Spotify’s platform for podcast distribution is streaming as it is for music.   The company has invested heavily in the podcast field.

According to eMarketer, this year, Spotify will pass Apple in the number of listeners to podcasts in the U.S.   The evolution of podcast to streaming will fundamentally change the value of the medium, says Sean Kegelman, Global Head of Data and Audience Solutions at Spotify.

In this episode of the #BeetCast podcast, Kegelman also explains the value of the Spotify’s listeners’ music preferences and playlists in enhancing listening experiences and by effectively identifying users for advertiser messages.

In our chat, Kegelman reflects the evolution of digital media spanning some 23 years, as seen from his work at  Digitas to Vivaki and Spotify.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.

The music and podcast service clocked 185 million monthly active users supported by advertising in Q3 2020 – 31% up on the prior year – as it made €185 million from advertising,  equating to a dollar in advertising revenue per user.

The secret sauce? Not just the user scale with which to deliver ads en masse, but also the user data to be able to target specific ads at the right listener.

Multi-platform listening

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Spotify’s global head of audience and data solutions Sean Kegelman describes how the music app listens to user’s signals.

“Identity graph is a really important concept for Spotify because we’re one of a very small handful of platforms that really engage with the consumer across an increasingly large variety of devices,” he says.

“(Consumption) increasingly is done through a variety of different connected devices, connected TVs, connected speakers, gaming consoles.

“(We have an) ability to understand the consumer across a really large variety of devices, and across different contexts, and as they use us in different times of day – you know, in the morning, in the evening, in the afternoon, etcetera.

“(We know) whether you’re using a gaming console in the morning, a mobile phone in the afternoon, or a connected TV in the evening … we know who you are. That experience of everything that we built up in terms of your taste profile stays with you.”

Self-serve ads

Spotify offers brands the ability to be part of users’ “soundtrack”. The company has long offered the dual revenue channels of premium subscriptions and ad support, now about evenly split in its revenue make-up.

It boasts that its Ad Studio platform helps advertisers create their first ad in just 10 minutes, with targeting and a free voiceover artist tool, video advertising and measurement.

“It really was incumbent upon us to have this kind of approach of, you can access Spotify wherever and however you want to, and we’re going to try to make that as accessible as possible,” Kegelman adds.

Listen and learn

Last month, Spotify reported content consumption had returned to pre-COVID levels after a pandemic listening lull, with in-car listening hours back up and home-based listening above pre-COVID levels, too.

Kegelman thinks measuring is important – not only for Spotify but for its advertiers.

“We’re continuing a march towards increasing quantification and increasing expectations of that quantification also being tied to performance,” he says.

“There’s going to be increasing need to just integrate those things across all the different objectives that an advertiser has – whether that’s the full funnel of objectives, from awareness to acquisition, to growth and retention, those are continuing to, need to be the walls across those things that are being brought down.”

You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.

But that is not the only way music personalization can manifest. And listeners themselves may not be the only party to benefit.

“Our listeners really trust us,” says Marco Bertozzi, VP Head of Sales, Europe at Spotify. 

Bertozzi in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Hopefully, we can allow advertisers to benefit from that trust as well.”

Spotify currently is obsessed by delivering listeners the right music for them at the right time – and, in so doing, helping advertisers to reach the right listeners at the right time.

Twin strategies of requiring a user account and supporting ubiquity across listening devices are what gives Spotify this super power.

Bertozzi continues: “Now what that allows us to do is say, ‘Okay, now we know that an individual is streaming in the car’.

“So rather than guesswork and advertisers, if they want to reach the morning commute, just buying media between 9:00 and whatever, 6:00 and 10:00, we can actually say, ‘These people are in the car streaming Spotify, and you have the opportunity to target an ad to that environment’.”

On top of recommending spot-on tracks to users through its Discover, Discover Weekly and Release Radar sections, recent initiatives have included:

• Launching a free-to-play tier this year, with immediate onboarding to express personal listening preferences.
• Introducing Ad Studio, a self-service ad-buying platform for small businesses.
• Solidifying availability of video ad units.
• Custom audience segments combining client data, Spotify data and third-party data.

He was better known to Beet.TV viewers as the man who helped grow Publicis’ programmatic advertising business.

But last year Marco Bertozzi jumped out of the agency world and in to the music subscription startup, when he was named Europe VP and head of sales for the service. Now Bertozzi is in harmony with the music software.

“If we’re going to help lots of artists make a living, we’ve got to help them be found by listeners,” he says. “So discovery’s at the heart of everything we do. The more we discover, the more we can personalize what people like, what they’re listening to.

“We’ve done research in one of the markets in the Netherlands with TNS that shows that people on average are paying 17% more attention to our ads than standard radio.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

But, even as it dives more heavily in to podcasts, now Spotify no longer thinks of itself simply an audio platform – and one of its leading advertising executives is leading that charge.

“That’s how it’s moved for us,” says Spotify Europe VP Marco Bertozzi, “moving away from being a music player to where really culture’s happening right now, and moving away from a playlist to a multi-dimensional relationship with consumers, whether it’s live gigs, concerts, and so on.

“At Spotify we’re trying to create, from a consumer perspective a multi-sensory platform now. We’re talking a lot about playlists that include video content actually in the stream of the playlist as opposed to just the list of songs. That’s important because our fans, the fans of the artists really want to dig deeper into understanding more about their artists and what they’re doing.”

He was better known to Beet.TV viewers as the man who helped grow Publicis’ programmatic advertising business.

But last year Marco Bertozzi jumped out of the agency world and in to a music subscription startup, when he was named Europe VP and head of sales for the service.

With big outgoings represented by its label payments and having raised $2.7bn in funding to date according to Crunchbase, Spotify will make its initial public offering this coming spring in what is one of the most anticipated tech listings for years.

Spotify leads Apple Music with 70 million paid subscribers, underpinned by a free service offering ad-supported music to a much larger audience. Three big developments have been happening in the audio world:

• Music platforms have opened up to programmatic advertising, making buying easier.
• Podcasts continue to grow in popularity, while Apple has turned on rudimentary analytics for the format.
• Home speakers with voice-controlled assistants are putting audio devices in millions more homes.

But, for Bertozzi, it’s no longer just about the sound of music.  “People are spending more time looking, they’re looking at the screen as well as listening,” he tells Beet.TV. “When the phone’s in the pocket, then of course we have audio messaging. But, at the same time, if people are commuting and they’re looking at their screen, then we want to be able to show video advertising as well.

“The video side of things for us is less about is it different in terms of look and feel, but it’s more of the metrics behind it because we have, it’s 100% share of voice. There’s no clutter around it. All you see is the video ad.”

This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018.   Please visit this page for more coverage. 

In fact, Spotify introduced video advertising back in 2014. But, as it gears up to go public, the company is turning up the volume on an ad offering, video, that can likely command higher premiums than audio.

“We’ve been an audio platform for the first 10 years of our existence. We’ve evolved to having short-form video,” Spotify’s sales head Brian Benedik tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Some of our playlists are starting to embed video in to the playlist experiences … from artists, introducing themselves. The response from our user base has been very good so far.”

But, Benedik claims listeners are warming to being turned in to viewers, he also says the company has to work to switch on ad buyers to the format leap.

“We have to train our advertisers and partners that video is a great place to be on Spotify,” Benedik adds.

Spotify has grown from 20 million subscribers in two years and had more than 140 million people using the service between the free and paid options as of July, Bloomberg reported, generating  sales of €2.93 billion ($3.45 billion) in 2016.

Digital music subscriptions have helped the music industry turn its total revenue positive again, following years of piracy woes.

This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We talk about bundling products and we talk about bundling video products together, but I think what’s interesting is the opportunity to bundle more than just video with video,” says Peter Naylor, SVP, Advertising Sales, Hulu.

“Even Amazon is bundling shipping with video. So I think bundles are going to leap beyond video and go multidimensional, multimedia,” Naylor adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and media trade show.

Founded in 2007 by three traditional broadcast networks, Hulu earlier this year debuted its own live package consisting of more than 50 channels. Since then it’s added The CW Network and more than 200 local TV affiliates. “Depending on where you, are you’re getting not only national feeds but local content as well. So that’s going very well,” Naylor says.

Beginning on Sept. 12, subscribers to the T-Mobile ONE plan with at least two phones on their plan were able to stream Netflix programming at no additional cost.

“While the big bundle collapses, people will reassemble their own bundles in more of an a la carte fashion. It will be interesting to see how many relationships viewers want with different services.”

Naylor says advertising on Hulu is “healthy and vital right now,” given that the majority of people who sign up opt for the ad-supported version. And while 15- and 30-second ads “are totally welcome” on the platform, he sees creative opportunity in interactive advertising.

“We partner with people like Brightline, for example, for interactive advertising. We’re doing a lot of integrations.”

Naylor cites as examples the season and series finale of The Mindy Project, in which brands like McDonald’s, Sprint and Volkswagen have show integrations. “So we have some of the best of old school TV with integrations and the best of new TV with interactive ads.”

At the 69th Emmy awards, Hulu achieved a milestone when it not only tied for most wins of the night–five, along with HBO–but its original production The Handmaid’s Tale made it the first streaming service to take home the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, as The Verge reports.

While many advertisers are still content to transact on age and demographics mostly with 15’s and 30’s, “I think you’re seeing a more layered and nuanced approach because data is only increasing with advanced TV capabilities.”

This is accompanied by a rise in attribution measurement. “It’s not just did my ad get served in a way that’s viewable and, frankly, non- fraudulent but did it move the needle for my business,” says Naylor.

This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“From an advertiser perspective, we’re seeing a lot of that right now. Brands that are actually taking sales impact as a KPI and then adjusting all of their media tactics to meet that,” Feigenson says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Meanwhile, on the publisher side, what interests Feigenson, who is Chief Revenue Officer at Nielsen Catalina Solutions, “is a wholescale embracing of this.”

The company has about 90 million households worth of frequent shopper data garnered from retail partners frequent shopper data. “That means we can go really deep in terms of creating segments for activation or in doing closed-loop attribution,” Feigenson says.

That data is complemented with insights from the Nielsen Homescan panel, “which allows us to create a representative view of what’s going on in the market beyond the retailers that participate with us through Catalina.”

Since the beginning of 2017, Nielsen Catalina Solutions has announced new relationships with Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify.

With regard to business outcomes for advertisers, TV is still an easier medium to mine, according to Feigenson.

“It’s somewhat easy to look at effectiveness because you have one format and you can take that format and put it against a media mix model and get pretty predictive about what results are going to be,” he says.

Digital involves many different formats and ways of targeting, so outcomes can vary widely. “So from a publisher perspective, first and foremost they need to show that what they’re doing works.”

Some publishers exceed these expectations by using outcomes to influence their own product strategy. “In other words, they use outcomes as a way to figure for them what works, they work backwards to make it better.”

At Cannes, Feigenson is optimistic that all parties can come together in the common interest of advancing the ad industry and lifting certain clouds that have lingered overhead, among them digital ad fraud.

“I’m hoping here we address issues honestly and creatively and we come up with ways to make this industry better.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Publishers and platforms go on tinkering with offering new ad experiences in a never-ending quest to push the boundaries and increase consumer attention.

But what happens when publishers innovate ahead of the standard curve, how do they approach inventing a new format, and what are the results? A panel of executives convened at the Beet Retreat summit discussed during this panel debate.

true[X] east coast sales and partnerships SVP Sam Amiri:

“Digital has always struggled because it never had its own native ad break or format. We just, as an industry, took pre-existing platforms, took a TV spot and called it pre-roll, took a newspaper ad and called it display.

“As a consumer, it’s difficult to find a reason to support advertising in our daily experience. There’s no reason to want to see those ads.”

Spotify video sales head Brian Danzis:

“What if you could speak to someone when they’re going for a run, or lifting weights? Music gives us a unique opportunity to look at what people are feeling, what they’re doing and decide on multimedia ad formats to reach them with.

“Knowing what people are feeling and thinking about based on the music that they listen to gives marketers the ability to reach somebody in a proper mindset.

“We released a new ad format in the fall called ‘branded moments’, where you could take existing creative, we would help retro-fit it for vertical, allowing advertisers to speak to users in these moments that matter.”

Facebook agency partner manager Jason Dailey:

“We start with watching consumers. Once we find something that seems to be a common thread across all of them, we figure out how to build a solution or produce around it.

“Right now, we’re trying to create ways for people to create, share and consume video in all the ways they want to – vertical formats, live formats, ephemeral formats… short-form… long-form … creating the widest possible palette of options there is.”

Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin:

“The problem is scale. (Marketers say), ‘I need my message on YouTube, Snap, Hulu and many other places and I don’t want to work with each and every one of them to build something that is (only) a little different’ … that doesn’t translate well between devices.”

This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Streaming music provider Spotify has no shortage of insights that define its users, as the company’s Head of Video Sales, Brian Danzis, explains in this interview with Beet.TV. Foremost among the tools for understanding what Spotify users are doing and feeling is their persistent identity.

With a user base that’s 100% logged in, there is “no opportunity for fraud on our platform, ever,” Danzis says during a break at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

Always on the lookout for new metrics that are unique to particular users, Spotify sees things on a continuum—from people who prefer the music the company programs for them to those who prefer a la carte selections, and everyone in between.

“These people are very different and we’re learning a lot about what those differences and behaviors are,” says Danzis.

Another metric is discovery, meaning whether users opt for tunes most familiar to them or whether they delight in finding new artists and use Spotify playlists to discover them. Then there is diversity, as expressed through the exploration of new types of cultures and genres, according to Danzis.

Having introduced its video advertising formats two years ago, Spotify “was in a unique position to not have to retrofit our ads to meet the needs of our customers” who were concerned about viewability, he adds. Spotify’s mid-roll ad units, consisting of video takeovers on both desktop and mobile, are served at key points in between songs, “only when an ad is in focus, so we know someone is looking at it,” Danzis says.

Each mid-roll video is billed to advertisers based on Moat’s Human, Audible, Viewable on Complete guidelines, meaning videos are viewable not just a the start or in the middle but upon completion.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

You also get to experience a sense of shared success—whether the topic is television audience guarantees, addressable advertising, or new offerings from the likes of Hulu, Innovid and Spotify, according to Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. and the self-described Dean of the Faculty of the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat, which was sponsored by Videology with 605.

In keeping with longstanding tradition, in this video Swartz gives a brief recap of two days of industry give and take in a venue that eschews divisiveness for camaraderie and shared success.

This year’s Retreat was truly a global affair, with the presence of experts from Liberty Global, Sky TV and others. But for Swartz, there was something more basic at play.

“How blessed I am to have such amazing colleagues,” she says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques.  The event and series is presented by Videology and 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In Spotify’s first trip to the Masters of Marketing Conference of the American Association of Advertisers, Kelly says in an interview with Beet.TV. that the key to the Branded Moments offerings is enabling listeners to mirror the “authenticity” of music.

“When we have 100 million active users connecting with over 30 million tracks against 2 billion playlists, that turns into something, and that something is a moment,” says Kelly.

One can easily imagine Gatorade sponsoring a 30-minute block of exercise-inducing tunes, or Baccardi if people select their favorite party accompaniment. Spotify wants brands to be there in those moments so they can “own this experience end to end,” Kelly explains. “You’ve never been able to do this before.”

The brand exposure encompasses an end cap, a vertical video and a mobile overlay for 30 minutes. “Anytime a listener press shuffle play, they’re going to be experiencing a relationship with that band. And that’s going to last 30 minutes, brought to you by Gatorade, or Bose, or Baccardi,” she says.

Asked how the return for the brands will be quantified at the end of the beta period, Kelly says Spotify is examining “what’s going to be the most effective way” to measure it. “We’re building in another layer of authenticity there. Unlike any other medium, it is a reflection of yourself,” Kelly says.

We interviewed her at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But Spotify’s change is not just a goodwill gift to users – it points to the growing part advertisers play in a business that has always relied mostly on consumer payments.

“We’re seeing a lot more requests for data and how users are listening to music as part of their life,” Spotify’s head of global business marketing and brand experience, Amy Vale, tells Beet.TV.

“Brands are starting to play in that area – what is the intent that the consumer has and how can my brand play a part in that?”

Spotify’s marketer proposition is manyfold, from audio and display ads to full-blown brand partnerships. “Now brands can reach a consumer at every part of their day,” Vale reckons. “Music is such a friendly language to speak in.”

We spoke with Vale at the Mindshare Client Huddle at CES.