SiriusXM Media’s Lizzie Collins joins The Current Podcast to discuss artificial intelligence, omnichannel campaigns and how influencers should utilize podcasts.

Episode Transcript

Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.

[00:00:00 ] Damian: I'm Damian Fowler.

[00:00:01 ] Ilyse: And I'm Ilyse Liffreing

[00:00:02 ] Damian: And welcome to this edition of the Current Podcast.

[00:00:05 ] Ilyse: This week, we're delighted to talk with Lizzie Collins, the SVP of Ad Innovation and B2B Marketing at SiriusXM Media, the advertising arm of SiriusXM, which includes Pandora, the SiriusXM streaming network, as well as the podcast network.

[00:00:21 ] Damian: There are likely very few people who know more about audio ad innovation than Lizzie, who was actually the very first salesperson at Pandora back in 2006. 

[00:00:31 ] Ilyse: As a leader at SiriusXM Media, her focus is growing the largest digital audio ecosystem in North America.

[00:00:39 ] Damian: So without further ado, we'll start by asking Lizzie about what advertisers need to know about the audio ad opportunity in 2024.  

[00:00:47 ] Ilyse: So Lizzie, tell us, what is it that advertisers need to know about the opportunity to reach people on audio channels?

[00:00:55 ] Lizzie: Yea, and thanks for having me. I love what you said about, I know everything about audio, but it's been quite a ride from 2006 until now. And I'd say that in this current moment in time, audio has such an important place in the consumer's life. 31, 32, whichever number you want to get hooked to percent of time spent with media is the audio format, and yet marketers are only allocating somewhere between 8, 9 under 10 percent of their media investment to this format.

[00:01:21 ] So first and foremost, I want advertisers to know just the power of audio. It is an opportunity to reach customers in places where you can't reach them via display or video. It has the power to turn on their brain in a unique way because you have the theater of the mind that has to like fill in the pictures and the faces.

[00:01:38 ] And so cognitively, it's just such a powerful way to message. And so when you match the power of the format with, Oh my gosh, there's all this incremental time that I'm not messaging to them. We just think there's a real opportunity in audio in general.

[00:01:54 ] Ilyse: So looking at podcasting at least, podcasting isone of the fastest [00:02:00 ] growing digital channels. How have you been able to grow programmatic at Sirius XM and Pandora?

[00:02:49 ] Lizzie: Well podcasting, I think we all love. We're here on a podcast. So this is very meta talking about podcasting on a podcast. I love that. I want to point that out for the listeners. podcasting is not [00:03:00 ] necessarily new, but the ability for advertisers to buy it at scale with maybe an audience based buying strategy with all of the tracking and targeting that they're used to in digital is what we've really foundationally been putting in place for the last two years.

[00:03:13 ] So what many don't know is that SiriusXM Media, Pandora, SoundCloud, and all of our other partnerships operate on the AdsWiz platform. And we are an audio first technology company. We built all of our own audio, ad delivery, ad serving, tracking, and whatnot. The opportunity to modernize the podcast space is what's really been the key factor for us to drive revenue in that space.

[00:03:35 ] And then specific to programmatic without those pipes, right? Without that ability to do dynamic ad insertion, to target audiences, to onboard data, and then digitally deliver those ads, you were going to have buyers doing what they were doing historically one show at a time. I can't tell you the stories, the horror stories of going into the clients and saying, here's our spreadsheet where we're tracking the [00:04:00 ] podcasts we think we should be buying based on Joe podcast guy in the corner who just happens to know the most about podcasts.

[00:04:06 ] So It's, the first step was putting that foundational ad tech in place. And the second step has been taking all of what advertisers appreciate in terms of programmatic transaction and bringing it to podcasting. And that's where IAB and others are referencing this significant growth because it's this bringing the best of two worlds together into this medium.

[00:04:26 ] Ilyse: What would you say are the advantages to programmatic ad buying on audio networks? How is it audience first? Well,

[00:04:34 ] Lizzie: Well, I think overall you're seeing a big trend in advertisers. Brands, even within the client agencies, publishers wanting to reduce friction on the buy side and the transaction as a whole. So programmatic obviously has been that promise for, gosh, over a decade now, right? To Create just an effortless buying transaction.

[00:04:57 ] And so when we think [00:05:00 ] about audio more specifically and audience based buying, like we have to be able to connect all of those pipes and be able to not be this hard to buy. Product. And so we've, you know, I spoke to that in my last example. that's been so much of the work we've done the last two years.

[00:05:16 ] And then because of all of that, we're a little different than some other audio partners were open ecosystem. So we will work with any third party measurement vendor, transaction partners like the trade desk, um, targeting partners like Comscore and advertisers obviously have their own data and their own ways in which they want to measure.

[00:05:34 ] And so that's also been, a huge breakthrough for us. For us in terms of allowing you said audience based buying. I mean, just allowing our clients to address their customers in this format in the most effortless way 

[00:05:46 ] Damian: One of the things that's interesting about audio is how it's different from, TV, which has traditionally been a big brand building medium. Of course, that's changing too because of CTV, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how Pandora thinks about [00:06:00 ] his ad offerings in terms of the balance between big brand campaigns and performance.

[00:06:06 ] Lizzie: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think what's hidden in this question is creative in general and trying to help brands understand the power of what audio creative can do. It can create. effortlessly travel cross device, right? It can reach customers where they're not seeing a video ad or they're not seeing a display ad.

[00:06:27 ] It can get right literally into their ears. And I talked about, the power of that. And so we, I would say, do talk to our customers about different products, drive different results. Of course, you might want mass reach and super efficient for, some effort. That you're trying to push maybe top of funnel or you need something super geo targeted You want to move specific product off a store shelf?

[00:06:50 ] Yeah, that can impact targeting and that can impact some of what we sell you based on price But we spend a lot more time through our in house agency studio resonate [00:07:00 ] Helping to educate our customers on the right way to bring the video message into the audio format. If they're a video first creative agency, and that starts with an audio brief, you'd be surprised how many agencies do a creative brief and it doesn't include audio as a way to interpret the brand or determine the call to action.

[00:07:20 ] And so once we get going in that direction, then we can take all aspects of their KP eyes and build custom creative to meet the needs of whatever they're trying to get the consumer to do. I love

[00:07:30 ] Damian: I love that, can I ask a follow up question about that? What would you say are some of the salient points about building a good audio brief? Well,

[00:07:47 ] Lizzie: is the largest podcast network for women in the United States. We beat everyone else. And it's that type of insight and then the creators that are within our podcast network to say, look, [00:07:58 ] Lizzie: Ashley Flowers is here.

[00:07:59 ] She's a [00:08:00 ] massive star in the podcast world. She really has a tempo to her shows. It's true crime. These listeners are so leaned in that you don't need a music bed. You don't need a scream at the listener in that example, which might be more of a sort of traditional upbeat 15 second audio spot that might live in a music station.

[00:08:19 ] And so a lot of it is trying to understand the customer. Then. What is the, context in which we're targeting? And then of course we have a million best practices about, testing creative. And we use a lot of third parties to come in and actually pre test creative. of course we have all of our own technology, which I mentioned.

[00:08:34 ] So we'll AB test creative. and again, what I love about audio is that it's pretty effortless to build an audio ad. you can go from brief to a spec spot, 30 minutes. Or less if we're talking about a I produced creative, which we can talk about, too. And so to be able to have all that optionality for an agency to play with actually helps inform a lot of landing the brief.

[00:08:58 ] And then, of course, we have something to [00:09:00 ] live with throughout a campaign to reach back to

[00:09:02 ] Damian: So it's getting a lot more nuanced now that you mentioned creativity, and that's very interesting.

[00:09:07 ] Lizzie: It's getting more nuanced because, look, you said I was the first salesperson at Pandora and I was, and we were only ever inserting a 1