Tag: mobile advertising

Pandora has announced that it is testing out a new type of mobile advertising to better engage its users.

The streaming music platform has said that its new mobile marketing strategy is a “visual ad experience” that involves the use of interactive mobile ads that are also highly visual. According to Pandora Media, the beta version of its new mobile advertising option will feature ads from the automotive industry, including Lexus Dealer Associations, as well as ads from clothing company Express.

The company’s more than 80 million listeners will now have better control over the ads they receive.

Users of the popular streaming music platform, who already have the power to pick and choose the types of music to which they want to listen, will now also be able to have more control over the ads they receive via an intuitive swipe versus tap-to-dismiss functionality, reported The Motley Fool.

Instead of the previous closable pop-up box, ads will now automatically adjust to fit the size of the phone screen and exist only within the square space that usually displays the album art.

Additionally, the new mobile ad format gives advertisers greater control as well, providing them with the ability to measure listener engagement metrics such as viewability and time spent. Advertisers also have the ability to deliver videos within a responsive display unit. These videos are muted by default when the user is listening to music, but listeners have the option of taping on the video to un-mute it and watch it in full-screen if that is their choice.

The new visual and interactive mobile ads will become available to more advertisers later in 2016.

In a recent blog post from Chris Phillips, Chief Product Officer at Pandora, the CPO said that the company is “setting out to reinvent Pandora’s mobile display ad solution to take better advantage of screen real estate, and features native to our own platform. We’ll also be emphasizing the human need for attention on an ad, which needs to take place before meaningful interaction with brand content can happen.”

The new visual ads will be made up of a series of native, mobile ad formats, according to Pandora. These formats are what help to make rich media, display ads and video more effective and impactful for marketers, the company explained.

Pandora’s full interactive mobile ads program will roll out later this year to all advertisers.

The social media giant is broadening its Audience Network outside the reach of its platform.

Facebook has announced that it is expanding its Audience Network to make it possible to deliver interest based mobile ads to smartphone and tablet users who either aren’t members of its social media platform and to those who simply aren’t signed in.

The goal is to be able to further solidify Facebook’s position as the second biggest mobile advertising network.

According to the social network, it will be able to obtain enough usable data about non-Facebook users or users who aren’t logged in, through its own technology, to make it possible to generate relevant interest based mobile ads to serve to those individuals. Those mobile ads will be displayed to smartphone and tablet users via various apps and partner sites.

This is accomplished through the Facebook Audience Network (FAN), which was initially created in 2014 and makes it possible for mobile marketers to place targeted ads in Facebook’s signature style onto various mobile friendly partner sites and apps.

These interest based mobile ads will help to keep Facebook just behind Google in smartphone advertising.

According to Facebook, among all the impressions received on FAN, 80 percent of them are native. Within the mobile app ecosystem, Facebook has said that 6 percent of all time users have spent on mobile applications is on apps that are partners in the FAN. Back at the start of this year, the social network announced that Q4 2015 had a $1 billion annual revenue run rate. Comparatively, that same figure for Google Network was $4.14. Though Facebook still has less than a quarter of the Google mobile ad revenue, it is still the next closest to that top spot.

Among FAN’s strong points is that it is able to glean granular data from Facebook users, of which there are 1.6 million actively using the platform around the world. That said, it can now step beyond that specific group of people and may be able to strategically obtain data of the right quality in order to ensure that the targeting accuracy will remain high.

Recently, Andrew Bosworth, the Facebook vice president of ads and business platform explained the importance of interest based mobile ads. He said that “One of the things we’ve heard from people is that many of the ads they see are annoying, distracting or misleading. We think companies can do better, and that’s why we’ve been focused on improving ads both on and off Facebook.”