• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, November 22, 2016

Ad-tech firm Adform on Tuesday announced a partnership with Rubicon Project to offer programmatic audio ads. Adform’s clients will be able to purchase 15-second or 30-second audio ads on Spotify programmatically through Rubicon Project’s platform, targeting Spotify’s listeners in real time via Adform’s demand-side platform.

The combination of Spotify's deterministic data, Rubicon Project’s advertising marketplace and Adform's targeting capabilities will enable advertisers to target relevant listeners with a personal brand experience, Adform said.

The real-time buys take ad frequency into account. Adform also tracks ads’ completion rates, as well as pauses and mutes in addition to standard measurement analysis.

Spotify is available in 60 markets around the world and reaches more than 70 million non-paying listeners across more than 2 billion playlists. The music-streaming service uses first-party data to create audience segments for advertisers that enable precise targeting of ad messages across desktop and mobile devices, based on a listener’s age, gender, preferred music genre and personalized playlists. 

“The addition of programmatic audio as a channel is yet another example of the industry looking for greater automation and efficiency," Jay Stevens, Adform's CRO, told Real-Time Daily via email. "A trend that started with a trading mechanic to sell remnant desktop display inventory almost a decade ago has matured into giving advertisers the capability of making media buys across video, mobile, digital out-of-home, and now digital audio from a single interface."

Adform aims to offer support for programmatic audio ads via cross-channel programmatic buying.