Historically, audio advertising hasn’t kept pace with online advertising. Publishers often had to sell audio ads directly and advertisers repurposed video ads into digital audio ads format. This resulted in poor listening experiences and limited revenue generation.
As people listen to more music streaming services, digital radio, podcasts, and even text-to-speech news articles, more inventory is becoming available. This helps advertisers reach their users with audio ads and gives publishers an opportunity to grow their revenue through new formats.
Bringing programmatic audio into the digital media mix
MediaMarkt, Europe's largest consumer electronics retailer used traditional audio in their media mix alongside display and video formats but were eager to find ways to consolidate their media and test the performance of programmatic audio.
Until now, very few publishers offered the option to buy programmatic audio through a guaranteed deal. Grupo Prisa historically used Google Ad Manager for display and video campaigns, with all their audio inventory managed directly by the sales teams. This resulted in operational overheads, especially for reporting and campaign troubleshooting.
Grupo Prisa, MediaMarkt and Google set out to test the effectiveness of programmatic audio ads in the media mix.
The benefits of programmatic advertising
MediaMarkt was eager to test digital audio ads alongside their existing display and video campaigns. Buying audio programmatically meant they were able to consolidate their media and effectively reach their customers in more innovative ways. They set up programmatic audio in Display & Video 360 to access the most premium audio inventory while benefiting from the advantages that come with programmatic, like the use of data, audiences, less troubleshooting and media consolidation.
Grupo Prisa consolidated their campaign and brought their digital audio offering alongside their display and video formats on a single ad server. This simplified their campaign setup and report management processes by using standardized workflows without the need for in-house audio specialists.
Improved performance and lower costs
MediaMarkt’s in-house programmatic team has been working with Google Marketing Platform technology for several years, they have used guaranteed deals for display and visual campaigns but this was the first time with Prisa programmatic audio. The solution consolidated their traditional standby media strategy in the programmatic environment, helping to improve campaign performance and lower cost.
On the publisher side, Grupo Prisa was pleased with the opportunity to sell an audio guaranteed deal with a reliable forecast. Audio is more complex than other ad formats in the programmatic environment, so being able to serve the contracted impressions with uniform pacing was a success. Having a single ad serving solution, Grupo Prisa can unlock further valuable audio inventory to programmatic demand across all demand channels.
Compared with a direct audio campaign with similar characteristics such as budget and duration, the programmatic audio campaign achieved incredible results:
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113% increase in CTR
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45% decrease in the CPC of the campaign
- 125% increase in traffic generated from the campaign