adStream is a journal of ad-spottings in online music services that highlight how commercials (audio and visual) can be an integrated part of the online listening experience.
All indicators point to mobile for nearly all Internet activities, and especially for listening to music. Pandora is the fifth most-downloaded mobile app, according to comScore.
Which is a shame for advertisers who buy the full-screen treatment on Pandora’s browser experience.
It’s not unusual for web publishers to sell the background space behind a web site. That wide-screen inventory might be even more effective on Pandora.com, because the user is not scrolling up and down the page, and probably not navigating away from the page quickly.
If web-browser listening eventually disappears in a mobile-centric Internet, there’s an analogy to vanishing album art when vinyl records were replaced by CDs … and further reduction of artwork going from CDs to downloads and streaming. The big, full-screen ads on Pandora are like album art for advertisers.
In the case of Lumosity, the artwork continues fortifying the brand and selling the message even after the formal commercial (if there is one, such as Lumosity’s video ad)) has finished — all the way through the next song in the playlist.
Imagine if there was a way of doing this kind of thing with audio. It would totally do away with the ad break as we know it.