Pandora offering up political ad targeting

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As we move closer to the 2012 election season, Pandora unveiled new targeting features that give political campaign strategists the option to target voters by state, county and congressional districts, as well as metropolitan survey areas (MSA), and designated market areas (DMA).


Campaigns of all sizes are able to deliver their messages to custom voter zones in an uncluttered radio environment (Pandora plays only one audio ad per break). The service also offers display and video components in addition to audio. Campaigns on Pandora service run on websites, mobile phones, tablets and consumer electronic devices such as TVs, Blu-ray players and DVRs.

Pandora gathers zip code data at account registration and a back-end system maps that information into specific regions, making it easier for a campaign to maximize effectiveness. These new features add on to the previously available targeting parameters of age, gender, zip code, time of day, music genre, seeded artist, interaction, mobile and first impression.

Chief Revenue Officer John Trimble said, “With the 2012 political campaign season in full swing, advertisers realize that personalized, internet radio is a powerful platform to reach a desired set of voters. Pandora’s new targeting features maximize effectiveness of ad spend that has historically been wasted reaching voters outside of election districts. Political, national and local advertisers all benefit from our scale, precision targeting and personalization to reach a passionate and engaged audience on Pandora.”

RBR-TVBR observation: It’s pretty easy to target geographically, but the bulk of Pandora’s listening comes from custom channels created by listeners, not the pre-defined formats they also offer. There could be plenty of waste trying to target the custom channel listeners, as many are like tunes on someone’s iPod—a little bit of everything.