Gearing up for what’s expected to be an increasingly audio future, Innovid has added audio ad-serving to its advertising suite. The offering will enable marketers to effectively measure their digital audio media investment together with TV, video, display and social.
Already utilized by over a dozen clients including Nationwide, Innovid’s new capabilities will give marketers insight on audio ad impressions and clicks to quartiles and completes for a holistic view of their media mix.
Innovid’s latest move comes as nearly 51 percent of US adults’ total audio time will be spent listening via digital services this year, according to eMarketer. This figure marks the first time digital audio surpasses traditional radio in time spent, reports the firm.
That’s after digital audio accounted for 11 percent of total media time per day for US adults last year and will account for 11.7 percent in 2021. Hence the reason eMarketer revised its 2020 estimate from 1 percent decline in the time US adults spent with digital audio to 8.3 percent growth, for a total of 1 hour, 29 minutes per day.
The resilience of digital audio has ignited a race among social media titans to pump out audio-only features users are already flocking to on standalone social audio apps such as Discord and Clubhouse. If they make them, listeners will come as eMarketer estimates nearly 1.5 billion global consumers will listen to digital audio formats such as podcasts and streaming music at least once a month in 2021.
According to WARC’s Marketer Toolkit 2021, 16 percent of advertisers worldwide plan to increase investment in audio in the coming 12 months, while another 38 percent plan to increase spend on podcast advertising.
Discord, which started in 2015 as a chat platform for gamers, boasts 140 million monthly active users who can communicate with each other via audio, text or video in invitation-only servers, namely ‘Stages,’ on a variety of subjects.
Then came Clubhouse, the invite-only live audio conversation app that launched last April. Thanks in part to celebrity appearances by Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk and Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the platform now reports more than 10 million weekly active users and says more than 300,000 rooms are created each day. Available only on iOs until recently, Clubhouse launched on Android in May and in doing so added one million Android users.
In April, among a string of new audio products, Facebook announced a Clubhouse copycat called Live Audio Rooms for Facebook and Messenger. Facebook recently hosted its first public test of the feature in the US, hosted by Zuckerberg. Similarly, after a year of testing, Twitter opened its live audio conversation feature, Spaces, to all accounts with 600 or more followers in May. LinkedIn, too, has confirmed it’s developing a social audio feature in its app.
Spotify is the latest to jump on the audio bandwagon, announcing the launch of a new mobile app called Spotify Greenroom which lets users globally join or host live audio rooms, conversations from which they can turn into podcasts. Spotify is betting big on the new app as it also announced a Creator Fund that will help enhance the app’s content.
