can to build our video content that gives advertisers pre-roll. It’s too good a business. If we don’t have a good video product, we can’t continue to be the next best alternative beyond Google and Facebook.”

Beyond pre-roll, The Weather Network has worked directly with brands on video content, such as its Storm Hunters series, which featured outerwear provided by Columbia.

If consumers start adopting more of the Weather Network and MétéoMédia’s deeper features as the campaign promotes, there won’t be a direct benefit to Pelmorex’s data offering, Sebastian said. But as a former managing director of Google Canada, he learned that when consumer expectations are exceeded, “everything else follows. Indirectly, if we can keep our users happy, grow our reach, grab more users because we’re delivering value, then our ad products perform better, we can launch more data products.”

The campaign is running primarily on Pelmorex-owned digital and OOH properties.

Pelmorex has had a busy year, changing names from Pelmorex Media to Pelmorex Corp. to signify its shift away from being strictly a media company. Sebastian joined in July. It also recently acquired Addictive Mobility.