April 3, 2014

National Public Radio and Tribune Co. are betting on audio ads to monetize their applications as mobile becomes the main platform for news consumption.

The addition of audio-based mobile ads are geared toward helping publishers crack into a few of the success that music streaming services similar to Pandora and Spotify have seen with big brands. NPR, for instance, is seeing greater than 50 percent of its users coming from mobile and is now in the course of ramping up its mobile applications and advertising options for marketers.

“We’ve been leveraging audio sponsorships for a while in mobile and on the net, but as our mobile use continues to grow, we’re finding that much of the audio listening is occurring while phones are in background mode, or in circumstances where the user is concentrated on other tasks,” said Bryan Moffett, vice chairman of digital strategy and ad operations at NPR, Washington.

“While we’ve enjoyed higher click-through rates on our mobile audio sponsorships, the power to take advantage of your voice to behave on a sponsorship opens up plenty of potential for those users who’re not actively their phone, or in a situation where they cannot,” he said.

Mobile sponsorships
National Public Radio is rolling out voice-activated mobile ads to its app that run after news reports.

Lumber Liquidator is the 1st advertiser to sign-directly to NPR’s app with a campaign that aims to drive app downloads. 

The ad contains a 15-second call-to-action. Consumers are then prompted to talk right into a device’s microphone in the event that they would like to download the app, and a landing page pulls within the app’s content from Apple’s App Store.

The idea is that a normal radio ad repeats the similar call-to-action multiple times, which are annoying and requires a shopper to take an action later. 

A demo of the Lumber Liquidators ad

With the audio ads, consumers can take an action immediately, per Pat Higbie, CEO of XappMedia, Washington. NPR’s ads are powered by Xapp.

Other use cases for the ads include audio samples from musicians’ albums or audiobooks. 

According to Mr. Moffett, the brand new ads are positioned to prevent transactional calls-to-action similar to ‘buy now’, which NPR doesn’t allow advertisers to make use of.

These new ads also help NPR gear up for the launch of a brand new app later this spring so we can include personalized local and national programming, with future plans to increase news to more connected devices. 

In addition to leveraging the voice-recognition ads for sponsorships, NPR may even use the technology to bulk up memberships within the new app.

“The app is the primary endpoint of a platform we’re building to support this experience in any choice of endpoints, from apps to the net to connected cars, and someday not really too faraway, refrigerators,” Mr. Moffett said.

Targeted messaging
Tribune Co. also recently rolled out a brand new voice-based app that aggregates 7,000 newspaper and Web stories that customers can decide to have read aloud (see story).

The app is being supported by audio ads which are placed between news segments, identical to the mobile experience on Pandora or Spotify.

Tribune Co.’s app

It isn’t surprising that publishers are scrambling to make as much money out of mobile as possible because the medium continues to work out an uptick in smartphone and tablet traffic.

For Tribune Co. and NPR, the shift to audio-based ads and advertising also underscores the impact that mobile has on traditional news publishers rooted in either print or radio.

“Audio-based ads leverage traditional radio advertising from an inventive perspective, and consumers are very used to this sort of advertising as they’ve been engaging with it for 80-plus years,” said Ross Sleight, said chief strategy officer at Somo, London.

“It is a straightforward transition from a standard variety of advertising to an innovative mobile application delivering content in context to consumers,” he said.

However, as consumers become more well-off seeing and interacting with mobile ads, audio-based units could help up engagement rates with mobile ads.

“We think audio interactions can become a natural kind of interaction for all mobile ads that require consumer input,” said Mahi de Silva, CEO of Opera Mediaworks, San Mateo, CA. 

“Where you can actually use the microphone or the virtual keyboard – regardless of the consumer is most pleased with.”

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York