Demand for digital radio services has been growing for years and many advertisers discovered this medium as a valid alternative to terrestrial radio campaigns. The big players in the market are Apple Music, iHeart Media, Pandora, and Spotify. You can directly negotiate a schedule with respective advertising representatives. However, there are now two self-serve platforms available and we want to make sure you are familiar with their features as well.
Pandora
Pandora just recently introduced their self-serve platform via AudioGo. The minimum campaign budget is $250 and you can set the flight by determining a start and an end date. Commercials may be up to 30 seconds long and you can upload three different sizes of display ads that appear when your commercial plays: 300×250, 300×600, 500×500. They all link to a website of your choice.
You can target by gender and ZIP codes. Pandora uses similar age categories as Google Ads: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, and 65+. You can also make sure commercials only run within specific music genres. In addition to the traditional genres, Pandora offers a couple of unique genres not provided by Spotify:
- Christmas Music
- Controversial
- Schlager
- Top40/Hits – Pop
- World
Spotify
Spotify’s self-serve platform is intuitive and easy to use. Like Pandora, the minimum budget is $250 per campaign and you can set the flight by determining a start and an end date. Commercials can be up to 30 seconds long and can upload one 640×640 display ad linking to your website. ZIP code targeting is available as well.
Spotify has a couple of advantages over Pandora. First, Spotify produces your commercial without any charge. You submit your copy, select a voice (i.e. male/female, age, English accent, language), select/upload your background music and then Spotify will create the commercial for you to review. You will still have a chance to request changes, so there is no commitment associated with this feature.
Second, Spotify offers additional campaign features to promote artists like serving commercials to fans of certain musicians. Another feature focuses on announcing new shows or merchandise sales.
Third, Spotify offers unique targeting abilities. These unique targeting opportunities include; targeting usual genres, certain interests of listeners determined by listener behavior and real-time context by focusing on playlists used for commuting, celebrating, studying and more. You will not be able to combine different targeting strategies, but you can target specific age ranges starting at the age of 13. You can also select specific platforms (desktop, iOS, Android). Both platforms allow smaller businesses to access the marketplace for digital radio advertising after high minimum budget commitments have created barriers in the past. Please contact Adrian at adrian@medialinkinc.com if you would like to learn more about digital radio advertising.
