Innovation Examples

The purpose of this section is to describe what is already on the cusp of innovation in the field of music branding and audio technology in general. A lot of potential has been unlocked by Artificial Intelligence, although human creativity is still at the heart of what these new experiences are destined to be. Here is a list of technologically advanced experiments that are going to define the future of music branding.

Voice Ads: a new form of advertising

As millions of Pandora users utilize Voice Mode to navigate their music on the platform, advertising companies realized that speech had applications beyond searching and playing music. Since customers were already accustomed to speaking with Pandora, they decided to create Voice Ads. Listeners can now directly interact with the brands that matter to them.

SXM Media is a full-service media company specializing in satellite radio. They offer a wide range of services, including programming, production, distribution, and marketing. They were able to roll-out a closed beta for Voice Ads with major brands such as KFC, Xfinity, Unilever, The Home Depot, Acura, and more.

The results were interesting. They found out that everybody talks to Voice Ads.

However, Gen-Z is the most engaged cohort, with 30% more likely to interact with voice commercials. This, combined with the fact that Millennials account for almost 40% of the voice-enabled population, is particularly noteworthy, given how challenging it is to gain the attention and engagement of younger demographics.

A question comes up quite obvious, do Voice Ads work?

“Say-through rate is Pandora’s standard first-party metric for measuring verbal engagement with voice ads. During closed beta, voice ads had up to 10x higher say-through rates (think of it as the click-through rate of voice ads) over click-through rates, suggesting that voice is 1) a more native way to engage with audio 2) enabling a way to engage while listeners are otherwise hands-free.

Finally, our Veritonic tests showed that voice ads had 27% higher purchase intent than the audio ad benchmarks for those who engaged in the ad. They also had consistently high scores for attributes such as Relevant to Me, Interesting and Trustworthy.

Essentially, these new formats really resonated with consumers and were a highly effective means of connecting with them.”¹

AI voices with personalities

Sonantic² was founded in December 2018 by co-founders John and Zeena, after meeting at Entrepreneur First. Both had a decade of speech experience each and a deep interest in speech technology. At Entrepreneur First, John showed Zeena a demo of an artificial voice that sounded perfect, including breath. She realized that gaming studios could really benefit from hyper-realistic artificial voices, since game developers are expert storytellers who already use cutting edge technologies, including text-to-speech. So they set out to fix this problem and landed 7 pilots with AAA gaming studios within 5 days. They knew that current text-to-speech solutions sounded robotic, lacking natural performance and quality because speech synthesis is very subjective, unlike speech recognition, which is more objective. So they built a 'Photoshop for voice' and have over 1000+ companies on their waiting list in under 2 years. Sonantic was the first company to truly pioneer voice to speech human sounding text with a variety of emotions and shades in their voices. This ability to trick the human brain into thinking that a real human is behind the microphone could completely change the spectrum of possible applications for personalized audio advertising and several other entertainment industries. Combined with AI technologies, Sonantic synthetic voices could provide a ground breaking platform for the future of hyper-personalized audio advertising.

Hyper-personalized and regionally relevant ads

Another extremely interesting field of innovation in which music branding will play an important role is multilingual targeted advertising and targeted audio advertisements. As of now, services like Adsonica can already provide regionally relevant audio advertisements based on the region where the ad is being played and even language preferences on people's browsers. However, some companies like Semetis and A Million Ads are harnessing the power of data to offer even more personalized experiences. A Million Ads³ is a company that combines all the data points known about the user, their environment and the campaign to influence what they hear. The more they know, the more personalized versions are created, making for a more personal experience. Their platform creates all of the personalized versions automatically, controlling production costs.

They collect three categories of data:

In the moment data:

• Location
• Sequence
• Device Type
• Weather

Publish, DSP & DMP data:

• Gender
• Age
• Playlist/Station
• Language
• Household income
• Behavior
• User Segment

Bespoke data:

• 1st, 2nd, 3rd party segments

In 2021 Belron Group (owner of Carglass, Autoglass and Safelite) partnered with Semetis and A Million Ads for a hyper-personalized campaign in Belgium.

They started to analyze two key metrics:

1. Weather conditions, as driving conditions, are correlated with damaged windscreens
2. Location, emphasizing the proximity of a carglass service center The user location data was leveraged and infused with storytelling, so Carglass could establish a more personal connection with the listener. Combining 6 weather conditions, 44 service locations in Belgium and 2 languages, they created more than 500 unique audio advertisements. The results: 453,000 Belgiums were reached by these ads, of which 83% heard a fully personalized audio ad. Overall, the number of bookings increased by 46% thanks to the ad.

Making sports accessible

Action Audio is the world-first technology for adding sound to live sports, allowing those who are blind or visually impaired to follow games in real time. Action Audio, which was developed in collaboration with Tennis Australia and Monash University, uses data from a ball tracking computer vision system to highlight critical moments of play with a 3D sound design system created for the blind and low-vision community. Action Audio will provide the first opportunity for many visually impaired sports fans to follow the speed and actions of a live game. During the finals of the 2021 Australian Open tennis tournament, Action Audio debuted. For the 2022 Australian Open, Action Audio is now accessible on live radio and through Google Assistant for every match at the Rod Laver Arena. Listeners may now use Google Assistant to listen to Action Audio as well as live radio commentary of each game on center court during the tournament, making it even more accessible. Visually challenged tennis fans can ask Google to stream the Action Audio live broadcast using voice commands, as well as access information about how Action Audio works to learn more about the experience. Action Audio sets a new standard in accessibility in sport, the ubiquity of ball monitoring computer vision systems at over 80 tennis tournaments worldwide, and other codes such as cricket and football, creates a huge opportunity to open access for millions of visually impaired sports fans.³