A New Era for Audio

Our CEO Anders Lithner has rightly said that there’s no Brand Metrics client more appreciated than the one who pushes us into uncharted territory.

And certainly a pioneering partnership that developed a scalable measurement solution for podcasts and audio proved to be an interesting and important innovation for us - and resulted in a major study and resulting whitepaper, A New Era for Audio, that amply demonstrates the brand-building power of the medium.

In conjunction with FD Mediagroep and BNR Newsradio - an all-news radio station in the Netherlands - we helped to carry out the first listener-wide study in the country to include podcasts as an advertising medium. New media, technologies and channels are of course creating new opportunities all the time and, in the face of increasing demand for insight into audio campaign effects in particular, the innovative study considered 32 audio campaigns by advertisers from 12 different sectors.

This provided a range of actionable insights with regard to radio, livestream and podcasts in terms of brand KPIs, such as brand awareness, brand consideration, brand preference and action intent.

It found, for instance, that using radio, livestream and podcasts in combination achieves the highest performance in terms of brand lift. The study also revealed the difference in impact of audio advertising between well-known and less well-known brands, with the average uplift in brand awareness for the latter brands 42% higher than for the former. That said, well-known brands achieved significant advertising impact in terms of brand consideration and brand preference.

What’s more, where increased brand consideration and brand preference were concerned, we found that the combination of livestream and podcast achieves the best results. And when it comes to creativity, shorter audio campaigns of less than 20 seconds achieve double the brand lift delivered by campaigns lasting longer.

Jacomien van Doorn, Head of Digital Sales and Development at FD Mediagroep, spoke of the organisation’s pride that it can now compare the combined audio types and offer them to advertisers, even on a small-scale basis.

More details can be found in the Whitepaper, A New Era for Audio, which can be downloaded here.