Saavn announced the launch of programmatic audio advertising in India, the newest addition to Saavn’s extensive suite of advertising technology offerings. This groundbreaking new platform, created in partnership with AdsWizz, automates the real-time buying, targeting, optimization, and reporting of audio ad inventory into a few simple steps. Major brands across India, including Saavn’s current base of over 250 advertisers, can now use relevant data to significantly simplify the process to access and communicate with Saavn’s 20 million unique listeners.
Audio, especially on mobile devices, is a highly personal experience and is a form of personal expression and mood. With the increase of demanding lifestyles, audio is becoming an intrinsic part of this generation’s media consumption. Earlier while television and other visual mediums were the trigger points for consumers, we are now seeing a shift towards passive entertainment consumption. Audio is the only true companion medium that can traverse our entire day; unlike visual mediums in the online and offline world, audio does not require peoples’ fully focused attention to make a lasting impact. Digital audio is considered a premium because of the passion-centric brand safe environment it’s delivered in as well as the enormous amounts of data its consumption produces. Each stream is associated with a time-of-day, location, device brand/model, mobile operator, genre, age, gender, and several other factors. Audio is fundamentally a medium about “top of the funnel” branding instead of clicks and conversions reserved for demand fulfillment media like Google search ads.
“Digital audio advertising represents one of the largest untapped opportunities for brands to generate new demand and grow their businesses,” said Gaurav Kaushik, VP Advertising Platform at Saavn. “We had over 1.8 billion real ad impressions in Q4 and each one of them is unmatched in terms of sophisticated targeting capabilities and helping deliver insights for brands. Our programmatic solution can simplify the otherwise complex process of planning, executing and reporting dynamic digital audio campaign on mobile devices.”
Global digital audio solutions provider AdsWizz, Omnicom Media Group, and Saavn created the first private marketplace for major brands. Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the first brand advertiser in India to run digital audio buys programmatically on Saavn.
“The future of media buying is programmatic because it helps us focus our time, energy and resources on creativity and messaging for people who will find our products most useful. Audio ads literally allow us to speak with our target customers in a high engagement environment on Saavn,” said Amit Singla, Head of Digital Marketing at HP India. “The reduction in time to set up campaigns and get real-time reports is an added benefit, especially in an increasingly media fragmented world.”
Omnicom Media Group and their renowned clients plan to access Saavn’s digital audio advertising inventory. In order to streamline operations, Omnicom’s clients are able to purchase audio inventory without wasting time in a lengthy direct sales process, protracted negotiation, and tedious campaign setup.
“We are pleased to be the first agency to bring programmatic audio to India, and the prospect of quickly scaling a mobile medium with 100% share-of-voice for brands is beyond exciting,” said Anil Pandit, Associate Vice President at Omnicom Media Group. “While digital audio advertising is a compelling way to change consumer mindsets, its delivery in a closed system also eliminates nagging issues like fraud, viewability and ad blocking in digital advertising.”