Pandora, the music discovery platform, today announced its new visual ad experience, a series of native, mobile ad formats aimed to make rich media, video and display ads more impactful and effective for marketers.
This is the most recent advertising innovation from Pandora, after the Sponsored Listening, launch in july 2015.
The new format makes it possible to reach Pandora’s 80 million monthly active users, giving listeners more control over the ads they see.
The new visual ad experinece is aimed, at the same time, to deliver stronger results for brands.
During the pilot phase, the number of listeners who engaged with an advertiser’s landing page for more than 30 seconds doubled.
New features: Responsive Mobile Display and Muted Video
While the Sponsored Listening gives Pandora users an hour of uninterrupted listening following their engagement with a brand’s video or rich media unit at the beginning of their session.
New Responsive Mobile Display: In addition to enhanced 300×250 mobile ads, the new creative ad canvas automatically adjusts to the size of the phone’s screen and lives within the square space that houses album art. This also applies to the visuals accompanying audio ads and first impression takeover ads.
Muted Video: Advertisers can serve their video – on mute – within a responsive display unit, accommodating the popular 1×1, 4×3 and 16×9 ratios. Listeners tap on the video to un-mute and watch in a full screen view. This gives listeners more control over their ad experience and brands a new opportunity to deliver video on Pandora.
The new format also provides pre-rendering display ads for optimal load times and to maximize viewability, and refines ad interactions to give listeners improved signals of intent to either dismiss an ad or get additional content.
Beta launch this Summer
The ads launch in beta this summer with Express and the Lexus Dealer Association as first brands using it, and will be available to all advertisers later this year.
Pandora partnered with Moat, the only MRC accredited company for mobile viewability measurement to quantify in-app viewability.
