Consumers are spending more time with audio than ever before. Mobile phones, smart speakers, and connected devices in the car and home offer many ways to listen. These technologies have put digital audio front and center for marketers looking to connect with today’s consumers. Advertisers are also investing more in digital audio than ever before – according to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, digital audio advertising revenues topped $1.2 billion in 2017. As brands and agencies measure and evaluate these opportunities, they are also looking to protect their investments. In today’s digital media advertising marketplace, brand safety is an underpinning theme to almost all conversations.
An important element of Brand Safety for audio advertisers is ensuring that an ad will not be heard in a context that would damage a brand’s reputation. An appealing aspect of digital audio is that it offers many programs and channels that connect with listeners’ moods and mindsets, creating moments and data signals that marketers are looking for. The ability for digital audio to provide that context has been key to its advertising growth. It’s also an important element for consideration in the brand safety conversation, as advertisers look to control the context surrounding their messaging.
Digital audio offers marketers an engaged audience across multiple touch points (devices) in a consumer’s daily journey. From waking up, going to the gym, commuting, at work, at home or in social settings digital audio is present. Time spent listening to digital audio channels is significant, driven in part by the rapid growth of smart speakers. Since listening to digital audio is a mainly mobile experience, its mainly in-app listening experience creates diminished fraud as well. Other key protections for advertisers include server-side ad insertion, non-skippable ads, and invalid content filtering.
Whether its digital music, podcasts or spoken word, marketers are taking notice of audio. As marketers look to digital audio for innovative messaging environments, they continue to emphasize the importance of safe and transparent solutions.
The white paper ‘Digital Audio’s Role in the Brand Safety Conversation: Protecting Marketer’s Investments’ represents the work of a group of members of the IAB Audio Committee. It offers a summary of the advantages that Digital Audio platforms can offer marketers in terms of Brand Safety and related issues so that they can invest with confidence.
