What is Digital Audio Advertising? Here’s Everything You Need to Know
Published on December 27, 2023
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Have you ever been jamming in your car to your favorite song and then suddenly interrupted by a thirty second ad? Us too. While the ad break does kill the vibe to some degree, you are highly likely to listen to the entire ad (and often remember it) because there is simply nothing else to do while driving.
Audio advertising has been around the advertising block for a while, commanding U.S. listeners attention for just over a century. The first 1922 advertisements came by way of traditional radio, but one hundred years later, things are changing. 2020 marked the first year that digital audio surpassed radio in U.S. adult’s daily audio listening percentage, and last year, 55% of daily listen time belonged to digital audio channels, and 45% to radio.
With digital technology sweeping through traditional industries, its impact on audio advertising can’t be ignored. As an already powerful and trustworthy marketing channel, audio advertising has seen a new era of accessibility and popularity with today’s streaming platforms, mobile devices, and new content formats. People can now listen to whatever type of audio they desire — from true crime podcasts to Morgan Wallen’s new album — whenever and wherever they want. Marketers can now utilize the digital audio mediums’ growing popularity and integrated digital programmatic targeting and attribution to reach their markets directly, without guessing which radio channel they are most likely watching.
All advertisers need are the right tools and resources.
What is Digital Audio?
Before jumping into the details, it’s important to understand what digital audio actually is. Digital audio refers to audio content that is accessed through an internet connection. There are several types of digital audio, including:
- Downloaded Audio: This includes songs, albums, and podcasts that users can download and listen to offline.
- Live-Streaming Audio: This category resembles radio broadcasting, where digital platforms host live music streams and live discussions accessed through the internet (rather than radio satellite).
- On-Demand Audio: This type of audio content includes music, podcasts, talk shows, radio programs, audio clips, and voiceovers that users can access whenever they want.
Digital audio is not limited to specific devices or settings. With the widespread use of smartphones, smart speakers, and wireless headphones, listeners can enjoy digital audio content in various environments.
One of the significant advantages of digital audio over traditional radio is its elevated level of personalization. Unlike radio, digital audio allows listeners to create customized playlists, share their favorite songs with friends and family, and tailor their listening experiences to specific moments. Whether they are cooking, commuting, studying, working, or simply relaxing, users can curate their digital audio experience according to their preferences.
Audio Facts and Stats (U.S.A):
- There are currently 228+ million audio streaming users
- 78% of people consume music via audio
- 53% of consumers use ad-supported audio services
- 3.1+ million audio users are in-market for a vehicle at any given time
What is Digital Audio Advertising?
Digital audio advertising refers to the practice of promoting products, services, or brands through digital audio-based mediums. This allows advertisers to engage with listeners while they are immersed in their favorite content, such as music, podcasts, or digital radio shows on audio platforms such as streaming music services, podcasts, and voice-enabled devices.
Digital audio advertising’s programmatic abilities allow marketers to buy highly predictive, interested audiences and place advertisements directly in front of those individuals while they are streaming music or podcasts throughout their day.
Where are Digital Audio Ads Shown?
Digital Audio ads are shown on digital audio inventory of all kinds. The audio ad creative is delivered in “ad pods” (or ad inventory slots) within both paid and free ad-supported streaming apps and digital audio marketplaces. These are household names people know and love — Spotify, Pandora, Audiology, and more. The content within these platforms are streaming music and podcasts of any genre. These are accessed on any and all internet devices, from mobile phones, tablets, desktops, and even on CTVs (Yes, you can stream music and podcasts on your TV!).
The Advantages of Digital Audio Advertising
Audio advertising is highly effective, although often forgotten in campaign strategies. Digital audio advertising creates exciting avenues for brands to connect with audiences, offering unique opportunities to boost engagement and generate revenue.
Digital audio content is the perfect alternative to the common “screen fatigue” predicament. Podcast and music mediums enable advertisers to engage with listeners during the cherished “screenless moments” they seek, providing a valuable, personalized way to reach their target audience. With fewer screen-related distractions, audio ads are optimal for driving the advertisement’s message home and creating an imaginative element with the highly engaged listener.
With digital audio channels moving the needle in the audio world, there’s no better time to make the jump to digital audio advertising. With 67% of total streaming activity on on-demand audio and over 228 million streaming users in the U.S.A. right now, utilizing these digital audio mediums in streaming campaigns will reach target audiences where CTV can’t: their everyday routines. Finding in-market car buyers on their long commute to work, while cooking dinner, or relaxing in the sun creates an elevated level of authenticity and integration into their routines that CTV just can’t reach.
How Digital Audio Advertising Works with EMG
EMG offers streaming advertising solutions for tier 3 automotive dealerships with CTV and audio. With audio ads, dealerships can integrate their brand into in-market shoppers’ everyday routines in a distraction-free environment, creating a uniquely personalized ad experience around their interests.
With EMG, marketers can launch their audio advertising campaigns seamlessly with our end-to-end solution. The process is quite simple, just provide your guidelines and creative, and let EMG do the rest. In just five steps highlighted below, understand the complete EMG advertising process on streaming audio.
1. Plan Your Dealership’s Campaign
Campaign planning is now trouble-free for marketers. With EMG’s automated proposal tool, marketers can generate a custom proposal for any dealership in the country instantaneously based on current dealer sales and regression data from thousands of our streaming campaigns. This proposal saves marketers the headache of budgeting and conducting market research by providing (1) an ideal budget, (2) precise radius targeting, (3) and channel guidance. Let five years of EMG learnings and optimizations set your campaign up for success from the very start.
2. Select Your Audience
With EMG’s curated audience segments, derived from 40+ million attributed dealership walk-ins over five years, marketers can target the most predictive auto intending audiences. With first-party data from S&P Global Mobility, Experian, Cars.com, and Oracle Data Cloud, our partners gain access to the top 0.2% of commercially available automotive audience segments. EMG Audiences include car buyers of every type: class, vehicle segment, fuel type, and new or used. From there, EMG retargets consumers who completed the streaming advertisements or previously showed interest in the dealership by using display reinforcement to guide them down the sales funnel. All marketers need to do is tell us who their customer is, and EMG will find them.
3. Launch on Top Performing Streaming Inventory
EMG has 200+ private access contracts with premium streaming platforms and publishers to give our partners access to the top performing ad inventory supply. This includes hundreds of CTV and digital audio channels that dominate streaming viewership — Hulu, Spotify, Disney+. Through inventory curation, our pathways to delivery (via operating system → digital media player → and streaming platform) produce the highest engagement, completion, and conversion rates.
From there, choose your campaign’s budget, radius targeting, upload your creatives, and voila — you’re good to go.
4. Measure Dealership Performance
EMG’s measurement technology gathers deterministic attribution data, letting marketers know exactly how their streaming campaigns are performing — down to the exact tactic. It measures online and offline metrics that dealerships value, such as tracked dealership walk-ins, VDP views, online leads, and more micro details — all with deterministic data, not probabilistic.
How? EMG attribution technology partners with Foursquare, Experian, and S&P Global Mobility to track offline metrics and uses EMG tracking pixels to track online metrics. Both online and offline attribution leverage the Household Graph to link a completed CTV or audio impression to the other connected devices within that household to enable cross-channel measurement. EMG location data is highly trusted, provided by the same company used by Apple, Uber, and Amazon.
All measurement data is precise and actionable, perfect for campaign optimization. With this level of data detail, EMG can further optimize our custom audience and inventory configurations for even greater success in future campaigns.
5. Access Next Generation Reporting
EMG’s reporting is simply storytelling. We reveal and explain the data we collect in a user-friendly, customizable interface that allows our customers to access and understand this attribution. It makes sense of the raw data by using calculations and algorithms to present this data as a comprehensible reporting suite. This allows marketers to understand the true impact their campaigns are having on sales and leads and gain insight into the metrics that matter most.
The GMS iQ Report features each dealership’s GMS iQ index, giving dealerships their exact geographic market-share (GMS iQ) compared to rival dealerships in their market. EMG reporting also includes compliant placement reports, making co-op reimbursement easier than ever. Marketers can also integrate with our reporting stack built upon Snowflake to power their internal dashboards.
EMG reporting is detailed and transparent, providing meaningful and attributed performance metrics – tying walk-ins and online leads to the campaign – that give marketers the one-to-one attribution they need to understand their streaming campaign’s impact and easily communicate these results.
The EMG Guarantee:
EMG’s streaming recipe values the audio channel in authentically reaching auto-intending audiences during their everyday routines while streaming the podcasts and playlists they love.
With EMG’s streaming solutions, our audio campaigns guarantee (1) brand safety, ensuring your ads only run on premium services that align with your brand and messaging, (2) transparency, where our reporting tells you where every single impression was placed with your campaign and all associated metrics, (3) scale, with countless integrations and partnerships, it’s easier to ask who we don’t work with versus who we do, and (4) fraud protection, because fraudulent ad impressions don’t visit dealerships or submit leads, so we remove any audio inventory that doesn’t perform.
EMG’s extraordinary attention to detail and measurable outcomes in our streaming solution is why our campaigns average 30% of the addressed households we target physically arriving at a dealership within 90 days. This result is more than 8.5x the national average of automotive advertising and why EMG produces the most efficient, hyper-performing campaigns in automotive streaming.
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