The streaming music service Pandora, which counts over 71 million active monthly users, is looking to boost its ad sales business by launching three new ad formats.
Unlike Spotify or Apple Music, which both count paid subscribers in the tens of millions, Pandora has 6 million paid subscribers to its ad-free service. While it wants to bulk up its subscription business, it has also invested in its ad-supported business to better compete with the leaders in the streaming music category.
The ad formats may seem familiar to viewers of streaming video, but have not been released at scale in the streaming audio world until now. They are dynamic audio, sequential audio, and short-form audio.
Short-form audio ads are built around ad spots that between :04-:10 seconds long, and are meant to complement longer :15 and :30 second spots.
Sequential audio ads allow the marketer to tell a story in sequential order, using multiple ads.
Dynamic audio ads are personalized, based on a variety of factors, including age, location, gender, the weather and music genre. The company says its platform can automatically create hundreds or thousands of different versions of the same ad to target to different consumers.
Dynamic audio ads build on the technology Pandora is known for through its Music Genome Project algorithm. It seeks to suggest and build dynamic playlists based on the musical interests of listeners.