In South Africa, where microclimates can change from one region to the next in hours, and consumer intent is often situational, the cost of generic advertising is not merely wasted media spend; it is missed demand at the exact moment customers are ready to buy.
What makes this work remarkable is not that it uses “weather” as a theme; it turns weather into a live commercial signal. Instead of planning around broad seasons, Cape Union Mart has built a retail and e-commerce model that could respond to real conditions as they change: shifting product emphasis, creative messaging, targeting logic, and budget allocation based on real-time micro-climate inputs across South Africa. In effect, the brand has moved from running campaigns about winter to running a system that reacts to the winter actually happening — in the places customers are, and at the moments they are ready to purchase.
That practical, pioneering approach was first recognised locally when the campaign won Gold at the 2025 Assegai Awards in Special – Data-Driven Technology for “Cape Union Mart – When the Weather Drives What You Wear”. This Gold win then led to an invitation to enter the work into the International ECHO Awards, where the same underlying model earned international recognition under “From Forecast to Checkout: Cape Union Mart’s Live Weather-Driven Personalisation Journey” in the retail and e-commerce category.
For executives responsible for growing revenue and improving margins, the significance is straightforward: the International ECHOs benchmark measurable marketing effectiveness on a global stage, not on vanity metrics. In the retail and e-commerce category, Cape Union Mart’s recognition sits in the same competitive field as international retail operators such as Dólar Diarco — businesses operating in demanding, high-volume commerce environments where results are won through relevance, speed, and conversion discipline.
And the broader 2025 ECHO winners list reads like a roll-call of global performance brands across industries, including American Express, Ralph Lauren, Unilever, Netflix, Rogers, TD Bank, Toyota, and Visa. The point is not that South Africa outspends the world; it is that Cape Union Mart has demonstrated it can compete where digital marketing is judged by its ability to convert relevance into revenue.
That international recognition signals a shift away from “campaign thinking” towards revenue operating systems, because in noisy digital channels, performance increasingly depends on real-time signals that shape targeting, creative, and spend decisions with the same discipline leaders expect from pricing and supply chain.
Most retail advertising still assumes demand is stable enough to plan around seasons, calendars, and promotional events. Seasonality matters; consumers anticipate winter, and many plan purchases in advance. But intent is rarely constant. It is contextual, time-bound, and often triggered by what people are experiencing in the moment, particularly in outdoor apparel and equipment.
A customer may know they need a jacket this season, yet their willingness to browse, compare, and buy rises sharply when the necessity becomes immediate: the temperature drops in their area, rain arrives, or a cold front rolls in. On a warm, clear day, that same product category is easier to ignore — not because the need disappears, but because it is less salient. In practice, the surroundings shape attention, and attention shapes conversion.
Offernet recognises Cape Union Mart as a retailer whose innovation is grounded in what customers genuinely rely on: trust, deep product expertise, and a service culture built on long-term relationships. The brand is associated with durable performance and outdoor confidence, supported by a broader commitment to responsible retail and sustainability.
Seen through that lens, the business challenge was never, “How do we run another winter campaign?” It was far more customer-led:
With consumers overwhelmed by ads, how do we earn attention by delivering only what is relevant — the correct product, for the right person, in their conditions, in real time?
How do we ensure the product story aligns with what customers are experiencing at the moment they are most likely to act?
How do we prioritise products customers can actually buy right now — based on real availability, not just catalogue breadth?
Offernet’s philosophy — Informed by Data, Powered by Technology — made it possible for the brand to answer those three questions consistently, so revenue performance becomes an outcome, not a hope.
The breakthrough was not a seasonal campaign. It was an operating model shift — and, more importantly, a mindset shift. Offernet gave Cape Union Mart the capability to move beyond traditional “spray-and-pray” digital advertising, where performance is too often judged by impressions, Facebook followers, likes, and other vanity metrics that do not reliably translate into revenue.
In many organisations, the default agency model starts with the creative concept and works backwards — optimising what is visible and billable, rather than what is commercially necessary. Offernet’s model begins in the opposite direction: with the customer, the data, and the journey. It maps how demand forms, where friction occurs, and what signals indicate intent, then builds an optimisation system around those realities.
This is where RevTech diverges from conventional campaign execution: the goal is not a single concept expressed broadly, but a decision system expressed precisely — hyper-local, hyper-personal, and measurable.
That shift was enabled by Offernet’s RevTech platform, Touchpoint®, which functions as the orchestration layer between data, decisioning, and activation. Touchpoint® includes a live decision layer designed to connect to a wide range of online and offline data sources and platforms, translating disparate inputs into a common optimisation language, Offernet calls Data-Echoes.
A Data-Echo is an actionable signal — derived from both context (such as micro-climate conditions) and measurable behaviour — that Touchpoint® can use to refine the customer journey in-flight. The practical point is that these signals are not limited to weather. A Data-Echo can be created from almost any source that indicates intent, constraint, or opportunity: first-party data such as CRM and customer databases, point-of-sale systems, stock and inventory feeds, store catchment and location data, or call-centre dialler outcomes; as well as third-party and environmental signals such as live weather APIs, traffic and congestion data, major events, or even live sports scores.
When those inputs are converted into Data-Echoes, they become usable decision signals, informing what to show, when to show it, and where to allocate budget to drive measurable commercial outcomes.
Rather than relying on calendar-based assumptions, the platform ingested real-time micro-climate signals alongside campaign performance data, then dynamically adjusted product emphasis, creative messaging, targeting logic, and spend allocation. The result was real-time personalisation and customer-journey optimisation at scale: fewer generic impressions, more relevant product moments, and a shorter path from attention to checkout.
In practice, the model changed three things:
Most “weather” campaigns use weather as a creative motif. This programme used weather as a decision input. When conditions shifted, the system could adjust product emphasis and messaging to match what customers were likely to need next, translating context into relevance rather than simply talking about context.
Relevance is easy to describe and notoriously hard to maintain. The value here was not a clever concept; it was the ability to deliver the right product consistently, without lag, across a fragmented set of micro-climates. When the temperature drops, rain patterns, and cold fronts change by region, the system was built to respond quickly, closing the gap between insight and execution.
Many digital campaigns optimise for what platforms make visible: clicks, views, and reach. Revenue-driven commerce requires a different lens: actions that correlate with purchase intent, basket completion, and profitable conversion. The intent was not “engagement for its own sake”, but measurable movement towards checkout.
The most important differentiator in this story is not access to weather data. Weather APIs are available to anyone. The differentiator is the ability to convert live signals into better, more consistent commercial decisions, and refine them quickly.
That is what Touchpoint® enables: it serves as an orchestration layer that connects signals, decisions, execution, and measurement into a single learning loop.
In the Cape Union Mart model, Touchpoint® helped make three things operational:
Signal ingestion: Bringing real-time context into segmentation and decision logic, rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Adaptive execution: Changing emphasis and messaging without rebuilding campaign structures each week.
Continuous optimisation: Learning from downstream outcomes and reallocating effort towards what performs best as conditions change.
This is also where the “RevTech versus agency” distinction becomes practical. An agency can build a strong campaign within a period. A revenue technology partner builds a system that compounds performance across periods, because the system learns, adapts, and becomes more accurate with every new set of outcomes.
For growth leaders, the practical question is not whether digital works. It is whether digital can be managed with the same accountability applied to pricing, merchandising, and supply chain using evidence, not opinion.
That is where Offernet’s Touchpoint® platform changes the conversation. By converting customer behaviour, business data, and real-world context into Data-Echoes, Touchpoint® turns performance into something that can be steered in-flight, not merely reported after the campaign ends.
In Offernet’s model, governance is expressed through Revenue Performance Metrics (RPM), a practical set of measures that tie media decisions to commercial outcomes (for example: revenue per rand, margin efficiency, cost per sale, and the conversion economics that matter to CFOs and CROs). This is one reason Offernet is increasingly recognised as a category leader in performance-driven Retail and eCommerce, where accountability is measured in outcomes.
When performance is treated as a system:
This is the underlying principle of Offernet’s RevTech approach: marketing should not be a cost centre measured in activity. It should be a controllable growth mechanism measured in outcomes.
The Cape Union Mart programme points to a broader shift: context-aware commerce and signal-driven marketing becoming standard practice for competitive Retail and e-commerce organisations. The opportunity for South African businesses is not limited to the weather. The same architecture applies wherever external or operational signals materially influence conversion probability, for example:
The common thread is moving from reporting performance to engineering performance — building systems that convert context into customer value, and customer value into revenue. That is what differentiates organisations that are merely present in digital from organisations that use digital as a measurable growth engine.
The reason this matters is that most organisations are still structured for a different era: creative-first planning, broad targeting, and performance judged by platform-level optics. Offernet’s model starts at a different place — with the customer, the data, and the commercial outcome — then uses technology to build a learning loop that improves over time.
Two capabilities make this approach unusually powerful in practice:
First, Touchpoint®: the platform’s live decision layer can connect to a wide range of online and offline inputs and translate them into Data-Echoes — decision signals that inform what to show, who to show it to, when to deliver it, and how to allocate spend as outcomes emerge.
Second, Offernet’s big-data and measurement backbone (including Touch-Base) helps businesses connect online behaviour to real commercial outcomes, enabling the kind of attribution, optimisation, and accountability that revenue leaders expect.
For teams looking to move beyond vanity metrics, Offernet has written extensively on shifting performance measurement towards outcomes, including Revenue Performance Metrics (RPM) and how to identify and remove waste through Touchpoint analysis.
The output is not “a nicer campaign”; it is a more efficient commercial system, engineered around metrics leadership teams can actually manage: cost per qualified lead, cost per sale, revenue per rand, and margin efficiency.
For many CEOs, CFOs, and CROs, the decisive question is not whether a strategy sounds compelling; it is whether incentives and risk are aligned to results.
In suitable cases, Offernet can offer Outcome-Based Billing (also called Results-Based Billing or RBB) through its partnership with Onvest, a UK-based investment firm that has built a bespoke investor platform specifically to fund performance-led growth programmes. In practical terms, this is not presented as a marketing “pricing option”. It is structured as a performance investment model: Onvest’s capital underwrites the media and execution, and Onvest’s investors generate a return when commercially defined outcomes are delivered.
For executive teams, the significance is strategic. Rather than approving upfront spend and hoping performance follows, growth investment can be governed around pre-agreed, measurable outcomes — such as cost per qualified lead, cost per sale, or other revenue-linked conversion events — with clearer accountability and stronger incentive alignment. In boardroom terms, it shifts digital from discretionary activity into a governed performance mechanism: funded with intent, measured with discipline, and paid for in line with results.
For organisations under pressure to grow revenue and protect margin, the question is no longer whether to “go digital”. It is whether digital is run as a campaign function or as a revenue operating system.
If you want to explore what this looks like in practice, Offernet’s case histories offer additional examples, and you can reach the team directly via Contact us.
