Creating Personalized Audio Ads

Creating Personalized Audio Ads

Audio ads have been excluded from programmatic marketing for a long time: “Too expensive, slow and not-scalable”, many people would say. Now, for the first time, there is a way to create audio ads fast, cheap and available in unlimited versions.

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From my childhood, I remember quite a number of ads very distinctively, most of them because of their music and jingles. In the 90s when I was a kid, most ads on the radio & TV seemed to have elaborated (yet often cheesy) jingles and claims. Unfortunately, most original jingles have disappeared by now.

However, having quality audio in your ads is still capable of making a huge difference: As I’m typing this I can remember one specific ad off the top of my head: a Zalando video ad I saw on Youtube that featured Robin S.’ “You Got To Show Me Love”, a classic 1993 dance track I still remember back when it came out.

Audio production is expensive

There are many reasons why audio and video ads feel so much more generic than they used to 20 years ago: maxed-out media time, short campaigns or cross-channel-marketing just to name a few. With the internet being omnipresent for most of us, advertising has accelerated and become more competitive than ever. 

On top of that, there’s an ever growing discrepancy between the budgets of huge corporations as well as unicorns on the one side, and everybody else on the other. One example of that is the Zalando ad I mentioned earlier. I could probably name a few other unicorns I remember ads from, however not so much because of their wit and memorability, but instead of their sheer volume. That media volume costs a lot of money.

Delivering More Value

In principle, radio and audio ads are not really rocket science. Still, they require serious planning, concept work and flawless execution. These things often take months, which equals a lot of expenses and time for your company. The worst part of it all is that you have no idea if the campaign will stick to your audience and what you could have done better.

The challenge is that audio production is not scalable. Yes, you can create 3 or 4 different versions and test them against each other but that not only will it increase your production cost, it’s also still very limited in terms of version-testing.

If only there was a solution for creating audio at scale... Well, there is now: With api.audio you can now create thousands of audio ads in a matter of minutes. We think this is a no-brainer use case for our technology because it can address all of the issues I mentioned earlier, and offers limitless additional possibilities:

1. Production cost and time to market

Instead of hiring an ad agency, contracting a matching voice actor, booking a studio, hiring an audio engineer and polishing things up in post-production, you can now do all of this in minutes with api.audio, saving you thousands of dollars and precious time.

1. Personalization and dynamic content

Just imagine a drugstore offering a specific product range in some but not all of their stores. Another case would be offering discounts for sunscreen when it’s hot outside and umbrellas when it’s raining. You can now create automated ads with variables in them, making each ad feel personal and relevant to the listener. 

Another example is a supermarket offering daily deals. Recording these would not only be expensive, the turnaround time would take longer than the offer being valid. Or offering tickets for the artist you’re listening to on Spotify if they have a concert coming up in your area. And there are countless more options in Gaming, Health or Education but you get the point: Now, you’re able to programmatically stage these things using variables in the ad script.

1. A/B and Multivariate-Testing

Given that audio production with api.audio is so fast and easy, you can now create an unlimited number of versions for your ad. You can try different copies, personalized and non-personalized content, different music choices or different speakers. There is literally no limit of how many versions of your ad you can produce within minutes. 

Api.audio will produce a VAST file to go with your ad. This will make it incredibly easy to hand your ad over to a wide variety of advertising players. There is no reason you can not optimize your campaign in the same way you would optimize your search or display campaign.

A Game changer in advertising

All of this means that, for the first time, you can now truly treat your audio advertising as a programmatic channel. It’s fast to produce, you can create an unlimited number of versions for 1:1 targeting and you can optimize your campaign on a granular level never seen before. Api.audio is powered by our ExO rendering engine, which is capable of creating thousands of 5 min long audio files in under 1 minute. You can use api.audio not only for audio ads but also for voice overs for your videos.

How it works

All of this sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Let’s have a look under the hood and see how it works:

1. Create a script by simply typing a text
2. Add your personalization variables such as user name, local weather, store address or product price
3. Select a speaker out of 200+ available text to speech voices in 30+ languages
4. Select a sound design matching the look & feel of your ad
5. Run the code (this will render the speech, create the versions, mix & master the audio and optionally produce a VAST file to accompany them)
6. Load the VAST files into your favorite advertising platform and create a campaign

So how does it sound?

Here are a few examples of audio ads created with api.audio:

Here's a typical car ad. The personalization elements are the car types (92 Santa Fes) and location (Bank Street Hyundai).

And this one is for a Squarespace ad that doesn't use any personalization parameters:

Conclusion

Audio ads have been excluded from programmatic marketing for a long time: “Too expensive, slow and not-scalable”, many people would say. Now, for the first time, with api.audio there is a tool to create audio ads that are fast and cheap to produce, available in unlimited versions and conveniently delivered with a VAST file, the gold standard format for advertising.

Synthetic speakers, audio templates and the api infrastructure enable you to create ads that are closer to the consumer, highly relevant and feed into existing ad platforms.

About:

Aflorithmic is a London/Barcelona-based technology company. Its api.audio platform enables fully automated, scalable audio production by using synthetic media, voice cloning, and audio mastering, to then deliver it on any device, such as websites, mobile apps, or smart speakers.

With this Audio-As-A-Service, anybody can create beautiful sounding audio, starting from a simple text to including music and complex audio engineering without any previous experience required.

The team consists of highly skilled specialists in machine learning, software development, voice synthesizing, AI research, audio engineering, and product development.