Pandora Voice-Activated Ads: Just The Facts

Earlier this month, Pandora, the largest streaming service in the U.S., announced their new voice-activated ad testing.

What Are Pandora’s Voice-Activated Ads?

Pandora’s voice-activated ads allow listeners to interact with ads by talking to them. For each ad, listeners can verbally respond to let Pandora know that they’d like to learn more about the brand advertising or skip the ad altogether. The beta test of this advertising format will launch later this year.

Why Is Pandora Testing Voice-Activated Ads?

Pandora is facing measurement challenges that are unique to the digital audio channel. Because audio ads aren’t clickable like typical web ads, it’s hard to know how many people who listened to audio ads later researched more information or made purchases.

Voice-powered ads offer a solution to the tracking and attribution challenges. With so many consumers integrating voice assistants into daily life, Pandora’s voice-activated ads have arrived at an opportune time.

Eric Picard, VP Product Management at Pandora, said, “Voice interactivity has already changed the way consumers interact with brands on smart speakers, and we believe voice will change the very nature of the way consumers interact with brands on Pandora.”

How Will Pandora’s Voice-Activated Ads Benefit Marketers?

With more available metrics, marketers will be able to gauge the performance of their audio ads in ways similar to banner ad or native advertising performance. Over time it is also possible voice-activated audio ads may encourage in-depth, back-and-forth conversations between consumers and brands.

Picard said, “Pandora is building a comprehensive voice solution across our consumer-facing offerings with advertising services on top of it to enable our own ‘first party’ offering as well as ‘third-party vendors’ such as Instreamatic and AdsWizz to plug in. Our expectation is that the buy-side – advertisers and agencies – are going to want to do ‘build-once-buy-everywhere’ solutions for voice ads just like they have for other markets.”

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About the Author

Victoria Pallien is a Marketing Communications Writer at Digital Media Solutions (DMS), the fastest-growing independent digital performance marketing company. DMS helps its clients accelerate growth by deploying diversified and data-driven customer acquisition solutions that deliver scalable, sustainable and measurable marketing results. DMS performance marketing solutions connect the right consumers with the right offers at the right time to achieve the marketing objectives of our clients. DMS is continually innovating to provide new and emerging media and technology solutions that minimize waste and maximize results across the most competitive industries. Since its inception, DMS has demonstrated incredible year-over-year growth which has earned recognition on the Inc. 5000 list in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

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