Pandora Adds Mobile to Programmatic

Pandora has introduced a mobile programmatic solution to supplement its existing desktop offering.

Now advertisers will be able to reach Pandora’s 80 million active listeners and automatically purchase the platform’s display inventory across desktop, smartphones and tablets. The mobile programmatic program represents a big opportunity for advertisers, as around 80 percent of Pandora’s listening takes place on mobile and other connected devices.

“No matter what way advertisers want to buy ads on Pandora, we want to enable it,” says Jack Krawczyk, vice president of ad product management for Pandora. “Programmatic allows us to accept another form of ad payment on Pandora. For brands prefer to buy display inventory through demand-side platform (DSP), we allow them to do so.”

Since Pandora has quality data, its programmatic solution can offer highly viewable inventory to alleviate the viewability problem that the industry is facing, the company says.

Many advertisers use programmatic for retargeting. Krawczyk explains that Pandora can help brands enhance retargeting capability with its first-party data, which includes specific demographics around users’ gender, location, political and multi-cultural background.

In order to stand out in the crowded programmatic space, Pandora takes a “device-agnostic” approach to targeting and retargeting, thanks to its registration data.

“We don’t care if our users are on mobile or desktop, as long as they log in with the same account,” says Krawczyk. “Therefore, we can provide seamless targeting across desktop and mobile. Lots of our initial advertisers are encouraged by this capability.”

Released in beta in March, the solution has been tested by brands such as Ford and agencies like Essence. Pandora’s mobile offering is one of the most recent products to help the platform improve its bottom-line performance through advertising. Last year, the company introduced Promoted Stations and Sponsored Listening to connect users and advertisers.