Pandora partners with A Million Ads to bring dynamic capabilities to audio marketplace
Pandora continues to expand and change its business model, and today the streaming audio and internet radio company has announced an exclusive partnership with London-based A Million Ads, a company that specializes in dynamic creative and personalization for digital audio — becoming the first publisher to bring the dynamic capabilities popular in display and video advertising to the audio marketplace.
“This is a natural extension of the best-in-class personalization we bring to the music listening experience on Pandora every day,” said John Trimble, chief revenue officer at Pandora. “Our massive data set, combined with A Million Ads’ ability to deliver tailored, data-driven audio creative in real-time, gives us yet another way to help advertisers unlock the power of audio.”
Leveraging a variety of listener demographic and consumption data, Pandora and A Million Ads will give marketers two new tools to reach Pandora’s 81m active listeners:
- Real-time personalized creative at scale. Brands and advertisers can build and serve personalized listener audio ads based on personal attributes such as gender, age and zip code through a single tag. The real-time ads also take into account location, time of day and weather, allowing advertisers to create thousands of versions of an audio ad easily and efficiently.
- Sequential messaging and targeting: This lets advertisers capture listener attention by telling a story over time through sequentially targeted audio ads. The ads give listeners new bits of information about a brand or product. A press release regarding the partnership said that campaigns that tell a brand story before asking people to make a purchase have been proven significantly more effective than ones that immediately focus on people to take an action – this citing The Science of Social Advertising, A Research Study on Sequenced for Call to Action vs. Sustained Call to Action, from May 2014.
This is another move by Pandora to activate its advertising base. Earlier this year, it rolled out muted video and responsive mobile display ads to all its advertisers in order to drive results across key performance indicators. Previous to that, the company introduced sponsored listening and a new advertising opportunity that allows brands to sponsor skips and replays.
“As the industry leader, Pandora sets the bar for digital audio advertising and consistently offers marketers solutions that harness the power of music to effectively reach millions of consumers,” said Steve Dunlop, founder and chief executive officer of A Million Ads. “Together, we will revolutionize what listeners experience from an ad-supported music streaming experience and deliver new dynamic and personalized ways to capture attention and drive ROI for advertisers.”