Voice Ads ready for prime time

Recent articles from Pandora and AdWeek highlight the success of the first phase of Voice Ad roll out on Pandora. In June 2020 Pandora launched Voice Ads on its platform using Instreamatics Voice Ad ai technology and has been scaling up the new format in the period since while analyzing the impact of voice ads on audience and advertisers. The results are overwhelming positive and herald in a new era for brand marketing.

As we see clicking, tapping, and swiping replaced by speech — the most natural way for us to communicate and one where technology adapts to human behaviour rather than the other way around. Talking with a brand is a lean-in and focused experience that respects the consumer giving them the choice of how they wish to interact. With millions of people using voice as part of their daily lives, brands now have a way to directly interact with their audience and engage in realtime interactions.

Since launching, Pandora has worked with leading brands such as KFC, Xfinity, Unilever, The Home Depot, Volvo, Acura and more to better understand the Brand Conversational experience focusing on listener sentiment, audience insights, engagement, brand recall and varied target actions.

AdWeek highlight one of the unique features of Voice Ads, “Say-Through-Rate” STR which measures engagement with a voice-ad and the audio equivalent of a click-through rate (CTR) which gives advertisers “the ability to chat with their consumers and gain a real-time understanding of how engaging their content is.” At Instreamatic across multiple campaigns in different markets, we have seen STR in the range of 5–17% a 10–20 X increase over digital banner CTR’s and providing the advantage of zero accidental or fraudulent clicks.

Pandora report the following results from their initial campaigns:

• Voice ads had up to 10-times higher STRs than CTRs
• 27% higher purchase intent scores compared to audio ad benchmarks
• 7.6 points higher ad recall over control

These results are consistent with Instreamatic findings across other publishers and campaigns and reflect the research jointly published with Mindshare at the end of last year on audience sentiment towards Voice Ads.

Another great takeaway from Pandora’s findings is that everyone talks back, young and older alike, confirming that the technology is not just for early adopters but is a comfortable means of interaction for a mass audience, voice users are 43% and 36% more likely to be moms and dads, respectively, of small children, great news for advertisers looking to talk with people across the age spectrum.

Audio is exploding in all areas from voice assistants to audio social networks (clubhouse) and new content forms (podcasts, stationhead etc) and as this market booms, Brands have found a way to not only make themselves heard but also to listen to what their customers have to say — via Voice Ads. The creative possibilities for this technology are still nascent and we look forward to seeing all brands adopting the format as they discover the unique benefits of the format.