Pandora’s New Visual Ad Experience: Now For All Mobile Advertisers

It’s true: the advertising industry has been slow to catch up with today’s mobile technology and its users. That’s why Pandora has spent the last six months working on some exciting advancements to our mobile visual ad offering.

Pandora’s new Visual Ad Experience was originally announced last June and will be available to all advertisers starting January 19. Since launch we’ve been testing in beta with a small subset of our listener base and have seen strong results. This suite of redesigned mobile ad units has led to significant movement across many of the KPIs marketers care most about, such as time spent, brand favorability, intent to purchase and more.

Inspired by these initial outcomes, we are thrilled to unlock these new product offerings to all of our advertising partners in the coming weeks!

We recognized an unmet need in the industry for mobile solutions that take advantage of the full mobile screen real estate, while offering users a better experience. That’s why our Visual Ad Experience introduces two new product offerings: Muted Video and Responsive Mobile Display, along with a product feature enhancement to Mobile 300x250.

Here are the most notable changes to Pandora’s existing visual offering:

1. Mobile Creative Placement: No longer will mobile ad creative cover up a user’s content. New mobile display artwork will appear in the same container that houses the album cover art of the song that’s playing.

2. A Better Way to Dismiss: We are introducing swipe-to-dismiss functionality to replace the “X” close button that appeared in the corner of an ad. This simple adjustment has already proven to reduce accidental clicks.

3. Responsive Design: Modern mobile ad creative must be responsive to varying mobile screen sizes, so we’ve introduced responsive design and a 1:1 aspect ratio, so the ad will automatically adjust to the size of a listener’s phone while using standard industry specs.

4. Muted Video: A new attention-winning ad product that allows your video to play in a responsive display unit, with the option to engage and capture a listener’s full attention with sound.

5. In-App Landing Pages: Advertisers can now take advantage of a more native landing page within the Pandora app to offer customized information to their audience. The page also offers a new share functionality.

At the onset of our beta, we set out to improve mobile click quality—and we did just that! On average, our beta partners saw up to a 50% increase in time spent with Responsive Mobile Display and Mobile 300x250, as well as increased click quality, evidenced by decreased bounce rates and increased conversions. Additionally, the new native, mobile landing pages saw a 7% increase in time spent indicating high engagement.

We also saw double digit lifts in brand favorability, awareness and message resonance. And because music drives positive brand association, advertisers using the new Muted Video solution saw a 32% increase in listeners spending at least five seconds with the video.

Our beta partners included Denny’s, Express, Google, the Lexus Dealer Association, SimpliSafe, Ascent Protein and others. Nico Johnson, Growth Specialist at SimpliSafe, had this to say about his experience:

“We’re always looking for new ways to drive ROI. We saw an increase in on-site engagement from the new ad products, which means that Pandora is now sending us higher quality traffic and getting us more conversions than before.” In addition to delivering strong results for brands, these new ads have resonated with users too. In a recent survey of Pandora listeners, we found that:¹

• 3 in 4 said they prefer the new ad experience
• 74% were more likely to engage with the new ad units
• 2 in 3 preferred swiping left to dismiss an ad
• 50%+ of our listeners (across all demos) gave these new ad formats a strong favorability score.

  We’re committed to making mobile impressions count for brands and to providing a positive, less obtrusive experience for our listeners. We believe in the mantra, “what is good for the listener, is good for the advertiser” because better user experiences translate to higher quality engagement for brands. In today’s cluttered mobile advertising landscape, it is more important than ever to leverage solutions that emphasize high quality clicks and drive results among engagement metrics.

To learn more about Pandora’s Visual Ad Experience, CLICK HERE

If you’re interested in integrating the new Visual Ad Experience into your next Pandora campaign, get in touch with your sales rep or contact us

CLICK HERE

^{Source: 1 Pandora Soundboard VAE Survey, Oct 2016}