5 Ways Pandora’s Advertising Model is Better than Yours

pandora advertising

Despite our love of social media and engagement-driven marketing, display advertising isn’t going anywhere fast.

Analysts and Google CEO Eric Schmidt are in agreement that (display advertising) is the next major cash cow for them, estimating that display will account for more than $1 billion in 2010.

And that’s okay. But it means we need to do it better.

I’ve often heard (and even thought) that if you build an exceptional web property/mobile app with a ton of users, advertising will be a sufficient revenue model. The fact is, (most) advertisers aren’t stupid. Traditional banners have lost a lot of their effectiveness. Here’s how Pandora is making it work.

1. Pandora offers experiential advertising. Instead of only offering pay-per-click models, Pandora draws users into the brand experience. Users can interact with the ads: scroll over special deals, play a funny video, launch a station… And it’s all in a way that doesn’t irritate the user.

2. It spans platforms. From unobtrusive ads at the bottom of mobile, to music-infused blurbs between songs, on up to stations customized to your brand, Pandora meets consumers where they want to connect.

Pandora is offered via web browsers or downloadable desktop apps. Pandora also offers free mobile apps across platforms to offer their services and, of course, advertisements.

3. Each advertisement has custom dimensions. Face it: Users are virtually unresponsive to your banner ad.

Generally speaking, Nielsen’s eye tracking research typically showed that there are no fixations within advertisements. And users don’t fixate with design elements that resemble ads. In the early years of display advertising on Web pages, people ignored ads because they were usually totally irrelevant. Not only that, most banner ads were as creative as you’d get from a box of crayons and a drawing pad. (Even worse when the animated gif arrived and everything had to flash off and on just because you could). Source

Sure Pandora ads show up in (generally) the same places, but the shape, size, feel, and experience of each ad created is crafted to allow the brand to interact with the user in a completely custom way. Bottom line: They don’t look like “ads.”

4. They empower advertisers to use a medium users are already familiar with. Instead of using never-heard-of songs to avoid copyright, Pandora has brands associating products with the songs users are already singing along to.

There is nothing new for the user to learn or retain. Rather, the user is now able to connect a brand to something they’re already opting into engaging with.

5. They’re targeting based on on-the-fly user inputs. This means the user experience is customized as the user customizes and experiences the website!

Case in point: Clicking the “thumbs up” on a party-themed hip hop song changed my ad from the Ford’s “Sales Event” to Barcardi’s “Color your summer.” Those of you who can’t see the correlation between party-themed hip hop and Barcardi are in serious need of a vacation or a college student.