For better audio campaigns, listen to the market

Audio’s primacy as the marketing channel to connect with people is growing, writes Veritonic’s Scott Klass, and Veritonic Competitive Intelligence can help marketers navigate this space

Think of the last time you bought something substantial, say, a new mattress. If you’re like most people these days, in addition to investigating certain features and such to help you make a decision, you looked to guidance from the market - you read reviews (from both people and ‘experts’). You looked for five stars, a large volume of feedback (with an emphasis on the most recent), trends and stats on which mattresses are most popular, anecdotes about the mattress things that matter to you, and so on. 

A new bed is obviously not only an expensive purchase - it’s a meaningful one. Will it make a good ‘home desk’ in our current, bizarre reality? Will you have to re-engage with a chiropractor in three years? With that, making your decision based on quantifiable insight on what’s happening in the mattress market is just responsible buying. In modern times, it’s a required checklist item.

Buying a bed v. buying a ton of media

What’s at stake when you launch a huge consumer ad campaign? While many might argue that more diligence should go into choosing a mattress, if you're a marketer, you likely disagree. It goes without saying that if your campaign bombs, and it comes out that you launched it without paying attention to what's happening in the market ...yeah, you’re declining that Zoom meeting. In that scenario, the repercussions of less-informed choices are bigger than wasted budget alone: losing market share, tainting an otherwise popular brand - they’re all on the table.

So, like all responsible buyers, you make sure you have clear intelligence before you make a move - where others like you are spending and why; which channels, creative elements and more are working best for them; how new activity is changing things, and more. 

It matters more in audio marketing

If you’ve had a chance to read news beyond the pandemic and the election, here are some items you may have seen recently:

• Omnicom is doing a $20m upfront buy on Spotify podcasts

• NBCU is running audio-only interstitials before many of its TV ads

• By 2028, voice assistants are projected to be in 90% of new vehicles sold globally

• 53% of people who hear a smart speaker ad buy the product

The list goes on to continually prove the point: Audio’s primacy as the marketing channel to connect with people - from podcasts to voice-activated ads to sonic branding - is only growing. Like all responsible marketers in the 21st century, you need to focus on where the eardrums are.

Veritonic Competitive Intelligence makes it easy and effective

So you need clear insight into the landscape to make more responsible decisions about audio marketing, the most critical space right now. Veritonic Competitive Intelligence brings that insight. But its value goes even further.

Let’s say you’re the mattress company marketer. You know buying podcast inventory is probably a smart move, so you validate it with competitive intelligence data and see what other mattress companies are doing in podcasts. But to glean campaign effectiveness more completely - and efficiently - you recognise that you also need:

• A holistic view of the audio landscape, like a sense of how other mattress companies are marketing on other channels.  Is your competition also investing in streaming services, radio, etc., and which of those channels is working best for them?

• An easy way to know when new competitor ads launch and how they’re influencing the market

• Fast results

• A common rating system for understanding success   

Veritonic Competitive Intelligence brings it all together on one platform - to not only provide the insight and marry it to other key metrics like creative effectiveness, but to make it easy to understand and act on all of it.  

To get a walkthrough of Veritonic Competitive Intelligence, click here.