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Episode 10

Hit the Right Note With Audio Advertising

Illustration of Kevin Linger, Digital Marketing Manager at Xero

About This Episode

January 25, 2023

How marketers leverage programmatic audio advertising to connect with listeners? Learn what programmatic audio is, how it works, and how to reach quality audiences.

Kevin Linger | Digital Marketing Manager, Xero

Liban Ahmed | Sales Director, StackAdapt

00:00

Transcript

Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

Audio provides incremental reach opportunities when added to a campaign. Looking at audio specifically, it comes down to that additional reach looking at completed listens, which is a metric we would often use when evaluating audio campaigns, it can be significantly cheaper than a click. So we can still get engagement with our ad, figure out what creative is working and decide on how our audience wants to receive messaging, and then do that more efficiently in some cases with audio compared to some of the other mediums that we’re considering.

How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:27)

But then you think about the social landscape. The research data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touchpoints. So that long term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.

Matt (00:00:52)

Hello, and welcome to the How Agencies Thrive podcast. My name is Matt, and I’m on the Education Development Team at StackAdapt. And today, we have a very special episode centered around programmatic audio. And mainly what we’re going to be talking about is how advertisers can effectively leverage non-skippable highly engaging audio ads in their campaigns. In this episode, we have Kevin from Xero, which is a technology company specializing in cloud-based accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses. And we have StackAdapt very own Liban. As always, we’re going to have our guests introduce themselves. So Kevin, we’d love to hear a little bit about Xero yourself and your role in some of your areas of expertise.

Kevin (00:01:32)

Hey, thanks, Matt. Glad to be on the show. Yeah, I’m Kevin, a digital marketing manager. Here at Xero based in Canada. My role is really focused on Xero’s performance online in the US looking at a combination of digital media, search engine optimization, advertising, website performance, and working with a big team of specialists here. And abroad. Xero is a cloud accounting software, we’re looking to grow really rapidly here in North America, excited to be here. And we’re always testing and learning and trying out new formats like audio.

Matt (00:02:08)

Fantastic. Now, Liban, I’d love to hear a little bit about you.

Liban (00:02:13)

For sure. My name is Liban, and I’m an account director here at StackAdapt. I’ve been here for nearly four years now. But my career started back in 2014, going through the agency route, having spent some time at PhD media wave maker, and even M net, which is a programmatic trading desk. So I’ve been programmatic around my entire career, and found myself a StackAdapt, where now we are selling that solution. But I’m glad to be here. And thanks for having me.

Matt (00:02:43)

Fantastic. So as mentioned, the theme for this episode is programmatic audio. So, Kevin and Liban, just to bring everybody up to speed, maybe some of our listeners might not be totally familiar with this format. But when we when we think of audio ads, typically, what comes to mind would be your traditional radio with ad breaks. And now, with podcasts, personalized music, audio shows, and programmatic ads, things are obviously very different. So for any of our listeners who are looking to kind of wrap their heads around this subject, what’s the definition of programmatic audio? Kind of what is it and how does it work?

Kevin (00:03:21)

Yeah, I love to keep things simple with my definition. So just starting with like an audio ad, I would say an audio ad is any sound on advertisement. And then you can build in deeper definitions from there. So obviously, like you said, Matt, there’s traditional radio and then looking to online audio. There’s programmatic, which has like all the great targeting abilities that we’ve got, reaching people, listening to podcasts, checking out the newest DJ track on SoundCloud, catching up on some music, listen to radio shows online or offline. And it captures like a huge diversity of content through an audio-only means.

Liban (00:04:04)

Yeah, for sure. I agree with Kevin here. I like to keep it simple. And audio advertising is simply the delivery of ads in an audio format across any online streaming platform. So if we’re looking at it specifically in the programmatic lens, really what we’re doing here is we’re automating the process of buying and selling audio within an ad space. There’s a lot of opportunity to target the right audience at the right time with programmatic audio ads, in comparison to traditional audio ads that we’re used to from traditional radio, because a lot of the time there, it’s not specifically buying around the audience but rather buying around the contextual relevancy of the show or program that you want to be on because you would at that point, back in the day, what they were thinking is, our audience is listening to this. So let’s place it on here. But what we’re able to do now is we know your audience is listening to this and let’s place it there.

Matt (00:05:01)

Awesome. And I liked the mention of contextual relevance because this moves us into our next question where we want to know a little bit more about targeting. So when someone’s targeting with audio ads, you know, how do we know the number of people that this has reached? And how do we even get started when we think about who we might want to target with certain audio creatives? And on what inventory?

Kevin (00:05:23)

Yeah, I’d love to just start with from two. So we went from that contextual relevance that Liban spoke to where it was just like, hey, this is a local area that my audience might be in let’s blast radio. And now we’ve got all these layers. So in addition to the demographic and geographic targeting, that we’ve been able to use in the past, like age, gender, city, we’ve also got behavioural, what am I looking at? What am I reading about? What content am I gauging with around the web, and that can inform a really great persona of who that person is in the B2B space. With CRO and accounting software, I mean, we’re not looking to say everyone in Idaho is our target market, for example, we really want those accountants and bookkeepers, or those small businesses, decision-makers. So seeing people that are engaging with content online relevant to that, like accounting today, or trying to learn more about getting their finances together. That context is really great for tailoring audio to our audience. And that’s something we can do through programmatic. Liban, I know you’re an expert in the tracking space. So I’ll leave it to you to catch the second part of that.

Liban (00:06:39)

So, yes, thinking from the StackAdapt side of things, we can definitely qualify the number of people you’ve reached in a variety of different ways, and a lot of targeting is available to you. So outside of our cookieless targeting solutions, which include page context AI and keyword targeting, all other targeting capabilities can be leveraged for running an audio campaign. Why is it that page context AI and keyword targeting are not available there is because both of these types of targeting tactics actually need to be displayed near content, whereas a lot of the audio medium, are within music, streaming platforms, podcasts, so on, so forth. So with that we’re relying on non-cookieless targeting solutions. Thereafter, how do we qualify the number of people you’ve reached? Well, StackAdapt will always be able to provide an analysis across demographic characteristics and interests of the listeners, we reached the customized targeting further, here at StackAdapt, we determined that unique users reached in order to qualify the total number of people, this would also include any sort of deduplication. So that way we can really qualify, this is your total unique users that you’ve been able to reach. And then finally, as we’ve been harping on this floor, there’s the ability to quartile completion, retarget your audiences, the ability to really amplify audio reach across programmatic formats to reach your audience.

Matt (00:07:59)

Awesome. Now, again, Liban, you’re giving me a great transition to the next question here. But, you know, when we think about programmatic audio, it’s often in that conversation of hey, what’s the multi-channel strategy? How does it size up against other programmatic channels that people might be familiar with? And we’ll look at this from kind of two sides of the coin. So Kevin, I’m interested to know from you, what kind of value programmatic audio has had in some of the campaigns that you’ve been running, and then Liban, I guess we can look at it more holistically from, you know, some of those best practices or even channel strategies, where audio might be effective. So, Kevin, we’ll start with you from kind of the Xero lens and then Liban, we’ll go to you from StackAdapt lens.

Kevin (00:08:45)

Yeah, there’s two things I like to consider on this. There’s a lot of available research around the impact on ad recall of people being exposed to messaging through multiple mediums. So for example, if I’m just exposed only to a TV ad, I’m not as likely to remember the brand is that I’m exposed to TV and print, or like social and offline. The second thing to consider is audio. And other audio provides incremental reach opportunities when added to a campaign. So maybe with the display ad, I can reach 80% of my audience. But to get that last 20, I need another channel to do that. And audio can help me get full coverage of my audience. So looking at audio specifically, it comes down to that additional reach. There’s additional users I can talk to that maybe I didn’t have a way into before. And the opportunity to improve on recall with that extra layer of messaging back to programmatic audio is so much more valuable for us now that it’s digital because we can reach people that are interested in our topics that might not have been identifiable before through just geographic or demographic targeting. And like a bonus on top of that is looking at completed listens, which is a metric we would often use when evaluating audio campaigns, it can be significantly cheaper than a click. So we can still get engagement with our ad, figure out what creative is working and decide on how our audience wants to receive messaging, and then do that more efficiently in some cases with audio compared to some of the other mediums that we’re considering.

Liban (00:10:27)

Cool, awesome. And then, just to jump in from the other lens, on the StackAdapt side of things from what I’m seeing, and what my experience with audio ads when it comes to the value of an overall marketing strategy is, I like to position audio as an awareness driving format, best use in the top of a marketing funnel in order to be that first or early impression for your advertisers efforts. Although audio is primarily leveraged to for brand awareness, we do see a huge value, leveraging audio for conversion goal campaigns, which we’ve done similarly, on the Xero side. But on our side, what we’re seeing here is similar to connected TV and online video format, advertisers are getting much more out of adding audio into the initial part of the marketing strategy, allowing us and its time really back to what I was saying earlier, being able to speak to people with other formats, being able to quartile retarget them and being able to develop messaging based on assets that they have previously seen, which will allow for a creative messaging strategy to push the audience down the funnel in the right manner that you’re looking for.

Kevin (00:11:37)

And Liban just like to add a couple more to that too, when we’re using audio as a component of our marketing mix. The first is, you mentioned audio being a great brand driver and absolutely agree. One thing that’s always awesome to include is a retargeting component, as well then taking advantage of the people that have shown interest with the audio ad, then using other tools to drive them through the funnel to ultimately purchase. The other piece and you’ll see why in a second that’s really important for Xero is making sure our branding is really present since we don’t have the same visual prompts that we might see in other mediums, it’s important to bring branding into the messaging. So a lot of our audio ads, instead of just saying Xero, which you might think is the number, we would say Xero with an x, so you know exactly what we’re talking about. And then the goal behind that is to really empower someone that’s interested in the message to go and complete maybe like a Google search for Xero afterwards and have like the right information to be able to do that properly.

Liban (00:12:46)

Yeah, I completely agree. Touching on that. The creative the use for audio should not sound like obnoxious promotional radio ads, we’ve become accustomed to rather, the approach with audio ads should be like having a conversation with your audience considered to testing different styles, voices and tones within your creative to learn what resonates most with your listeners.

Matt (00:13:07)

Kevin, from your side, we want to look at this from the B2B SaaS lens. And then for the band, we want to look at this from just general verticals that you’re seeing and ones that you’ve worked on. But our question here is, what verticals are best suited for programmatic audio? And how can each vertical benefit from this format?

Kevin (00:13:30)

Yeah, so before Xero, I also worked in advertising. And I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of different clients and a lot of different verticals, which we use audio across, they’re in industries as varied as like CPG, e-commerce, legal, etc. And none of them on the SaaS side, this is another vertical, where audio is a part of the media mix. From my experience, I don’t think it matters as much which vertical you’re in for targeting, it matters a lot more about who you’re trying to reach and who that decision-maker really is. So, you know, if you’re an auto-company, or a Bread Company, I think both can have success with audio. And the same goes for SaaS. Cause it really just comes down to can you reach that person? And I think the reality is, especially post-2020 like we live in a digital world where decisions are made in a combination of offline and online. And even if you’re someone that’s say like a farmer in agriculture, or you know, maybe you’re a plumber or another small business owner, you’re still going to do things online that are essentially putting your hand up and declaring your interest. So, you know, a farmer might google how to, you know, get a short-term loan, until like their next season of selling their crops comes by to Xero, that could be an opportunity to say, hey, there’s someone here that’s looking to improve their cash flow. Let’s start speaking to them in a way that’s organic and can really offer some help and insight for them to improve their business. So I really think just to sum up, I think any vertical can see success. In audio, it really just comes down to what’s your goals? And what’s your ability to develop creative that fits the medium in a natural was?

Liban (00:15:27)

So, personally, we’ve observed success across audio campaigns here at StackAdapt, across many verticals ranging from B2B to B2C. We touched on earlier that audio can be an asset for driving awareness and engagement as well as conversions. So altogether, this ultimately expands your campaign reach on premium inventory. For this reason, audio can be suited for all verticals. And we prefer to consider the type of audio inventory that we’re reaching based on the unique needs of each target audience. So an example here would be leveraging audience data in order to find individuals wherever they may be engaging with audio programs, or podcasts or music platforms, in order to be able to display the right thing in front of them. Now, I don’t think there’s any specific verticals where I would say, no, you shouldn’t do audio. Where have we seen the success that really comes to mind? A lot of retail, a lot of e-commerce, a lot of travel, B2B really works out well. I do think there is a place for audio across all verticals.

Matt (00:16:32)

Awesome. Now, what I want to ask both of you, as we get to the end of the episode is more kind of present and also forward-looking. So what I want to know is, what kind of trends are we seeing today with audio? And where is audio headed? And what should advertisers really be thinking about when it comes to this format and using it in the future?

Kevin (00:16:59)

Yeah, I think there’s two things I’d like to point out when considering audio. The first is creatively through the rise of the influencer economy, we’re seeing a huge surge and more organic messaging coming out and appealing to audiences. And I think the thing to consider with audio, onto Liban’s point earlier, is you don’t want to try too hard sometimes to sell. You want it to fit the medium, you want it to feel natural, you don’t want someone to feel like you’re screaming at them with like, a sign yelling at you, you know, they want to be drawn to you. And they want you to really pull them in a way that’s enjoyable for them to have that experience. And the second is, we’re really seeing the digitization of traditional advertising accelerate. And I think one of the hottest mediums in advertising last few years has been connected TV. And I think audio is really just likely to follow that exact same path where advertisers are saying, Hey, we have this medium. In the case of CTV, it’s not connected TV, it’s video. And what I want to do is be able to give someone a message in a video format, and make sure that I’m giving that message to the right person at the right time. And audio with programmatic has got the exact same opportunity in front of it. And that’s why you’re seeing so much growth in that market because it’s like, hey, the medium is sound, it’s audio, it’s exclusively a sound on message. Before with radio, I might not have been able to use this, but now I’ve got the tools to make its mark. So I think I see audio really parallelling CTV and growing as we continue to see the digitization of marketing. A couple other trends, I think to note are just more tools coming out for conversion tracking to tie the impact of upper funnel messaging, whether that’s audio or video, or whatever that might be with like the lower funnel acquisition piece. So the other thing I think we’ll see is an increase in the ability to track the impact of audio. And as more tools come online, we’ll get a better understanding of how audio can impact acquisition and can sales deeper down in the funnel. So you know, search lift and brand lift and conversion lift studies are all pieces in there to show if someone hears an audio ad, they’re this much more likely to convert or they’ll convert if this discount deeper the funnel, which I think is really important for businesses to stay really focused on their margins with their marketing. And the last piece I just like to say on audio is during the recession, which we may or may not be already in or coming up on brands usually pull back on their marketing spend. And there’s a lot of studies out there that show the brands that continue to focus on building themselves investing in awareness during the recession, tend to have long-term success. So for businesses that can weather the storm in the short term and continue to invest in brand-building channels like audio, it could be a really effective strategy to set themselves up for the long-term.

Liban (00:20:13)

Yeah, I completely agree with Kevin here. On the other side of the coin, where we’ve seen current trends, let’s talk about the inventory that’s available. Right now we have audio content available across streaming, in terms of podcasts, audiobooks, music, and playlists. One thing that we are seeing is more opportunity for inventory, a lot more opportunity for inventory placements over the last few years. Because audio is rapidly growing. On our side, I was able to find an EMARKETER report from earlier in 2021, that was actually projecting that audio listeners would be projected to increase to 73.1% by 2024, in the USA. So we are seeing a lot of adoption here. But it’s not just because the inventory and the ability to reach them, it’s more so also because of the adoption of things like rapid, or the rapid adoption of things like smart speaker adoption. Having those devices and opportunities to hit them in that medium where it’s meant for that medium is increasing rapidly. So we are seeing a lot more opportunity to hit individuals that we want to, while we’re using the right targeting in order to identify them across these devices, and these inventory types that are making themselves available now.

Kevin (00:21:29)

Liban, I love the note on expanding inventory. And I have a really good example, one of my favourite podcasts is the Raptor Show with, Will Lou, shout out Scotty Barnes. But he’s got a TV show on Sportsnet. And to be honest, I think it’s at like two o’clock Eastern in the afternoon. I don’t really watch it very much. But I love that I can listen to the podcast, that’s everything he covered in the show whenever I want and take it with me. And as an advertiser, if I wanted to go after someone that was interested in sports, that’s a really great signal that would be the right target for me. And something that used to be only available through traditional linear TV has now been cross-posted to an audio means. And now there’s all of that inventory with all of that available data for advertisers to use to make sure that they’re reaching the right person.

Liban (00:22:23)

Absolutely. And there’s the two sides and reaching those individuals maybe you now know, that’s a sports program, you know, the type of audience that’d be listening to it. So you can actually place your ad there knowing you’d be in front of a sports audience. But on the other side of things, we can use audience targeting to identify the people that you want to be speaking to, and they happen to be listening to that, then we can reach them from there in that angle as well.

Matt (00:22:46)

Awesome. So Kevin, and Liban, I’m gonna throw you both a bit of an audible, the end of the episode here. We ask all of our guests this. But in terms of resources that are out there, for anyone who’s, you know, whether they’re interested in programmatic audio or anything programmatic, what are some resources that each of you would recommend someone check out. So it could be a blog, could be a podcast, could be really anything that’s available that can help you stay on top of industry trends.

Kevin (00:23:15)

There are a variety of different ways to always capture information within this medium, and especially in emerging mediums such as audio, and really educate yourself. So that way, you’re armed for success when you’re looking into planning anything within audio or just being able to talk to it. I think a lot of the newsletters that are available right now, especially within our space, help out a lot with highlighting emerging trends such as Marketing Brew. But on the other end of things, any sort of information may be needed, I find a lot of the time is already captured by things like EMARKETER or Statista. If you’re ever looking for any sort of qualification of trends, or qualification of the format in general, outside of that, I’m a big Reddit fan. And there’s a lot of different pages around that. So there’s programmatic there’s ad ops pages, but yeah, just scouring there. It really just is a lot of individuals within this industry that are having conversations. And then from there could be thought starters for you in order to identify something you want to research further.

Liban (00:24:15)

Nice. Yeah, I’m also a big fan of EMARKETER and Statista as well. Three more that I’ll mention. First being MarTech Today, it’s really a resource for all marketing, technology, trends and guides. So everything from choosing the CRM software to emerging trends and advertising to new tools for analytics and conversion tracking and MarTech Today, covers all of that it’s really a great way to stay on top of the leading edge of the changes in marketing technology. The second is Search Engine Journal. I think the origin of this one is like just in search advertising, but obviously there’s so many digital mediums and tools in a marketer’s toolkit. And Search Engine Journal, covers them all, and talks about everything from like social to web to display, audio, video, and back to search again. And then the last is a newsletter I get every day called The Morning Dough. That’s dough, d-o-u-g-h. Spell it out since we’re in an audio medium here. And this is really a list that goes out with all the top stories. Really for like the digital marketing space of the day. Everything from like new product announcements to changing to consumer behaviour to like the rise of like international demand for different social spaces. So yeah, three really good resources for me. MarTech Today, Search Engine Journal, and Morning Dough.

Matt (00:25:51)

Fantastic. Well, Kevin, and Liban this has been a great episode. Thank you so much for joining. For anyone who is listening, we hope that you took a lot away from this and hope you’re feeling a lot more comfortable with programmatic audio as a whole. So, as always, this has been How Agencies Thrive podcast. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Episode Outro (00:26:14)

Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can us at stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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