We’ve had many inbound requests from audio publishers, advertisers and agencies lately at XAPP, so we can tell the idea of interactive audio advertising driven by voice engagement has inspired many people’s creative thinking. That creativity has also led to requests for new features. One of the simplest and most interesting is the ability to designate custom phrases.
There’s a XAPP Ad for That! Recent studies on consumer trends highlight the need for a shift in radio tactics. The results correlate well with other market trends that relate to music consumption patterns. Consumers listen to Internet radio on their mobile devices, but don’t typically think about terrestrial radio as an option outside of the car.
Today, Re/code’s Katie Boehret reviewed the new NPR One App. Not surprisingly, she had many good things to say about it, including NPR’s work with XAPPmedia.
Part news, part audio education and talk entertainment, NPR One provides for news and talk listeners what Pandora pioneered for music. Instead of selecting your news stories a la carte or being served up the undifferentiated broadcast, NPR One seeks to personalize the experience for each listener automatically.
XAPPmedia, provider of the first interactive audio advertising service, announced today the addition of Paul Burden as senior vice president of sales and advertiser relations to its executive team. A former Microsoft executive that led federal sales for the technology giant for over 15 years, Paul will work with advertisers and agencies to solve their challenge of connecting with ultramobile consumers through audio apps.
In our two previous blog posts, we discussed how XAPP Ads scale for Consumers and Advertisers. The final piece in the puzzle is how we provide scalability for mobile Publishers. Four scalability factors impact them directly: Transactions, Implementations, Integration and Ad Ops.
Last week, we talked about how XAPP Ads were developed to ensure consumer scalability. That boiled down to making the user experience so simple that consumers could successfully interact with an ad the first time. From an advertiser standpoint, we wanted to deliver a similar outcome. Radio ads today are simple and inexpensive to make. XAPP Ads are too. There is no new programming platform for agencies to learn, XAPP Ads are created just like traditional radio ads.
It is exciting to bring new advertising technology to the audio content marketplace, but it is also a complex undertaking. We learned quickly that success required us to bring value to consumers, advertisers and publishers alike. To achieve success, we knew we would also need to make the solution scalable for all three groups.
As introduced by Rob Woodbridge of Untether.tv: “Radio has always been one of the things that has been consistently ripe for mobile disruption on two fronts. The first is broadcast which is being handled by the likes of RDIO, Spotify, Pandora, Songza, iTunes Radio and now Amazon among many many others. All-told there are roughly 140 million Internet radio listeners that share their time across the new broadcasters. Not a huge global industry, but enough to warrant a rethink of the business and engagement models – which is the second piece ripe for a rethink. This is where XAPPmedia comes in.”
Veteran media strategist Mark Ramsey is well known in the audio world. He has worked with companies ranging from Apple and Pandora to Clear Channel and CBS. Mark recently connected with XAPP CEO Pat Higbie over Skype to conduct a 15-minute video interview.