2013 might be remembered as the year in which understanding and targeting the audio-listening audience gained some degree of maturity.
When it comes to knowing users and serving them relevant ads, the streaming audio industry has a harder nut to crack than traditional website publishing. In the latter realm, use of tracking cookies gives a detailed profile of a user’s activities on the web, and therefore some understanding of how to catch that person’s attention with an ad. This technology, which acts as a kind of advertisement subway system beneath the front-facing Internet, has become built out as a standard feature available to virtually all advertisers. For the user, seeing spookily well-targeted ads on wildly divergent websites is common.
In audio, advertisers are relatively blind. Before this year, ad buyers and sellers relied on registration data to gain a blunt demographic knowledge of users. That level of intelligence yields simple profiles of user gender, location, and sometimes age.
Two nearly coincidental breakthroughs signaled a possible evolutionary leap for advertisers. First, Pandora announced audience segment prediction based on a
combination of registration facts and listening choices. The service released two segments to start — Hispanic and Spanish-speaking users. As much inference as is probably inherent in the system, is is definitely an improvement and a step toward the promised land of relevance targeting.
Shortly after, The Echo Nest stole Pandora’s spotlight with its own audience identification product, called Music Audience Understanding. the Echo nest is primarily a music knowledge company, and provides an intelligence layer that powers music suggestions in hundreds of music services. With the company’s data-crunching prowess, audience understanding was a natural extension. Ambitiously, The Echo Nest released about 20 psychographic audience segments (interests and intentions such as car-buyers), and partnered with leading audio ad network Target Spot.
Pandora’s development is significant not only for its pioneering stab at better audience knowledge, but also for its impact on the company’s local sales effort. For The Echo Nest, the new product reinforces the company’s dominance in providing technology to music services. For ad sellers and buyers, 2014 beckons as a year when audio advertising finally gets smart.