Over two years ago, The Echo Nest spotted a unique opportunity to leverage our deep musical intelligence to help advertisers reach the right music fans. We’ve been developing a solution ever since. Now, we’re ready to announce it.
Ad-supported radio is fast becoming the centerpiece of every music service — not just iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify, but across the entire industry. A streaming service’s ability to sell advertising is central to its survival — not just because it’s a popular core feature, but because not every user wants to pay for an ad-free experience.
Our insight: The same deep understanding of individual fans’ music taste, which already powers our unparalleled Music Discovery and Personalization solution, can also segment online music fans in a variety of useful ways. Not only does this offer advertising networks a more efficient way to target music fans (commanding higher CPMs), but it increases the revenue of ad-supported music services by making their audience easier for advertisers to segment.
Music Identity and Targeting
Music is an important proxy to audience, which is why advertisers spend more than $15 billion per year advertising on radio stations: Classic Rock, AAA, Urban, and so on. Those formats are overly broad compared to the one-to-one nature of personalized streaming radio services. This is why streaming radio presents such a large opportunity to advertisers: they can reach unique individuals, rather than vast swaths of people whose specific proclivities are more or less unknown.
To capitalize on this important shift in listening behavior, music services, and music ad networks need tools for understanding each fan; where their musical taste fits into the world of music; and what else their taste says about them as people. That way, services and advertisers can extend music taste to preference for a certain brand or product.
We call our new solution Music Audience Understanding. We’re confident in its ability to deliver segments of streaming music fans to advertisers more accurately than through terrestrial radio. As more music fans transition to music streaming, The Echo Nest is well positioned to help advertisers and ad-supported music services make radio advertising much more targeted, engaging and personalized.
Better Targeting Than $15 Billion Radio Industry Provides
All signs indicate that radio is going digital, fast, yet radio advertising is still very analog. This situation will not last. The streaming services that survive will be those that shift from running general run-of-site ads and targeting old-school radio formats to delivering micro-audiences with the same granularity that social media and search can deliver — age, demographic, lifestyle attributes, and much more.
Our Music Audience Understanding solution can help. So far, we have proven its ability to use music listening behavior to predict music fans’ age or gender; affinity for over 20 lifestyle categories (i.e. foodies, gamers, sports fans); and preference for music genres and styles. Privacy is important, which is why we do all of this anonymously, without personally identifying information or the need for our customers to purchase (controversial) third-party user data.
Fully Anonymous and Privacy Friendly
We are obsessed with making online music better. Creepy ad technologies that track you around the web and approach the line of “personally identifiable information” do not necessarily improve online music. Our approach to segmentation is based on prediction and machine learning, so it doesn’t need personally identifiable information, and we don’t track users around the Internet; the solution works completely anonymously.
First Ad Network To Use Music Audience Understanding: TargetSpot
We’re happy to announce our first ad network customer: TargetSpot, the largest digital audio advertising network in the world, with over 85 distribution partners including CBS RADIO, ABC News Radio, Univision, Entercom, Live 365, and more.
Other customers of The Echo Nest’s Music Audience Understanding include several ad-supported radio services, because this solution is useful in both directions: for ad networks looking to target music fans across a variety of services, and digital music services interested in boosting the value of their advertisements.
0 comments:
Post a Comment