Personalizing Audio
This week we will continue on the theme of Personalization. Last week we wrote about how important it is to fully understand who your customers are from a 360 degree perspective so that you can personalize ads, content, and experiences for them. The benefits lead to higher AOV, repeat purchases, and loyalty. This week we are going to talk about how you take that type of information and put it to work for you.
As mentioned last week, ProfitWheel is a great tool to help you unpack who your customers are and put that information to work digitally. You can leverage those learnings or other 1PD to improve your audio campaigns as well. Scaling these efforts can be the most overwhelming challenge related to audio advertising and this is where a company like Frequency comes into play.
Let’s take a small step back and be clear on the sub-channels we are referring to. Terrestrial radio, otherwise known as broadcast radio has traditionally been a mass reach play targeted by content and geography based on the reach of a station or program. However, now most radio stations deliver their OTA content digitally. This opens up the opportunity for greater control over campaigns and improve personalization and optimization. Traditionally a brand would need to traffic one spot to be used all the time or multiple spots for different programs and time of day. With digital delivery via Frequency, advertisers can traffic on VAST and be done with it. Then all the creative and distribution/targeting can be done in the Frequency platform. This allows you to test and learn more quickly.
Streaming audio is a second audio sub-channel. This includes platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and NPR. It also includes networks like iHeart, DAX, and Audio Hook. There are many more. The amount of audio content available to advertise around is plentiful. At Cogent, we have found that most brands start with Spotify, Pandora, and/or iHeart. These are all great places to start because they are widely used and each will assist with creative development. I encourage everyone to dip their toes in via one of these partners. The science has shown that audio leads to higher recall than any other channel so brands quickly want to scale their audio efforts. Once a brand gets to this phase, they need a consolidated way to manage creative and campaigns. The benefit of scaling is that advertisers can find many more places to advertise while finding lower CPM’s and the ability to reach their same target audiences. This is an instant way to create efficiency. When an advertiser gets to this point, they need a Frequency to help with campaign management and creative consistency. Frequency will help advertisers develop dozens to thousands of iterations of their creative so that the most targeted ads can be delivered everywhere. The delivery mechanism is still the VAST tag. This allows brands to traffic one VAST tag, one time to each media partner and then control what goes where from within the Frequency platform. The operational efficiencies are huge here and it allows advertisers to optimize or update creative as often as they would their display creative. For anyone that manages audio advertising on multiple platforms, they will immediately appreciate the ability to manage personalization, contextualization, trafficking, reporting, and optimization from one platform. Frequency even provides 1PD to be used for personalization such as weather, sports scores, stock tickers, and more.
The third and final sub-channel is podcasting. Traditionally, brands have leveraged host read ads within the podcasting environments. This is an awesome tactic for hyper targeting since the advertiser knows the content, audience, and persona delivering the content. The challenge is that it isn’t easily scaleable since communication has to be had with each show or host to find alignment. Things are going to get easier for podcast advertisers. Frequency will launch a matchmaking platform in 2023 to help advertisers discover relevant programing and communicate with show producers in one place. Additionally, streaming ad opportunities have been increasing within podcasts. As these opportunities grow next year, brands will have more opportunities to deliver hyper-relevant ads to a variety of programs with ease from one platform.
In summary, if you are looking to develop more personalized or contextually relevant audio creative, you will benefit from the capabilities Frequency offers. If you are ready to scale your audio efforts and/or are looking for operational efficiencies, a platform like Frequency will save every advertiser time and money. Fun fact, Frequency has been around for several years but has been focused on backend ad serving for the largest players in the space. Now they are focused on helping advertisers improve their audio efforts across all sub-channels. If you’d like to learn more about Frequency, email me at [email protected].