YouTube Introduces New Audio Ads To Target Music Fans

In a bid to help brands grow further and better reach music fans on its platform, YouTube launches new audio ads and music lineups.

With people shelter-in-place due to pandemic and music concerts are closed, users are increasingly turning to YouTube to listen to a podcast while doing regular chores or working out while listening to albums. In an effort to adapt to this consumer behavior and monetize the moments on YouTube, the platform rolled out audio ads in beta. 

The 15-second audio ads are now available to all advertisers globally via auction on Google Ads and Display Video 360 on a CPM basis with the same audience targeting options, bidding strategies and Brand Lift measurement capabilities, and brand safety features as YouTube video campaigns. 

These ads won’t be audio-only but the audio soundtrack plays the lead role in delivering the brand message. The visual component is mainly a still image or basic animation. In the blog post, YouTube says the key that the audio message should carry is: “Think: If I close my eyes, I can still clearly understand what this ad is about.”

The company claims that in months of alpha testing, 

“75% of audio ad campaigns on YouTube resulted in a significant lift in brand awareness.”

For instance, this Shutterfly Audio Ad resulted in a 14 percent lift in ad recall and a 2 percent lift in favorability among their target audience.

 

YouTube is also introducing dynamic music lineups that allow advertisers to target campaigns at collections of music channels on YouTube in the popular genre such as Latin, K-pop, country, rap, and hip-hop.  Marketers can buy ads targeted by moods or interests like fitness or meditation. Let’s say if a brand prefers to run ads at any given moment, they can buy against the Top 100 — powered by YouTube Charts. In head-to-head competition with Spotify that pioneered in selling only audio-ads for years, YouTube expects the move to boost ad revenue that it generates from music on the platform.

In another blog post, Lyor Cohen, global head of music for YouTube, positioned the new ad push as an effort to help artists and record label partners earn more revenue from this new ad format. He further explained, more than 2 billion logged-in viewers are watching at least one music video each month whereas 60% of music consumption on YouTube happens on mobile devices,4 where background play is not available.

“Regardless of when and how people are tuning in, we have ways to help advertisers connect, even when they’re consuming music in the background. Now you can complement the moments your consumers are watching, by engaging them in moments when they’re listening, with newly announced audio ads.”

The blog reveals more than 50% of logged-in viewers consume more than 10 minutes of music content in a day. Though, video is still the main and largest category for YouTube: 85% of music consumption on the platform is in the foreground, Adam Stewart, YouTube’s VP of sales said the remaining 15% is a ripe market to tap for audio ads.

“We know being associated with this content works, and so it’s incumbent on us to create packaged opportunities for advertisers to get close to it in whatever format they want to work in, whether that be audio, video or both.”

The audio ad on YouTube follows another audio announcement from Google earlier this year in August as it launched programmatic audio in Ad manager.