Au­dio every­where you look and, of course, lis­ten : last year alone, 900,000 pod­casts be­gan their work and re­ceive our ut­most at­ten­tion. But be­sides that, ra­dio and mu­sic stream re­tail­ers in par­tic­u­lar are ben­e­fit­ing quite a lot. And ad­ver­tis­ing in au­dio for­mats is al­so prov­ing to be quite ef­fec­tive – as long as you get it right.

For the au­dio world, the cri­sis pe­ri­od is a re­al break­wa­ter. More than nine­ty (!) per­cent of all EU cit­i­zens now use au­dio and its con­tent reg­u­lar­ly (75 per­cent of them dai­ly and al­most 95 per­cent once or sev­er­al times a week). Thus, with­in a year, au­dio has be­come a true me­dia jug­ger­naut across all audiences.

Ra­dio re­mains on top

Ra­dio is and re­mains the num­ber one in the au­dio seg­ment – even though the num­bers have been steadi­ly de­clin­ing in re­cent years. With a ma­jor­i­ty of 46% in France and a peak of 56% in Spain, all EU coun­tries pre­fer this tra­di­tion­al medi­um to its mod­ern com­peti­tors. And yet, de­spite all this, there is a not in­signif­i­cant num­ber of in­di­vid­u­als who pre­fer to con­sume au­dio con­tent via pod­casts : In the tar­get group of 14- to 49-year-olds, their share is 68%.

In just 10 months, Club­house has sky­rock­et­ed from a no-name prod­uct to an ex­clu­sive brand, thanks to nu­mer­ous celebri­ty back­ers such as Mark Zucker­berg and Oprah Win­frey. Its mar­ket val­ue is cur­rent­ly over one bil­lion dol­lars. But its ex­clu­siv­i­ty is par­tic­u­lar­ly ev­i­dent among Eu­ro­peans : just three per­cent (!) of all EU cit­i­zens are al­ready reg­is­tered in the app (al­though it is worth say­ing here that Club­house still wants to re­tain a cer­tain ex­clu­siv­i­ty of con­tent and is not as­pir­ing to these user num­bers of In­sta­gram or Twit­ter, for ex­am­ple, at all). The max­i­mum val­ue of the num­ber and du­ra­tion of use cur­rent­ly ex­ists in the Nether­lands, fol­lowed by Ger­many and Italy. In Spain, on­ly a hand­ful of in­di­vid­u­als have ac­cessed the app so far. 

How­ev­er, Spo­ti­fy is al­so be­com­ing more pop­u­lar and wide­spread as they just an­nounced they will be adding un­par­al­leled da­ta, in­sights and user ex­pe­ri­ence strengths to their ex­pe­ri­ence to build a full com­ple­ment of live and on-de­mand of­fer­ings for users and cre­ators around the world. As such, the plat­form is look­ing to com­pete with Club­house to keep their mar­ket pow­er from grow­ing too large. But one thing is al­ready cer­tain : Au­dio will emerge from the cri­sis stronger than be­fore and will con­tin­ue to grow.

Au­dio con­tent galore

But why does au­dio con­tent reach such a wide au­di­ence ? There are two pri­ma­ry mo­tives here : one is to be en­ter­tained and the oth­er is to get ahead pro­fes­sion­al­ly. Both mo­tives are strong­ly rep­re­sent­ed, with the en­ter­tain­ment mo­tive be­ing found pri­mar­i­ly in coun­tries north of the Alpine range (such as Nor­way, the Nether­lands and Ger­many) and the busi­ness mo­tive in Italy, Greece and Spain.

And this de­spite the fact that busi­ness-re­lat­ed con­tent in par­tic­u­lar has gained in cre­ation in the au­dio sec­tor. This means that the sup­ply of busi­ness con­tent in some cas­es sig­nif­i­cant­ly ex­ceeds de­mand, as a large pro­por­tion of lis­ten­ers stay away from ed­u­ca­tion­al con­tent. What does that mean specif­i­cal­ly ? On­ly ten per­cent of all au­dio users ac­tive­ly search for and re­ceive con­tent that re­lates to their job in the broad­est sense. In oth­er words, if com­pa­nies want to ex­pand in­to the au­dio con­tent space, it’s im­por­tant that they re­main flex­i­ble and cre­ate con­tent that speaks to users’ needs and, at best, blends en­ter­tain­ment and business. 

Hate and love in au­dio advertising

Al­most every sec­ond au­dio user is in­flu­enced by au­dio con­tent and es­pe­cial­ly by au­dio ad­ver­tis­ing. It has a pos­i­tive in­flu­ence on con­sumer be­hav­ior and is seen as a per­son­al in­vi­ta­tion to try the ad­ver­tised prod­uct once and then in­cor­po­rate it in­to one’s every­day rit­u­al. But : on­ly one in three com­pa­nies can imag­ine re­ly­ing on this mod­ern­ized, yet tra­di­tion­al ad­ver­tis­ing medi­um and in­te­grat­ing it in­to their com­mu­ni­ca­tion strategy.

Why is that ? Au­dio con­tent and ad­ver­tis­ing have to learn to get along. This means that ad­ver­tis­ing must be made more at­trac­tive, es­pe­cial­ly in pod­casts, and must ful­fill a rev­o­lu­tion that had nev­er bro­ken through due to the so­cial me­dia boom. There needs to be fur­ther in­di­vid­u­al­iza­tion of con­tent and avoid­ance of re­ac­tance, which can on­ly progress with ge­olo­cat­ed da­ta. Con­se­quent­ly, on the en­tre­pre­neur­ial side, there is a need for in­creased hu­man re­sources, a fun­da­men­tal dig­i­tal cor­po­rate struc­ture, and an open­ing of trans­paren­cy chan­nels to in­volve the con­sumer in ad­ver­tis­ing cre­ation. Af­ter all, any­one who does not un­der­stand the cus­tomer will not be able to sur­vive on the mar­ket in the short and long term.

Con­clu­sion

Yes, au­dio con­tent may be chang­ing, but it’s still old school. In­di­vid­u­als still like to lis­ten to the ra­dio and are tak­ing their time tran­si­tion­ing to more mod­ern ways. How­ev­er, the time will in­deed come when we give pref­er­ence to stream­ing de­vices. Com­pa­nies are al­so tak­ing their time to jump on the ad­ver­tis­ing band­wag­on, but as con­sumers, most peo­ple are al­ready convinced.