Pandora To Seek Bigger Share of Local Ad Sales
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Pandora will push to sell more local ads next year, working with partners in various markets who already have local sales teams, Brian Mikalis, vice president of performance sales for the online music streamer, told a BIA/Kelsey conference Wednesday. “We're aggressively talking to companies that do have feet on the street to allow them to include Pandora as part of their” local ad network, he said. “It’s a new strategy and we've done some testing in the last three to four months, but in 2011 you'll see a lot more.”
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Pandora is already gaining traction with national advertisers because it can so finely target its audiences, Mikalis said. For instance, it can deliver a beer company’s ads only to listeners old enough to buy the product, he said. “We can guarantee you that’s the only audience you're going to reach.” The company can give advertisers a more precise sense of who actually heard or saw their ad, he said. “When we tell them how many impressions ran, it’s the exact amount of impressions,” while terrestrial radio stations just have to “guess,” he said.
Some of the ad money Pandora has attracted so far would have otherwise been spent on buying traditional radio spots, although much of it is coming from marketers’ digital ad budgets, said Cheryl Locanegro, senior vice president of ad sales. “People move their money around” when trying to reach a target audience, she said. “It does come out of local radio … it also comes out of digital.” As Pandora’s audiences grow within local markets, it has more success signing local advertisers, said Mikalis. “Once we have that reach in a market, we have the ability to go to talk to advertisers and speak their language.” In some markets such as San Francisco and Seattle, Pandora has more listeners than any radio station’s online stream, Locanegro said.
Beyond demographic information, Pandora can tap other sources of information about its listeners on behalf of marketers, Locanegro said. “We know the music they're listening to, the mood they're in and the device they're listening on.” Food advertisers can target ads to devices typically found in the kitchen, she said. Ads can dynamically change depending on the time of day, or proximity to an upcoming event, she said. Pandora has run ads for movie openings that automatically switch over from “Coming Soon” to “Coming Friday” as opening day approaches, she said.
Pandora isn’t concerned about the bandwidth caps of mobile broadband providers, Locanegro said. “Pandora, as a broadband hog, is not really that fat.” When Pandora listeners do bump up against mobile broadband usage caps, it’s usually as a result of the video they stream to their mobile devices, Mikalis said. “Pandora listening is not the thing that is going to get them to the cap.” Mikalis said that Pandora is also working to decrease the amount of bandwidth its music streams consume.