What Happened
Brands can now sponsor replays and skips on Pandora, features that its free-tier users only have limited access to, to get their brand messages across. Ebay is among the first brands to test out this new native ad product for its two-week-long holiday campaign. Pandora first started testing brand-sponsored replays and skips back in September, and is now allowing brands to sponsor them based on music genre, such as holiday music, workout music, or latino music, so as to more effectively reach their target audiences.
What Brands Should Do
By providing users with functional value, this ad product from Pandora should help brands grab listeners’ attention and get their brand messages across. For brands seeking more effective ways to reach today’s ad-avoidant consumers, this type of native advertising should be worth a try.
For more information on how brands can leverage branded content and sponsorships to earn consumer attention, check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.
Source: AdWeek