No more (at least for one beautiful day) of this:
REST IN PEACE WITH A $350,000 LIFE INSURANCE POLICY FOR $21/MONTH.
For 24 glorious hours, starting 12 am EST on Sept. 9, I can listen to my Pandora app without wanting to intermittently throw my phone out my car window.
Thank-you Pandora, for #LISTENERLOVEDAY, your generous gift to all of your loving listening. What a nice gift: no ads all day long. For one day.
Remind us again, though, why we should love you so much for this gesture:
Pandora turns 10 next week, (September 9 to be exact) and, rather than celebrate alone, we want to celebrate with all of you. Our offices in are just a bit too small to accommodate the nearly 80 million of you who tune in each month for an in-person party, so we decided to make September 9 Listener Love Day. What is this day you ask? Simply put, it is our gift to you. It s a day of all music and zero ads as a thank you for listening and thumbing over the past decade.
OK, we get it. And we do appreciate it. Because we know how important sharing all that advertising with your listeners is to your bottom line. We explored your advertising page here. And we immediately realized not only how many different kinds of ads you sell to your sponsors (we had no idea!), but also much your business model depends on others hocking their wares to us in between songs:
Wow: Attention-grabbing animation! Woven seamlessly into the individual listening experience! High-impact spash for a product launch!
We thought we d share with our readers, and your listeners, all the wonderful ways you can make money off our own willing ears:
Animated Overlay Animated Overlays are highly custom, impactful screen takeovers that can include attention-grabbing animation and/or large-format video that takes over 100% share of screen branding.
Audio On Pandora, Audio ads are in their native environment, woven seamlessly into the individual listening experience. On most platforms, your Audio ads are accompanied by a display unit, giving visual support to your audio messaging. Audio Everywhere Audio Everywhere is the easiest and most efficient way to extend an Audio campaign that s across all platforms: Web, Mobile, Tablet, Connected Home and Connected Car. Auto-Play Video Pandora delivers a full-screen video experience in a clean, clutter-free environment to make your video stand out on Web, Mobile and Tablet. Users only receive a video ad when they interact with our tuner by skipping a song or changing a station. This ensures that advertisers have 100% share of attention during natural breaks that are accepted by your audience. Banner Pandora s Web, Mobile and Tablet display banners are beautifully integrated into the site and app, providing advertisers with a feature-rich canvas for showcasing their brand or driving user action. Each placement adheres to well-established IAB and MMA standards, often allowing for existing creative to be leveraged without additional editing. Banner + Skin The background skin on Pandora s website allows marketers to more seamlessly integrate their display ads by owning the full real estate around Pandora s tuner. Billboard The IAB standard 970×250 ad unit offers an extensive canvas for advertisers looking to make a high impact splash for a product launch, a major announcement, or any key event. Billboard Sync The IAB 970×250 Billboard ad unit and synced 300×250 banner allow for an extended canvas, eye-catching animation and engaging interactivity between the two placements. These combined placements offer an extensive canvas for advertisers looking to make a high impact splash for a product launch, a major announcement, or any key event. Custom Station A Custom Station offers advertisers the creative freedom beyond Pandora music content to create a customized brand listening experience. These impactful brand stations are designed to build audiences through exclusive, on-demand audio or video content. With a unique mix of interviews and live performance tracks, Custom Stations drive deeper brand integration into the Pandora listening experience, driving quality time spent and brand engagement. Display Everywhere Display Everywhere is the easiest and most cost-efficient way to reach your audience across all of Pandora s touchpoints. The bundle includes a single Standard 300×250 Banner that runs cross-platform on Web, Mobile and Tablet – wherever inventory is available. Genome Station Pandora s Genome Station is an opportunity for you to build the sound of its brand through custom-created Pandora stations, reaching users on an entirely new emotional level. By aligning brand attributes and characteristics with specific music genres and styles, advertisers can create custom brand stations without having to secure special rights. This product offers the advertiser 100% share of voice while their station is playing and the campaign is live. Genre Station Sponsorship Pandora listeners frequently tune into a variety of popular seasonal and evergreen genre stations. These stations can be sponsored and branded by advertisers to align with the seasonal or strategic goals of their particular campaign. Examples of these stations include: Valentines Day, St. Patrick s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Graduation, Summer, Back to School, Halloween, End of Year and Workout. Mixtape By developing a custom Mixtape or allowing users to submit songs for a Mixtape, advertisers have full control over the music playing on their station, without having to secure special rights. This product offers the advertiser a 100% branding opportunity while their station is playing and the campaign is live. Mobile Welcome Interstitial The Welcome Interstitial is an impactful, full-screen ad that appears when the Pandora app is launched on iPhone and Android. When sold, this rich Interstitial ad unit takes over the entire screen immediately after the loading screen appears, right when a listener s music begins, creating top of mind awareness. This is the perfect mobile ad product for any new product launch, movie/TV premieres or major awareness campaigns. Pandora One Trial Sponsorship The Pandora One Trial Sponsorship allows one advertiser to provide listeners with a 7-Day trial period of the Pandora One experience on Web, Mobile and Tablet. Listeners that click on the traffic-driving banners will enjoy the full Pandora One experience free of charge for a week. The 2-week sponsorship opportunity includes co-branded traffic-driving banners promoting the 7-Day Trial. Sponsored Listening Introducing Sponsored Listening, Pandora s newest reward-based advertising product that offers listeners one hour of uninterrupted music, in exchange for active attention and engagement with your brand. Station Generator By aligning brand attributes and characteristics with specific music genres and styles, listeners can easily add and listen to Brand Stations without having to secure special rights. This product offers the advertiser 100% share of voice while their station is playing. With options available across multiple platforms, there are appropriate solutions for just about every advertising category. User-Submitted Mixtape A User-Submitted Mixtape allows advertisers to creatively capture an actively engaged listening audience on Pandora. This brand station is built from a branded playlist consisting of songs submitted by Pandora listeners based on various themes selected by the advertiser. The station consists of two execution phases – the first phase is to request song suggestions from listeners, and the second phase is to promote the completed User-Submitted Mixtape. Throughout the listener experience, your brand will receive 100% share of voice through In-Station Ads while the Audience Builder campaign is active. Video Everywhere Video Everywhere is the easiest and most cost-efficient way to extend a Video campaign across Web, Mobile and Tablet. The bundle includes an Video Ad and a Standard 300×250 Banner that runs wherever inventory is available.So Happy Birthday, Pandora. We ll enjoy all that ad-free music and wish you many happy returns.
And, without further ado, we leave everyone with this excerpt from your press release:
We promise to keep this short, but it s hard since each and every one of you has played a huge role in making Pandora the most streamed music platform in the world. Together, you have listened to 74 billion hours of music, thumbed up or down over 55 billion times and created 8 billion stations. Those are a lot of big numbers, but it boils down to one simple thing – when Pandora was created 10 years ago, we had one goal – to play the best music for each listener. That has not changed, it will not change, and we thank you for spending the past 10 years with us – here s to decades more!
Credit: Deeba Yavrom/Staff
