Commentary
Spotify Targets Your Bathing Habits
- by John Motavalli , Columnist, July 27, 2016
Can you tell by someone’s music taste what kind of car they would buy? Is it best to advertise to music fan’s ears or eyes? How about advertising to listeners in the shower?
Spotify, one of the top music sites, last week announced a partnership with AppNexus, Rubicon Project and The Trade Desk that will enable highly targeted Deal ID/PMP audio ads to serve to the 70-million, mostly young users of Spotify Free. Clients can use 15- or 30-second audio spots, and use first-party data to target by music genre, age, gender, playlist choices and various other demographic factors. Spotify had previously been offering a programmatic solution based on display ads and video spots.
This makes sense because, if I base it on how I use Pandora and Spotify, visuals are not the point. Who looks at Pandora when you’re playing it, especially on a PC? Spotify has display ads from the likes of clients like Aetna but, as they explain, watching Spotify isn’t really what people are doing. AppNexus quotes Nielsen estimating that “79% of audio consumption takes place while people are engaged in activities that make it impossible for them to engage with visual media.” That leaves an enticing possibility, but let’s leave salacious thoughts out of this story.
Although Spotify didn’t want to release client names, I heard a :15 Sam Adams beer spot, which seemed like the right length for this type of ad. Another ad was for the travel service Kayak. The ads I heard were spoken word, and avoided the shouting intensity of many radio ads, which is why I stopped listening to commercial radio, not to mention the podcasts with 15 spots in a row that make much of them unlistenable. I also heard local Florida targeting, a spot for Jacksonville State University. I grooved to Spotify’s Pop Chillout, which played a lot of songs I like. Because of Spotify, I now know and love The Brinks and Arizona’s “I Was Wrong.”
Spotify Says It Will Avoid Ad Overkill
Les Hollander, global head of audio monetization at
Spotify, told me his service is 90% subscription supported; advertising accounts for the other 10%. But 70% of its audience listens to the free service, so currently 30% of the audience is paying most
of the bills at Spotify. The plan is for that to change. Spotify wants to avoid ad overkill, with Hollander noting that that the audio ad load “will be lower than that of other
publishers.” I heard an ad after about five songs, which is a lot less than any radio station, and it was just one :15 spot. No clutter here, not yet.
Maybe Spotify doesn’t know as much about you as Google does, but it knows things Google doesn’t. I suppose we should have known this when the shower radio was invented, but a lot of people listen to music in the shower. According to Hollander, a breathtaking 800,000 Spotify listeners have created shower playlists. And while they’re powering those up, it’s a perfect opportunity for bath product advertisers to hit them where they bathe. There are also a lot of "barbecue" playlists? Steak sauce ads would come to mind.
According to company data, 80% of Spotify’s users wield a mobile device. And this ad opportunity is aimed straight at the radio audience, or what used to be the radio audience.
“While radio listening activity overindexes in the morning, Spotify listening builds steadily throughout the day, peaking in the afternoon and early evening,” the company asserts. Spotify claims that its “average cross-platform” users average 148 minutes of listening per day.
Spotify’s Hollander notes that many people now just listen to radio in the car. “When was the last time you saw a boombox?” he asks. While Spotify, Pandora and other such services are carried around with mobile devices throughout listeners’ days.
How reliable is someone’s music taste in targeting potential clients? Notwithstanding that politicians like Donald Trump and George Bush keep using songs that the artists don’t approve of, it’s difficult to predict what music turns somebody on. But combine that with detailed demographics, and you have something interesting
The classic boombox has been annecdotally replaced by Bluetooth speakers. They seem to be everywhere, including in vehicles with lousy built-in speakers (and/or a lack of phone connectivity).
So nobody listens to radio anymore, not even in the car.
If 79% of all audio consumption comes when listeners can not be exposed to "visual" media, according to Nielsen, and most of this takes place in a car or other moving vehicles, can't these people see outdoor advertising? And isn't such advertising "visual"? As for reduced ad clutter, sure that's a good thing, but are the CPMs still comparable to those charged by more cluttered forms of audio ( AM&FM stations ) or are they much higher to compensate for having so few ads? And what happens if advertiser demand suddenly increases---will commercial loads stay where they are now? Probably not---I'm guessing.
I have no doubt, Ed, that when they get more ads, the clutter will creep up, and we will be hearing pods with more than one ad, but I didn't hear that yet. They may be trying to make it sound different from commercial radio. I have always wondered why, say, classic rock listeners put up with 15 spots in a row, all of them featuring screaming announcers. Why? I also take your point about outdoor advertising, but I think a lot of the activitiy they're referring to doesn't involve driving...
John, I think that something like 65% of all radio listening is now done in cars, so Nielsen had to be including a lot of this in its figures. As for what happens when one of those long comkmercial breaks comes on, the PPMs show an audience loss of around 6-10%, due to sound muting, tune out and switching to another station. However I believe that a far higher percentage of "the audience" simply pays no attention to such ads.
Interesting, when they get two ad three, I'm gone, how can anybody sit there and hear somebody scream a car ad at you and voluntarily keep it on. There are so many ad-free music environments now. But then, these are the same people who WANT to hear Stairway to Heaven every day, three times a day. That is interesting about outdoor, how does one determine if Nielsen is including that in its figure?