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Ad Op Partners In Place, Pandora Makes A Grab For Local Radio Dollars

Doug Stern, PandoraStreaming audio player Pandora has increasingly focused on building ad revenues from the local level up, but has met with some hurdles in trying to pry ad dollars from the $15 billion terrestrial radio market.

This week it struck deals with two media buying and planning software providers, Mediaocean and STRATA , that it hopes will simplify the process of buying local audio ads.

"We knew that a substantial portion of the $15 billion radio market is bought through automated systems," Doug Sterne, VP of audio sales at Pandora, told AdExchanger. "About 70% of all spot radio is transacted through those systems. So we're trying to duplicate the workflow associated with buying radio. Using Mediaocean and STRATA will allow us to directly tap that pipeline of spending."

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WPP's Xaxis Sees A Draw For Brand Dollars In Programmatic Audio Ads

Brian LesserAlthough the major internet ad players – e.g., Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm – all swear by their direct sales, Xaxis, WPP's audience buying unit, is looking to leverage audio ads as a way to get more brand campaign ad dollars within its programmatic system.

"The appeal [of internet radio audio ads] is that we want to give brand advertisers another vehicle for audience targeting," said Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser in an interview with AdExchanger. "We fundamentally believe that programmatic buying lends itself very well to brand advertising, despite the fact that it’s mostly used, right now, for bottom of the funnel, direct response advertising. Our job within Xaxis is to make as many channels available to brand advertisers as possible through programmatic buying."

It's hard to find comprehensive figures for how much internet radio is bringing in these days, but suffice to say, consumer usage is surely outpacing ad spending. Last fall, digital audio ad network TargetSpot released a report attempting to put a face on internet radio listeners and suggested that they may be more amenable to being targeted in this format versus other mediums.

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TargetSpot Bringing Deeper Audience Targeting To Internet Radio Advertising Says CEO Goldwerger

Eyal Goldwerger, CEO of TargetSpot, an Internet radio advertising network.

TargetSpot CEO Eyal GoldwergerAdExchanger.com: What momentum has TargetSpot seen in 2009 for itself as well as its clients?

2009 is going to be a year of accelerating growth at TargetSpot, driven by rising advertiser demand. This is a result of both an increase in our advertisers' budgets, as well as a much wider mix in our advertiser base. Our customers now include a more complete spectrum, from the very largest national brands running national network campaigns, to national spot campaigns, and through to the small, locally-focused advertisers. Our customers are also using our network in an equally diverse manner: a recent outreach campaign enabled us to double the number of "self service" advertiser sign ups, which complements the growth in our large advertiser and agency-driven business that is predominantly "full-service" based.

Do you consider TargetSpot a technology or a services company?

TargetSpot is a service company which is enabled by great technology. As an advertising network, we enable the advertiser to tap into an immense amount of consolidated inventory and efficiently place ads across the network based on accurate targeting criteria. They benefit from scale, diversity, targeting, and automation. And we provide our integrated distribution partners access to advertiser demand that is consolidated and aggregate through our network. Ads are automatically placed within their streams, with similar benefits from their end.

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