The streaming audio market is growing as consumers spend more time listening to music and podcasts from on-demand platforms. Technological innovation also is putting audio advertising into mobile games, making them less intrusive than that video or display ads that can be a turnoff to gamers.
“Audio is a market that has been exploding, in large part it started with the advent of smartphones,” Dominick Milano, senior vice president of sales and business development, North America, at TargetSpot, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It has grown tremendously from there with technology, but also a vast amount of content. Certainly in the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of interest with podcasts.”
His company, a division of AudioValley, aggregates the inventory of on-demand audio platforms and segments it to help with more precise targeting. Advertisers can reach key audience groups, while publishers monetize their content among brands seeking greater scale across on-demand audio platforms.
Marketers are reaching consumers “as part of the aggregation and being able to tap into the fact that we have this tech stack and we have this bigger footprint, utilizing the services of Tru Optik, being able to take all of that audience, aggregate it and then come up with segments that any individual publisher can’t scale on their own, but we can do it for them,” Milano said.
On-demand audio has several advantages over other media formats, the biggest one being the ability to reach consumers while they’re doing other things. Streaming audio can be consumed as people commute to work, or during day-to-day activities like doing household chores or getting exercise.
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“It’s going beyond the way we traditionally look at listening to audio,” Milano said. “One of our partners converts text articles from newspaper and magazine articles — so effectively, it’s like a podcast, but now you have the ability to listen instead of reading an article on demand.”
The pandemic led to a surge in playing video games, as homebound consumers sought ways to fill the hours in isolation. There’s a growing opportunity to reach those consumers with audio ads, Milano said, citing a couple of TargetSpot’s partners that are putting ads into mobile games.
“It’s the first instance that I’m aware of, where you don’t have any audio content, but you’re using audio,” he said.
There’s an opportunity to engage consumers through gamification methods that urge people to take action during breaks in gameplay.
“You can create the context of what that message would be relevant to what that person is doing,” Milano said.
“We’ve seen programmatic grow tremendously in all forms of advertising during the past decade, and it’s no different for audio,” he said. “There isn’t anything outside of the realm of interest for audio at this point, because of technology and expansion of content. All of those revenue streams are there.”
You are watching “Advertisers: Turn Up the Volume on Streaming Audio,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Tru Optik. For more videos, please visit this page.
