With 65 million user accounts, Pandora’s popularity has soared in recent months, with the customizable online radio monolith extending the lineup of devices that deliver advertisements to include consumer electronics devices. We recently caught up with Trimble, and chatted with him about Pandora’s recent growth explosion, where it stands today and where the company aims to be.
By Mike Bacon
John Trimble
Pandora’s popularity has soared in recent months, with the customizable online radio monolith extending the lineup of devices that deliver advertisements to include consumer electronics devices. Now, connected televisions, blu-ray players, alarm clocks, and digital media players run audio ads and display ads on the Pandora app.
Pandora’s vision to extend it’s application across all platforms, making it almostomnipresent in the marketplace, in combination with its unique ability to customize advertisements right down to the most local of businesses has resonated with advertisers while not repelling users. Their user base stands at 65 million and grows substantially everyday.
Says Chief Revenue Officer John Trimble, “Pandora is everywhere consumers are and that means that our advertisers are too. We offer a powerful media mix and cross-platform reach that effectively leverages different platforms to reach engaged consumers. Campaigns on this newest platform will primarily feature audio ads, which create a more lasting and emotive connection with consumers. The ability for brands to connect with consumers using audio ads on an in-home device is a new and exciting opportunity in our results-driven arsenal.”
We recently caught up with Trimble, and chatted with him about Pandora’s recent growth explosion, where it stands today and where the company aims to be.
Tell us a bit about Pandora’s multi-platform approach.
If you take a step back and look at Pandora, we launched five years ago as an online music service, and really expanding beyond the computers has been an important and deliberate strategy for Pandora. The deals we’ve done with the auto manufacturers and the consumer electronics companies were years in the making. So it is really critical as we look at the evolution of where digital radio is going to be everywhere and anywhere for our consumers. From my world, the multi-platform side, it’s providing consumers that option to use Pandora wherever. It really starts to play into the mobilization of consumption that’s going on right now, where it’s not just the smart phones. It’s tablets, it’s consumer electronic products soon to be in cars, tabletop radios, Blu Ray players and alarm clocks, and it is happening in a very accelerated pace that we just happen to be in a position to take advantage of now in the market. We’re really trying to focus on optimizing our best practices. So what works so well on the desktop and how do we take that in a very elegant and easy way to each of your mobile devices? Fortunately we’ve been very successful with it. We’re on close to 150 different devices right now.
What has been the reaction from the advertising community and what is your advertising philosophy?
In a lot of respects we’re growing and learning together as this truly new media starts to push into mobilization. What advertisers are excited about with Pandora is not only do we have 65-million registered users, but we have engagement. People are using us through their devices two-plus-hours a day. Then you start to think about mobility. We’re adding 100,000 new mobile users a day. So as far as where and how, we just keep offering a broader pallet for brands to engage with their consumers. At the end of the day, a brand’s focus is how to interact with their consumer. Their consumer’s consumption feels like it’s changing a bit to much more mobility and that’s where we’re trying to intersect. So if you think through this multi-dimensional lifestyle people live, they don’t go anywhere without their phones and they’re plugging them into their carjacks. So what we start to talk about with brands and advertisers is sort of two key attributes: environment matters. So for us we have the ability to be with consumers. They’ve given us their age, their sex. We have the ability to create this much more contextually relevant ad, and then we have engagement.
So if you think about why social mediums have been so successful; it combines that high engagement, high passion with a really strong environment for marketers to take advantage of. That’s what we’ve been playing in for the past couple of years now. It’s just accelerating at a faster pace.
Having the Pandora brand out there very early in the process must have proven to be highly beneficial.
We have the ability to work together with brands because we’re laying a lot of the railroad tracks. That provides us the ability to collaborate. We do a lot of work with the brands to understand their objectives and understand what they’re thinking about as far as the horizon on engaging with their consumers in this new digital push, and trying to find the sweet spot from there.
Is zeroing in on users as they commute in their cars a strong focus for Pandora?
The majority of radio consumption happens in the automobile. So for us the ability to be in that environment and to provide the value for the user of their Pandora account and from the advertiser perspective to be able to integrate into their lifestyle is really a nice point of differentiation for us.
What unique campaigns have you initiated with ad clients in recent months?
For a national advertiser, like a national bank or a national financial institution, they’re looking for new ways, outside of just the desktop environment to engage with their consumers. So we’ve had really good success initially driving multiplatform deals that are not just on the desktop but on the mobile device as well as the tablet. They’re targeted at the early adopter, high end consumer that is using Pandora frequently and is highly engaged with us. So we’ve gone from that spectrum all the way down to a local grocery store who wants to run a special in five markets targeted to women from 11:00 o’clock to 1:00p around a lunch special. And we have the ability through our hyper-targeting to be able to deliver that without any waste. That was a lot of our focus with small business. We just feel like by putting our efforts behind the hyper local market, there’s a big opportunity for us because of personalization and with Pandora to be able to crack that local advertising market which is certainly very lucrative.
How much of a focus will be aimed at exclusive content to draw users and advertisers and such? Is that being explored?
Right now we’re focused on what our core is, and that’s really delivering the unique, personalized radio experience to the individual. So when you think about those 65 million registered users, that’s 65 million individual radio stations. So when you think about the type of platform you were asking about it’s not part of our model today. So it’s not one that, at least from my side on the revenue activation side, we spent time focused on. Going into 2011 our focus for monetization will be to continue to push against mobility. We feel like the opportunity to bring advertisers opportunities from everything from smart-phones through consumer electronics into the car is a huge value proposition we’ll bring into 2011, with scale.
[eQB Content by Mike Bacon]
