Earlier this year, dog biscuit brand Milk-Bone developed a campaign in partnership with Amazon Ads. It produced more than 20 million impressions and yielded a brand discovery rate of 31% among customers who asked Alexa to add Milk-Bone products to their cart.
Despite the strong results generated by voice-activated ads, the number of media companies exploring the tech remains limited.
Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming platform, has chosen to sidestep the use of voice interaction with the introduction of its own flagship interactive audio ad product, CTA Cards, which it released at the beginning of 2022.
“We’re very focused on continuing to observe what the user behavior is in terms of their proliferation between interview and passive engagement because we know that we have been, and always will be, an audio-first platform. We want to continue, first and foremost, to demonstrate and prove the value of what audio interactivity is for advertisers,” explained Chloe Wix, head of monetization product marketing at Spotify.
Since its launch, Spotify’s interactive ad product has been used for campaigns by Unilever, Brooklinen and Ulta Beauty.
A slow start, but positivity remains
Simon Dunlop spotted the potential of interactive audio ads when he recognized the low CPMs around audio as well as the lack of calls to action, targeting and measurement. He and his team created Instreamatic a few years ago. But it was slow to take hold because of an independent, rather than a unified, approach taken by audio platforms.
“An advertiser doesn’t just want to buy one slice of an audience; they want to be able to have a national campaign, which is going to be across irrespective of all of these publishers,” Dunlop says.
Instreamatic is now focusing on developing AI-powered and contextual audio ads.
“It’s been annoying that you can be at the forefront of the technology and the market just isn’t there yet. And as a startup, the only thing you can do—you can’t hang out and wait for the market to fill in—you have to pivot,” said Dunlop.
While the speed of adoption by advertisers may be slower than expected, there appears to remain positivity around the future of voice-comm as technology evolves.
