Report: Streaming, podcasts top choice for digital audio advertising

Digital audio advertising is reaching maturity, with 90 per cent of advertisers choosing streaming services and some 75 per cent opting for podcasts, according to the 2020 Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Audio Advertising State of the Nation report.

Now in its fourth year, the report found agencies turn to podcast advertising to help build brand awareness, particularly for podcast advertising, with almost half of agencies using podcasts primarily for branding. However, while brand awareness is the top objective of audio advertising, only one third of ad buyers are tracking this metric and only 25 per cent are tracking sales.

When it comes to streaming and podcasts, reach, frequency and completion are the most common metrics for both, although the report finds agencies are more confident in measuring these metrics for streaming audio, compared to podcasts.

IAB Australia CEO, Gai Le Roy, noted the evolving market in digital audio advertising, developing from experimentation “into a more strategically driven brand-building approach to digital audio advertising, reflecting the growing consumer consumption of audio formats, particularly podcasting”.   

The report also finds call to action spots are most popular format of streaming audio and have increased in usage strongly year-on-year, while programmatic audio advertising space is attractive to harness data and targeting and, in a challenging ad market, price is increasingly playing a part in choice of advertising.

In terms of creative development, the IAB report finds it’s one of audio advertising’s greatest strengths, yet also the greatest challenge. The ease and speed of audio creative development has proven to be a great attraction for agencies; however only 17 per cent of media agencies are regularly tailoring their creative to suit different audio environments. The report noted creative is the most important part of a successful campaign achieving impact.

IAB Audio Council co-chair, Richard Palmer, said the report shows the market is embracing the branding potential of the different audio formats, but needs to go further in developing unique creative for the various digital audio formats.  

“Over the next twelve months we anticipate the industry will come to understand the need to move from repurposing existing ads and instead look to produce creative campaigns tailored to suit the environment in which it appears,” he said.

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