I had an interesting and enjoyable chat with Scott Simonelli, Founder and CEO at Veritonic, a company that uses multivariate testing and statistical rigor to optimize audio for marketing campaigns.
Interestingly, before founding Veritonic, Scott composed music for TV ads. As he explains, “the genesis for Veritonic is: can we quantify human response to sound? Can we help marketers and advertisers understand how audio is impacting everything that they do?”
We discuss the power of audio in terms of influencing visceral responses and long-term memory, and how its impact on listeners can be discovered through the application of scalable testing methods. We touch on how different physical environments (e.g., car, gym, work) can elicit different reactions to audio ads, making it challenging to generalize results, and how consumer responses to audio will be different if audio formats are skippable or non-skippable.
Scott notes that while digital audio advertising is still in its early stages, there is a growing expectation that data-driven optimization and attribution modeling will be applied to the audio channel in the same way they’ve been applied to non-audio advertising channels.
He notes that “as a medium audio has got a lot of advantages. And I think we’ll continue to learn the right way to do it. But I think one thing we’re really fighting for, is to compare audio to other things that you do from a media standpoint and dollar for dollar.”
Our discussion turns to the growth of podcast advertising, along with the importance of sonic branding in advertising generally, particularly for brands with large audiences.
Finally, we turn our attention to the power of audio advertising during the holiday and political seasons.
Scott is clearly bullish about the future of digital audio advertising and is eager to have his company be part of the solution in terms of providing research and reliable attribution modeling to encourage future growth of the audio channel.
