Programmatic Audio: What Every Business Needs to Know
A decision framework for whether programmatic audio, on Spotify, Pandora and podcasts, made sense for your business in 2017.
By 2017, buying audio ads no longer meant negotiating directly with a radio station’s ad sales team. Spotify, Pandora and a growing set of podcast platforms had built out real programmatic infrastructure, and the question for most businesses wasn’t whether the technology existed, it was whether it made sense for them specifically. Here’s how to think it through.
What “programmatic audio” covers
Two distinct things fall under this label. Streaming audio platforms, Spotify’s Ad Studio and Pandora’s ad exchange both opened up meaningfully in 2017, let advertisers buy targeted audio spots the same way they’d buy programmatic display, using listener data rather than a station’s general demographic profile. Podcast advertising, separately, was starting to adopt dynamic ad insertion technology that let publishers swap ads into an episode’s audio stream after the fact rather than baking a single fixed ad into the file forever, which is what made podcast buying start to resemble a programmatic channel rather than a one-off sponsorship deal.
Who benefits from it
Businesses with a defined target audience that overlaps with streaming or podcast listeners get the clearest value: the targeting data available through Spotify and Pandora, age, listening habits, location, was considerably sharper than anything terrestrial radio could offer. Businesses selling something highly localized, or something that depends on visual demonstration, generally got less out of audio than they would from other formats, since audio can’t show a product the way display or video can.
What it costs to get in
Compared to traditional radio buys, which usually required negotiating minimum spend with a station or network, programmatic audio platforms let advertisers start with modest budgets and scale based on results, similar to how programmatic display worked. That lower barrier to entry was one of the format’s real advantages for smaller businesses that could never have afforded a traditional radio campaign.
The measurement gap you should expect
Audio, unlike display or search, doesn’t offer a click for someone to act on mid-ad. Streaming platforms provided listen-through and completion rate data, which told you whether people heard the ad, but connecting that to an actual sale still generally required a workaround: unique promo codes, dedicated landing pages or post-campaign brand lift surveys. Businesses that went into programmatic audio expecting search-level attribution were consistently disappointed; businesses that planned for indirect measurement from the start got a much more accurate read on performance.
The decision, in practice
If your audience skews toward streaming and podcast listening, if you can tolerate less precise attribution than you’re used to from search or social and if you have a message that works without visuals, programmatic audio in 2017 was an underused channel with real targeting improvements over its recent past. If none of those conditions apply, the format was easy to skip without missing much.
Where this was headed
Podcast listenership kept climbing steadily in the years following Serial’s breakout success in 2014, and dynamic ad insertion technology was still maturing in 2017 rather than fully mainstream. Businesses that built early comfort with audio’s measurement limitations were better positioned to take advantage as the tools around attribution and targeting kept improving.
More from Paid Advertising, the 2017 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
