India’s Audio Advertising Market Is Open For Business

Adobe Advertising Cloud now has the power to provide access to premium audio inventory from JioSaavn, Spotify, and Gaana — major streaming services in the Indian audio market with an active audience of over 150 million.

This announcement is another example of an often-told story. The ubiquity of smartphones and the rise of the internet have completely upended the way we consume content over the last decade. Mass-reach mediums such as TV and radio have evolved to simply become video and audio, where the consumer now has the choice to watch and listen to what they want, when they want it, on whatever device they choose.

This, in turn, has both challenged and empowered advertisers. Customers are now more demanding than ever. The personalized journeys that global content platforms such as Spotify and Netflix pioneered have raised the bar to a point where customers expect to be immediately understood and delivered relevant experiences across any device and every medium.

Armed with more data than ever before, some agile and innovative brands are investing in best-in-class advertising experiences across these emerging formats. These brands reap huge rewards, with an unsaturated audience that is typically younger, wealthier, and more tech-savvy being found through digital channels. However, many brands are struggling to cope with the rapid shift of consumers from offline to online, leading to a lag in trailing advertising budgets.

Arguably there are few countries in the world where this shift has occurred at a greater pace and scale than in India. The swift rollout of 4G networks with some of the cheapest data plans in the world, coupled with the proliferation of affordable 4G enabled feature smartphones, met a growing middle class eager to get online and fast.

This has meant a boom for digital content platforms. The digital audio space is expected to grow to have 273 million listeners by March 2020, up from 150 million in 2018, and everyone from global giants to local incumbents have ramped up their efforts to grab their share of the listeners. The launch of Spotify and YouTube Music in India in early 2019 sparked a price war as they strove to compete with local incumbents JioSaavn, Wynk, and Gaana, while pushing against global players Amazon and Apple.

So why is this space now so exciting to Indian advertisers? The price sensitivity of the India market means that it is estimated under 1% of these listeners utilize the paid subscription tier. This leaves a large addressable market for advertisers to tap into.

There are some key considerations for advertisers when running audio campaigns. First, the listening experience is very different to radio where ads are designed to capture attention through loud, “shouty” messages. The nature of digital audio, however, is much more personal and is often consumed through headphones, so advertisers need to create new ads that are softer and cater to this user experience. Second, it is important to activate audio through an omnichannel platform to ensure it can be managed as part of the overall customer journey. An Adobe study conducted in 2019 found that audio can be very closely aligned with performance channels, with 1 in 3 listeners who were exposed to an audio ad soon going on to search for a product.

Adobe Advertising Cloud’s access to audio inventory for the sum of the biggest players in the Indian market now gives advertisers the power to take advantage of this vast audience and deliver an experience that listeners will love. Through Adobe’s premium On Demand gallery, advertisers can apply data to target the audiences that matter to them — with the messages that will resonate.

Adobe Advertising Cloud has been running audio globally since 2016, helping advertisers take advantage of this opportunity, and is excited to bring this expertise to the Indian market.