Audio On in association with ad:tech | The Present & Future of Audience Marketing

Summary — In today’s world, accelerated by the pandemic — consumers are quickly integrating digital audio into their lives and at JioSaavn, we believe in riding the tide of change. We’re constantly improving the ad experience for our listeners while ensuring maximum impact for brands that advertise with us. The speakers at the AudioOn webinar discussed Audience Marketing, a new age concept that allows brands to go beyond the traditional methods of targeting via demographics to find the right customer. Audience Marketing uses first and third-party data that gathers the listeners’ behavior, habits & moods to target consumers who were disregarded due to demographic targeting. Read on to understand what industry experts have to say!

With the advancement of technology in digital audio, gathering information about listeners has been incredibly insightful. Understanding their likes, dislikes, habits, and even understanding the kind of mood they’re in has been very lucrative for advertisers looking to target their audience beyond the standard Age, Gender, & Location filters. The AudioOn webinar series in association with ad:tech threw light upon just that. How do you reach an audience that doesn’t fit into the ASL filter? Enter Audience Marketing. The AudioOn webinar strived to understand the current state of Audience Marketing & how it would evolve in the future.

The webinar began with Virginia Sharma giving the attendees context about Audience Marketing and then invited Gulshan Verma, CEO — JioAds for an informative fireside chat. Next was a panel discussion moderated by Gursimran Singh, Head of Brand Strategy and Creative Solutions — JioSaavn, the panelists included industry representatives like Tejinder Gill, General Manager — The Trade Desk, Gaurav Tiwari, Co-Founder — Paytunes, Premjit Sodhi, Chief Strategy Officer — Wavemaker & Suhani Arora, Director, Brand Solutions Marketing — JioSaavn. They discussed the various ways brands could capitalize on the present & future of audience marketing.

Introducing Audience Marketing

The AudioOn webinar kicked off with Virginia Sharma educating listeners about Audience Marketing. Audience Marketing is a revolutionary concept that considers the Behavior, Moments, and Mindsets of people throughout all demographic cohorts and targets them according to those characteristics, in both message and delivery, thus improving ROAS.

Using data in Audience Marketing

Data is the new gold for a reason and if brands don’t use it to its maximum potential, they’re missing out. The wealth of user insights about the campaign or the product itself is invaluable and critical to tweaking campaigns for maximum success.

In the chat with Virginia Sharma — VP, Brand Solutions — JioSaavn & Gulshan Verma, CEO — JioAds spoke about the Jio Ad platform along with the benefits of Jio Cohorts.

Jio Cohorts can use data from the Jio network, having almost half a billion users across platforms to get deep insights into the lives of users. This allows the division of listeners into audiences and even sub audiences to target the ideal customer by using Audience Marketing.

A protip from Gulshan Verma, said — “It’s not just about the audience but also about the creativity in the message & the integration of the campaign.”

He also mentioned that, while getting the right audience may seem easy with all the technological help available, brands shouldn’t forget about the messaging & the delivery of the ad to get maximum ROI.

With this final thought, the panelists were invited to the table to discuss the evolving nature of Audience Marketing. The highlights of the conversation comprised of the following insights:

1. Premjit Sodhi iterated — “Decode the mindset of the consumer.” By understanding the mood, preferences, and activities the listener enjoys doing is key to building the right cohorts for each type of consumer.
2. Don’t overdo personalization — create immersive experiences and content which a consumer values. Brands can’t look at a consumer only with the perspective of reach, they have to decide what to do with them to keep them engaged.
3. First-party data will be increasingly important going forward. The goal should be to have a 1–1 relationship with your audience and to group them into categories to create invaluable cohorts.
4. Hereafter, Gaurav Tiwari also communicated that there needed to be more focus on LTR (Listen Through Rate) & Completion rates along with more new-age performance metrics rather than only Measuring CTR & Reach.
5. Tejinder Gill stressed that — “It’s not only about Audio, Video, or Display Ad formats. It’s also about optimizing the best mix for your audience.” Audience Marketing aptly allows marketers to catch the consumers at the right time and engage with them with appropriate messaging making it extremely useful for all brand communication in the future.

In Conclusion

Gursimran Singh, at the end of the discussion, left listeners with the 3 A’s in Digital Audio Advertising — Adaptability, Accountability & Audience centricity. He recapitulated that these concepts would be the guiding principles to Audience marketing going forward. The common consensus among all panelists was also that brands must leverage first and third-party data to deliver hyper-personalized & contextual ads for the highest ROI. Suhani Arora also highlighted & others agreed — that while ASL was a dated concept, it definitely wasn’t irrelevant. The future of ads lay in seamlessly integrating ads into listeners’ daily routines by layering psychographic data on top of the standard Age, Geography & Gender to yield great results!

For more details, reach out to us at advertising@jiosaavn.com.