: Digital Audio Advertising: What’s in store for brands this Festive Season #IndiaNEWS #Featured In conversation with Gursimran Singh, Head of Brand Strategy & Creative Solutions, JioSaavn, Social

Digital Audio Advertising: What’s in store for brands this Festive Season #IndiaNEWS #Featured
In conversation with Gursimran Singh, Head of Brand Strategy & Creative Solutions, JioSaavn, Social Samosa deep dives into the potential of the digital audio industry and advertising avenues on an insightful Day 2 of the Festive Marketing Week.

The Potential Of Digital Audio

The advent of digital audio streaming began about a decade ago, the industrys growth and accelerated adoption have been estimated to lead the industry to a 100 Bn USD mark by 2025, shares Singh.

Presently, the digital audio industry stands at 200 Mn users, with over 100 Mn users hosted by JioSaavn, the last year and a half has experienced interesting patterns of consumer consumption. The number of subscribers through 2020 increased by 20%, accelerated by the pandemic.

The broad categorization of digital audio lies on three pillars:

Music

Music is the largest chunk in digital audio streaming. Consumers in India spend the most time on digital audio platforms listening to music, accounting for over 19. 1 hours per week, with users under the age of 34 being on the higher end.

Podcasts

Podcasts have been a recent phenomena, with last year experiencing a 28% increase in podcast audio streaming. India is also the third biggest market for podcasts in the world, after US and China.

Voice

Voice which includes social audio and more formats including ones that support voice performance marketing can facilitate a direct conversation between brands and consumers, allowing the brands to gain real-time feedback and build a connect.

Advertising Avenues

Singh mentions that 29% of audio consumption happens during ultra-mobile moments such as cooking, cleaning, cycling, or while in transit. The audio audience can be targeted through Showcase the high-impact ad slots, branded content (for instance, a playlist that represents a character from a web series), along mainline campaigns translated into digital audio.

Vernacular is another promising avenue, accounting for 35% of audio streaming.

He adds that a lot of brands try to superimpose social or digital references into audio, audio does not work like that, for example, a number of shares is one metric several brands expect, but sharing is not something audio offers, it is more of an individual experience. Similarly, the tropes of advertising on audio are different from social media or other digital platforms.

The current overall sentiment is cautiously optimistic, with a 2:1 ratio, optimistic folk ousted the others. Scaling up the campaign with tailored playlists, podcast associations, balancing out audio strategy with video and display as well, and multi-format campaigns that do not necessarily require huge budgets are the various avenues brands and advertisers can pick from.