Tag: pandora

Pandora To Launch Dynamic Audio Ads and Sequential Messaging

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pandora is planning to bring dynamic creatives to audio ads. The streaming service is teaming up with UK-based dynamic ad tech vendor A Million Ads to target consumers in real time with personalized messages. Brands looking to leverage dynamic audio can record a script with multiple message variations to address listeners based on a range of geographic locations, weather conditions, or calls to action.

Moreover, Pandora also announced it will add support for sequential and cross-platform messaging soon, offering brands more time to explain their products or services over several successive ad spots. These two new ad products will launch later this year in beta.

What Brands Need To Do
Dynamic creative is nothing new in display ads, but to execute it in audio ads on a streaming service is still quite new. Results from our media trial study with Yahoo indicates clear benefits of personalized ads, showing advertisers who utilized personalization saw significant increases in overall favorability and purchase intent. Pandora boasts over 78 million monthly active users, the vast majority of which uses the service on a free, ad-supported tier. Therefore, brand marketers looking to connect with music streamers on Pandora should consider these two upcoming new ad units to reach their target customers more effectively.

 

Source: AdWeek

 

Ebay Tests Sponsored Replays And Skips On Pandora For Holiday Campaign

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Brands can now sponsor replays and skips on Pandora, features that its free-tier users only have limited access to, to get their brand messages across. Ebay is among the first brands to test out this new native ad product for its two-week-long holiday campaign. Pandora first started testing brand-sponsored replays and skips back in September, and is now allowing brands to sponsor them based on music genre, such as holiday music, workout music, or latino music, so as to more effectively reach their target audiences.

What Brands Should Do
By providing users with functional value, this ad product from Pandora should help brands grab listeners’ attention and get their brand messages across. For brands seeking more effective ways to reach today’s ad-avoidant consumers, this type of native advertising should be worth a try.

For more information on how brands can leverage branded content and sponsorships to earn consumer attention, check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: AdWeek

How Las Vegas Used Placed To Track Pandora Ad Effectiveness

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Las Vegas used Pandora to promote the electronic dance music (EDM) artists playing in Vegas hotels and clubs in the hope of luring EDM fans to visit the city, and it worked! The campaign, which targeted seven U.S. markets between October 2014 and September 2015, drove a 6% lift in travel to Las Vegas among Pandora listeners. That lift was estimated to generate an additional $110 million in tourism revenue for the city. Pandora came to this discovery by cross-referencing its data of logged-in users with data from Placed, a mobile measurement firm that specializes in location data and online-offline attributions.

What Brands Need To Do
Typically, Placed is focused on providing attribution solutions for retailers to help them link online impressions with store visits, but this campaign proves that Placed can also assist in improving ad measurement and attribution for brands in other industries as well. Similar campaigns can be created for auto brands to track ad effectiveness in driving dealership visits, or for movie studios to see how their ads are driving box office sales. By linking digital ads with offline activities, brands can better understand how their ads are performing and adjust their campaign accordingly.

Full Disclosure: The Lab’s parent agency Interpublic has a minority stake in Placed.

 

Source: AdWeek

Pandora Now Lets Brands Sponsor Hour-Long Listening

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pandora has officially rolled out to all advertisers its “Sponsored Listening,” which it first started testing last fall. The new ad format prompts listeners to watch a branded video or click on a rich media ad in exchange for one hour of ad-free listening. Compared to more “native” audio ads, this ad unit seems disruptive to the user experience. Pandora claims that in pilot testing, those ads boosted purchase intent by 30% and brand awareness by 12%.

What Brands Should Do
If your brand is looking to reach the younger, streaming-heavy demographics, it may be worth your while to consider the kind of value exchange that “Sponsored Listening” presents: disrupt the audience to catch their full attention with the promise of a disruption-free experience later on. The lesson for brands here is that, if you want to cut through the clutter and engage with your audience, then you have to offer them some incentives to capture their attention first.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image taken from Pandora Advertising

Streaming Music Gets More Personal With Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdWeek and AdAge

Music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify are enhancing the way that they target ads by getting more intimate with listeners. Spotify announced that it will allow brands to target specific consumers through custom playlists based on user activity and preferences. Ideally, the streaming company will be able to infer the context in which people are listening to playlists to deliver the perfect ad. Similarly, Pandora is moving closer toward programmatic advertising by allowing brands to target users based on more specific demographics like the users’ declared age, gender, and location, showcasing the wealth of targeted data they can provide brands.

How Pandora’s New Feature Can Help Artists And Brands

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Re/code

Popular Internet radio service Pandora is launching a pilot test this week that will allow music artists to send personalized audio messages to the listeners, which the company foresees will be used to plug upcoming tours and new albums, or simply to provide context on a particular song.

More interestingly, the company also mentioned its plan to make this new Artist Audio Messaging feature geo-targeted and hyperlocal. This means that soon artists and brands alike on Pandora will be able to target fans in a specific city or region with relevant, localized messages.

New Pandora Apps Get More Personal

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Verge

The Pandora app on both Android and iOS are getting a revamped update that focuses on personalization. Besides a thumbs-up icon on the app’s now-playing screen, a listen history complete with a new “thumbs-down” capability are also added for refining music preference.

Such personalization gives Pandora an interactive edge over its competitors, as Pandora could use feedback data to better understand and serve its users. Right now the update is only available in beta to 3% of users, but will be rolled out to all listeners over the coming months.

On Trend: Music Streaming Growing Strong Despite Swift Boycott

Posted on by Richard Yao

One of the biggest stories in media this week has been Taylor Swift abruptly removing all her back catalogue from Spotify, sparking debate on the monetization strategy and shifting audience behavior of today’s music industry. Some artists have voiced their support for Swift’s decision and criticized the unfair compensation granted by streaming services.

Although Swift’s current popularity may let her defy media consumption trends, the move from ownership to subscribed access seems all but inevitable, as Spotify royalties have reportedly overtaken iTunes earnings by 13% in Europe.

Impressive as that sounds, Spotify still got beaten by Pandora in App Annie’s new Music App Index report released today, which ranked the latter as No. 1 among music apps for most downloads and monthly revenue with a reported $100 million in mobile ad revenue for the recent quarter.

Both services, however, might need to watch out for SoundCloud, an up-and-coming challenger who just signed a licensing deal with Warner Music Group. In an effort to alleviate the tension between musicians and digital music services, the deal mandates that Warner artists will get paid when all versions of their music, including the D.J. remixes and fanmade mash-ups, are played on SoundCloud.

All in all, one could say that music streaming services are taking the “breakup” with Taylor Swift pretty well.

Why Pandora Is Vying For Connected Cars

Posted on by Lab Team

Pandora is aiming to reach “on-the-road” consumers with targeted audio advertising. It has reportedly been working on an improved car radio console that would help with its presence in connected cars. The Internet-based music streaming service itself will be installed in one-third of all new cars shipped this year, so it makes sense for them to try and get a jump-start.

Pandora Opens To Independent Musicians

Posted on by Lab Team

Pandora is the first online streaming service to open its doors to independent artists of all stripes. There will now be an online submission process for self-releasing artists across the Internet, allowing musicians with digital copies of their music to be broadcast on the network. In the past, artists on Pandora needed to have a hard copy of a CD with a UPC on Amazon, but now all that’s required is work digitally submitted through iTunes, Amazon/MP3, CD Baby, or Bandcamp. Pandora will screen the singles by hand. The catch is: in light of recent payment disputes, is the publicity of being available on Pandora worth the paltry paycheck?