Spotify is expanding its ad marketplace, Spotify Audience Network, to Australia as the audio platform works on monetising its investment in podcasting.
Spotify Audience Network, which launched in the US earlier this year, allows brands to connect with listeners across content on and off Spotify, including Spotify Originals and Exclusives, as well as content from third-party Megaphone publishers.
The marketplace is the first time advertisers can buy according to audience rather than podcast title, giving buyers access to audience-based targeting tools including demographic targeting, geographic targeting, and audience segment targeting.
Within three months of launching in the US, Spotify says that nearly 60% of its US podcast advertiser base is advertising with the Audience Network.
Australia and New Zealand regional head of ad sales Peter Manten is already seeing strong interest from local advertisers across the major categories, including finance, automotive, and FMCG.
“We've signed up a number of advertisers already and the demand across all categories, genres, has been significant,” Manten tells AdNews.
“They [advertisers] can truly buy audience segment targeting at scale across our network now, both on and off platform and both across free and premium."
Peter Manten
To keep up with the growing podcast audience, Spotify has almost quadrupled the number of podcasts on the platform in just over a year to 2.6 million today, and based on Q4 2020 numbers, 25% of Spotify’s global total monthly active users engaged with podcast content, up from 22% the quarter prior.
“The market has done a really good job, so I think we're going to be floating and rising with the tide,” Manten says.
“We’re now just giving advertisers a whole new way to buy podcast advertising. So I definitely think not only will it be incremental upsell to existing music advertisers, but it gives us an opportunity to go after new categories of brands.”
Spotify is confident the new marketplace will help it monetise podcasts, citing a recent Advertiser Perceptions report which asked more than 200 podcast advertisers which buying method works best for achieving their podcast campaign KPIs and found that the top two responses were “by audience segment” and “across a podcast network”.
“Spotify Audience Network is a culmination of a lot of work that we've been doing, from the acquisition of Megaphone to the development and then expansion of Ad Studio,” Manten says.
“We’re taking the learnings that we have from audio and now applying it to the podcast space. It’s just absolutely a new layer to advertising.”
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