Close your eyes and imagine the targeting capabilities of programmatic advertising on radio – now open them, surprise! You now have them.
Spotify CRO Jeff Levick announced in a recent interview with AdExchanger that: “2015 was the year we started opening up, which was huge for us, and 2016 is the year we’re going to be fully open, We’re going to keep expanding and investing heavily in the programmatic channel.”
Back in November 2015, Spotify opened up it’s programmatic radio advertising offering to a limited audience. It’s a private marketplace where brands can leverage Spotify’s first party data to target users in a variety of ways. You can target by genre, by playlist, and also by subscriber data like DMA, age & gender.
For now, the programmatic functionality of the program is limited only to display and video ads but audio advertising is soon to follow. The IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) recently set guidelines for Internet Radio Advertising so the stage is set and companies like Spotify couldn’t be happier.
The excitement is visible in quotes like this one from former Rubicon Project vet and current head of programmatic at Spotify – Jana Jakovljevic: “For the first time ever there is going to be an audio standard for programmatic. It’s completely nascent right now, but once the standard is agreed upon, it won’t take long for tech vendors, SSPs and DSPs to adopt the standard and start running audio alongside their other formats.”
Programmatic Radio Advertising Enables Extremely Detailed Targeting
According to Spotify, their average user listens to around 148 minutes of music on Spotify each day. If you can serve an ad every 20 – 30 mins to roughly 50 / 70 million users at any given time… you do the math.
One of the most appealing things to advertisers about a platform like Spotify though is the amount of data available to target with. More than 80% of Spotify’s users tune in on a mobile device and the total number of monthly active users was estimated at around 100 million at the end of 2015.
For more, You can read the full interview with Jeff Levick and Jana Jakovljevic at AdExchanger.