The modern media marketplace is a marvel – with the tap of your smartphone you can listen to every song ever recorded by your favorite artists, livestream events from half a world away, and listen to your favorite podcasts wherever you are. Fan choice has defined the modern media landscape and platforms have delivered, creating a vibrant and robust marketplace for music, podcasts and other content.
That same fan choice that has driven the digital media revolution has also illuminated an important tension shaping the modern media market: namely, the desire across a broad range of stakeholders – listeners, publishers, advertisers – for ever-more personalization in content, as well as appropriate concerns about online privacy and people’s ability to assert control over their own digital footprints. While traditional identifiers, such as cookies, are being phased out, audio content and listener demand only continue to grow, making good ad delivery that much more difficult. So it’s an important time to talk about what the future of audio advertising looks like.
Enter AdsWizz AudioID™, our recently introduced consumer-first, science-driven listener solution that will allow for greater insights into what listeners want and experience. AudioID will allow us to deliver advertisements using an innovative system that creates anonymized AudioIDs from listener signals consumers have consented to in a way that supports the future of identity safety. This way, we can connect listeners and advertisers based on relevant listening behavior, rather than who is listening.
“We are entering a new era of identity—both in culture and in technology—that defines us not by who we are on paper or the cookies we leave behind, but by our interests and passions. AudioID is a consumer-first, privacy-conscious infrastructure that is expected to deliver our audiences the best experiences,” said Chris Record, Senior Vice President and Head of Ad Product, Technology & Operations at SXM Media & AdsWizz.
For customers, AudioID will address some of the biggest complaints we hear from listeners: they end up hearing the same ads repeatedly and too often ads have nothing to do with their interests. After the introduction of AudioID, listeners are expected to experience more relevant and fewer repeated ads, as well as more personalization across SiriusXM’s owned-and-operated properties, including Pandora and Stitcher. For advertisers, the benefit is also clear: it allows for better control over their advertising campaigns, helping them to better measure and understand the audiences they want to reach.
There’s also a significant benefit to creators and publishers, who win when listeners spend more time listening to the content they create. Improving the ability to deliver the content that listeners want means they are happier listeners. It also helps surface opportunities advertisers may not have previously considered. While size and reach of audience are always key drivers, AudioID can show that perhaps a smaller podcast is where an advertiser’s audience really engages – and where they should focus their spend.
AudioID’s U.S. launch offering will live within the walls of SXM Media and our products across SiriusXM, Pandora and Stitcher. But as we all navigate this changing landscape, we will look to work with other like-minded parties to create better data that helps strengthen and define a new privacy-centric identity framework for the audio ecosystem at large, one that centers around consumption, content, and preference data versus personal consumer signals.
At SiriusXM, we believe AudioID will have significant benefits across the audio entertainment industry. It is expected to allow us to meet listeners where they are, prioritizing privacy and identity safety while creating a better, more relevant experience that allows all stakeholders to truly understand what consumers want.