Southern Cross Austereo launches new digital audio advertising initiatives

Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) has launched two new digital audio advertising initiatives to help brands find and engage audiences. The two new options are mood targeting and interactive shakeable audio ads through instream. 

These new initiatives utilise first-party data and insights from SCA and SoundCloud to identify listeners’ key habits and interests, and target them during particular mood-states and activities. At time of launch, available mood-states includes chill out, wanderlust, work out, night out and dinner party.

SCA national head of sales, Nikki Rooke, said mood targeting product enables advertisers to target with contextual relevance as well as apply best practice creative scenarios to each. 

“The Studio at SCA and SoundVibes’ creative treatment ensures messaging is on point for the listening occasion and able to deliver optimum attention and engagement,” said Rooke.

In addition to the new audience targeting solution, SCA is also making available interactive audio ads with shakable and voice-activated listener responses. The ‘ShakeMe’ mobile-only format enables a listener to shake their phone or use a voice command to respond to a call to action such as ‘shake your phone’ and open a website, download a voucher or call.

SCA said mood targeting is available across InStream, SoundCloud and catch-up radio, and the ShakeMe function is available on iOS and Android through InStream, while voice-activation is in beta looking to launch later in the year.

SCA is looking to innovations like these to offer brands new and inventive ways to incorporate digital audio into campaigns, according to SCA head of digital commercial, Jonathan Mandel. 

“ShakeMe audio ads provide an all-new way for brands to engage with our audience and drive a call to action by shaking their phone when the ad plays. To date, our test advertisers have seen interaction rates more than 10 times a typical click through rate,” said Mandel.

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