The Importance of Digital Audio Advertising

A recent IAB event looked at the importance of digital audio advertising touching on the latest Audio Advertising State of the Nation research. Here we review some key highlights of that conference looking at the rise and rise of digital audio.

• The latest trends seen across the streaming audio and podcasts space
• Learnings and insights from brands about digital audio as a medium
• Explore audio dynamic creative
• How best to optimise audio media investment.

Digital Audio Market Trends

The summit kicked off with a recap and analysis of the current digital audio market trends. The State of the Nation Report found that despite the looming economic uncertainty, the majority of agencies are looking to increase their expenditure across digital audio over the next 12 months. In fact, in 2023, around 75% of agencies have highlighted digital audio advertising as a regular and substantial part of their planning activity as a result of growth in this channel. According to the latest data, 78% of Australians listen to digital audio every month and 71% every week, which has prompted increasing interest from agencies in this space. 74% of agencies stated that they intend to increase investment in streaming audio while 81% intend to increase investment in podcast advertising.

Planning and Buying Digital Audio Advertising

Another trend highlighted the growing popularity of planning and buying digital audio (streaming or podcasts) combined with other types of digital advertising. An exponential growth in purchase intent was observed for digital video advertising combined with digital audio, which increased from 59% in 2022 to 80% in 2023. Additionally, agencies are increasingly considering programmatic buying methods which, despite historically increasing steadily YoY, increased significantly in 2023 from 64% in 2022 to 82%.

The study has also found that digital audio continues to be viewed as the most effective way to increase customer engagement and deliver brand-building objectives. Podcasts are being toted as a highly effective tool to gain access to previously hard-to-reach audiences while streaming music and radio are essential to extend the reach of broadcast radio.

Dynamic Digital Audio Advertising Creative

The conference also touched on the changing usage of audio creative formats, particularly the pros and perceived cons of using dynamic audio creative. Dynamic audio creative is hyper-personalized messaging that changes and adapts based on triggers such as weather conditions, location, time, events (etc) unique to each user. Around 44% of respondents have used Dynamic Audio Creative and those that haven’t claim their main reason for not is that it either is not suited to the campaign strategy, they have limited creative resources or they are unfamiliar with the functionalities of this format. In terms of podcast creative formats, host-read podcasts and recorded radio spots remain the most used while there is a growing appetite to try branded podcasts and brand-supplied podcasts.

Measure and Optimise Digital Audio Advertising

Lastly, the conference showcased the metrics advertisers and agencies value when assessing the effectiveness of a digital audio campaign. For streaming audio and podcasts; Completion, Reach, Frequency, and Brand impact metrics were the main focus across both creative formats. In particular, agencies have increased the usage of completion and brand impact metrics with reach extension being added as a key metric from the survey responses for the first time.

Whilst the digital audio space looks to be making waves in 2023, the lack of measurement and standardised metrics is noted as a key issue preventing all audio advertising formats from garnering larger budgets in the planning stages. Brands and advertisers are calling for more focus on measuring ad effectiveness outside of merely reach and engagement and by the sounds of things, we can expect to start seeing more robust and standardised reporting across this space throughout 2023.

Reach out to your ADMATICian today for more information about Digital Audio Advertising.

The State of the Nation Report was conducted by Hoop Research throughout December 2022 and January 2023 and collected data from nearly 250 survey responses.