Digital audio: new opportunities to interact with your targets

The penetration rate of digital audio in people’s daily lives has increased in recent months with the advent of lockdown. It opens up new growth prospects for advertisers. How do you position yourself in this buoyant and profitable niche?

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a change in consumer habits and routines.  With digital audio, brands have a unique way of connecting with their audience in a more positive and relevant way. The share of digital audio increased by 11% during this period.

With an average of 2 hours 15 minutes of listening per day, one thing is certain: digital audio has now become firmly established in our daily lives, in a lasting way, thanks in particular to the boom in connected speakers. Last year, 35% of households already owned at least one smart speaker. This will be 75% by 2025.

Publishers and advertisers: a win-win relationship

Moving towards digital audio now represents a potential source of growth for publishers in terms of monetisation. Precise targeting offers them an ideal solution for creating a seamless listening experience for users.

The other big winners are advertisers. They are finding a way here of reaching more specific targets, those often inaccessible through traditional channels, including analogue radio. Indeed, digital audio allows them to create more personalised, impactful campaigns.

The targeting takes many forms:

• The socio-demographic profile, offering an opportunity to contextualise the spoken word;
• Precise localisation;
• Behaviour (affinity, typical profiles, site retargeting);
• DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimisation), for example, enabling adverts to be triggered according to the weather or epidemic peaks.

Three measured benefits:

• Conversion rate: + 4.43%
• Brand Recognition: + 200%
• Ad recall: + 150%

Targeting is key to ensuring the relevance of the message, increasing responsiveness and maximising the return on advertising investment.

The new players in digital audio

There are now three main categories of player in the digital audio field.

Simulcasters

These are traditional broadcasters or publishers who distribute their linear programming via the Internet. In this case, the brand remains identical, as does the programme in question.

Pure Players

These are extensions to existing brands and other spin-off entities launched by traditional distributors. The difference is that this is about purely digital brands, new players launched by established publishers.

Podcasters

They produce content to be listened to as a podcast. There are two types of format under this name that differ strongly from each other.

Firstly, there is replay. That is to say, content re-published by publishers: sequences or programmes broadcast by terrestrial means and then published online for on-demand consumption.

Secondly, there is native podcasting. That is, content designed, produced and intended to be exclusively in a podcast format, not broadcast over the air or in a stream.

Prospects for the future

Digital audio is the beginning of an ongoing revolution in the consumption of audio programming. Several major advances have already been made and will help to strengthen both interactivity and the links between the Internet user and audio content providers:

• Immersive audio technology: known as 3D or binaural sound. This is a three-dimensional sound format. The idea is to reproduce sound in conventional headphones as it is heard naturally, through spatialisation, in the style of films, series and video games.
•  Intelligent listening technology: capable of adapting the content to the listening conditions (place, time, location, weather) and the activity taking place (work, sport, public transport, traffic).
• Intelligent technological integration: in addition to connected cars, other everyday objects will also follow the evolution of permanent connectivity, from the fridge to mirrors.