Today in two conversations two separate radio stations told me how they were promoting their brand using Pandora.
Yes, you heard that right.
One is a Christian non-com that is pitching its Christmas programming in season – just click right through to the station! This is an incredibly elegant and (in hindsight) obvious tactic to meet the music-loving audience where they are for a unique programming proposition that’s only a click away. A targeted message that, this station reports, produced more than adequate ROI.
And, I might add, possibly a no-brainer for any station flipping to Christmas.
The other is a News/Talk station, where the call-to-action was a click-through to the station’s app. This is a somewhat tougher sell to a music audience, but the results were strong enough to warrant further experiments like this in the future.
If you have something special and it’s relevant to a particular audience on Pandora (as defined by demographics, geography, and artist/song preferences), the platform becomes an ever-more-attractive advertising option for your brand as it achieves scale – and scale it has certainly achieved.
Note what’s going on here….
Some broadcasters are concluding that placing their messages and their media in a click-through form on what is essentially a competing platform used by consumers as a radio station substitute makes sense because:
Pandora has a broad enough scale to achieve their goals
Pandora provides accountability metrics
Pandora is targetable
It works
This reflects a realization in at least some quarters that it’s not about “radio” or “not radio” – it’s about consumers and their attention. You can reach them where they are or where you wish them to be.
The former is a lot more likely to be successful.
It’s also a lesson from us to us: We value Pandora for its reach, its accountability, its targeting efficiencies. Are we really that different from our own clients?
What’s your strategy not just for reach, but also for accountability and targeting efficiency?