MUMBAI: Saavn, today announced the launch of programmatic audio advertising in India for the first time. It will be the newest addition to Saavn’s wide-ranging set of advertising technology offerings.

In partnership with AdsWizz, this groundbreaking new platform automates the real-time buying, targeting, optimisation, and reporting of audio ad inventory into a few simple steps. Including Saavn’s current support of over 250 advertisers, major advertising brands across India can now make use of the relevant data to make things easier and the process to access to communicate with Saavn’s 20 million unique listeners.

“Digital audio advertising represents one of the largest untapped opportunities for brands to generate new demand and grow their businesses,” said Saavn advertising VP Gaurav Kaushik.

“We had over 1.8 billion real ad impressions in Q4 and each one of them is unmatched in terms of sophisticated targeting capabilities and helping deliver insights for brands. Our programmatic solution can simplify the otherwise complex process of planning, executing, and reporting dynamic digital audio campaign on mobile devices,” added he.

With the increase of demanding lifestyles, audio is becoming an intrinsic part of this generation’s media consumption. On mobile devices, audio is a very special experience and is a form of personal expression and frame of mind. Digital audio is considered as a premium. Unlike visual mediums in the online and offline world, audio does not require peoples’ fully focused attention to make a lasting impact. Each stream is associated with a time-of-day, location, device brand/model, mobile operator, genre, age, gender, and several other factors. Audio is fundamentally a medium about “top of the funnel” branding instead of clicks and conversions reserved for demand fulfilment media like Google search ads.

Global digital audio solutions provider AdsWizz, Omnicom Media Group, and Saavn created the first private marketplace for major brands. Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the first brand advertiser in India to run digital audio buys programmatically on Saavn. HP was able to engage its broadly identified target customers and create more awareness for its PCs among them.

HP India head of digital marketing Amit Singla said, “The future of media buying is programmatic because it helps us focus our time, energy and resources on creativity and messaging for people who will find our products most useful. Audio ads literally allow us to speak with our target customers in a high engagement environment on Saavn. The reduction in time to set up campaigns and get real-time reports is an added benefit, especially in an increasingly media fragmented world.”

In that addition, Omnicom Media Group and their renowned clients plan to access Saavn’s digital audio advertising inventory. In order to streamline operations, Omnicom’s clients are able to purchase audio inventory without wasting time in a lengthy direct sales process, protracted negotiation, and tedious campaign setup.

“We are pleased to be the first agency to bring programmatic audio to India, and the prospect of quickly scaling a mobile medium with 100% share-of-voice for brands is beyond exciting. While digital audio advertising is a compelling way to change consumer mindsets, its delivery in a closed system also eliminates nagging issues like fraud, viewability and ad blocking in digital advertising,” said Omnicom Media Group associate vice president Anil Pandit.

2016 marked the first time that music audio streams exceeded music video streams in the US. BuzzAngle’s full year US digital music industry report indicated music audio streams increased 83 per cent to 251 billion streams in 2016 vs. 2015. The report further stated there were 181 billion music video streams in 2016, only a 7.5 per cent increase from 2015. Overall, more people are streaming more music than any year prior.

“We are excited to partner with Saavn as the industry leader in music entertainment to launch the programmatic audio in India for the first time. We’ve worked hard to build a world-class platform exclusively focused on audio that brings buyers and sellers together and creates a fluid market. Given the complexity of programmatic advertising, it was important to work with a technology-focused company like Saavn to bring this offering to the India market,” said AdsWizz CEO Alexis van de Wyer.