By Mark Ramsey
March the 7th, 2015
Data is powering marketing in general and advertising in particular in ways that could not have been imagined even five years ago. It’s important for folks in the audio space to bend their heads around this because data is, fundamentally, a form of marketing intelligence. And the more marketing intelligence that’s packed into ad inventory, the smarter and more valuable it becomes to the buyers and sellers of those ads.
One of the great differences between traditional radio spots and some online audio ads is the raw intelligence – the smarts – embedded into the advertising.
Needless to say, anything that makes audio advertising smarter is good for the advertiser (because the targeting is richer), good for the seller (because the inventory is more valuable) and good for the consumer (because the ad is more tailored to her personal needs and interests).
As an industry, the audio space remains very much in transition. This is how Triton Digital’s Mike Agovino put it in a Q&A with RAIN News:
[The audio advertising marketplace has a] scarcity of smart impressions that advertisers covet and will pay high CPMs for and a glut of unintelligent impressions that are being marketed in channels that will accept them, which are very basic channels like the network radio marketplace where you don’t have a bunch of targeting imperatives.
But the problem, of course, is that presently the “smart impressions” are disproportionately available from pureplays like Pandora, not from the giants of the audio space: Traditional broadcasters with digital audio streams.
This is obviously counterproductive, considering the traditional radio industry often under-invests in streaming because the platform can’t be monetized in the same ways as the legacy platforms of AM and FM. But, you see, one key to monetizing the streaming platform is to increase the value of the inventory! Indeed, that’s exactly the strategy of the pureplays, and it likewise must be the value of ALL players in the online audio space.
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