Audio isn’t an add-on, it’s the future, says SiriusXM Media’s Sherene Hilal
At Advertising Week New York, SiriusXM reaffirmed its leadership in the increasingly competitive audio space with an event that blended star power and a bold vision for the future of advertising.
Podcasters Alex Cooper and Andy Cohen took the stage, and Mumford & Sons turned up for a surprise performance.
Platooned by those stars was Sherene Hilal, SiriusXM Media’s chief advertising product officer. Before a crowd of several hundred marketers, Hilal dove into the company’s vision for the next era of audio advertising.
Audio commands 21% of time spent in the U.S. And though the star power in the room reinforced audio’s cultural significance, advertising has yet to catch up to consumers: Audio still makes up just 4% of media budgets, according to Hilal.
Hilal spoke with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik about how to correct that imbalance and what advancements in measurements will come to fruition in the next year.
Why do you think marketers should put audio on every media plan?
Oh, my God, OK, great question. The first thing is it’s just about the attention. We all know audio is about four hours of time spent listening. But is it dramatically underrepresented in spend. And so really, it’s about matching where people are putting their time.
What innovation are you most interested in within the programmatic space? And which ad formats in particular?
I can’t talk about innovation without talking about targeting and measurement, only because it’s still not where it needs to be. And where it needs to be is at par with digital.
It first starts with the ability to understand who’s listening. And I think again, the contextual and semantic part of how someone consumes audio really allows you to say, “Here’s what this person might be interested in.”
Being able to create [that]signal is the biggest innovation that I think has to happen in order for audio to be really understood in a way where brands are utilizing it as part of their media mix.
And it’s not an add-on to digital; audio subsumes digital. It’s more prolific in terms of the signaling. You can actually think about it as the most upper-funnel and the most lower funnel. And there really isn’t a format today that I think does both.
With the audio space becoming more popular, it’s also become more competitive. What do you want people to associate with SiriusXM?
Totally. I love the competition because without it, audio [won’t become] what it should be. And it’s one of the reasons why we focus on things that others don’t. I’ll name three [things] but there’s many more.
The first is access to the data. We recently announced a partnership with Snowflake, where we are taking 170 million listeners and every play, every genre, every device, everything that we know about their listening, the context, the semantics, we’re structuring that data.
That’s absolutely critical for AI applications, for audience insights, for segmentation. We’re making it available to every brand. And I think that’s a bold move.
The second is measurability. The commitment that we’ve made is actually solving a problem we created, which is how much audio consumption is ubiquitous. And we have worked very hard to make it that way.
At the same time, when it is that prolific, it becomes much harder to measure. And so how do you make a relevant impact when people are listening and scrolling and buying billions of times a year? And how do you find your next best transaction in that sea of listener data? It’s quite difficult. And so that structured data also allows you to integrate not just for insights but for measurement.
And today, I think the advancements in measurement have really been underwhelming compared to the advancements in consumption.
And consumption has overtaken the R&D in the measurement space. MMM methodologies can often understate audio. So our work is really with third parties like the IAB.
And the last one is just the devices that we’re on. We are working on connecting every car. We are working on being in every home. So again, not just the mobile-first experience of music listening. It is music and podcasts and hosts and live events as part of your everyday life, wherever you want to consume it.
And I think that’s quite unique. I don’t know anyone else out there doing those things.
If we talk again in a year, how do you think the measurement conversation and solution, more importantly, will have changed?
Audio will not be a tagalong anymore.
Digital teams will be buying audio as part of their every single media plan that they have. And I hope that it also is inclusive of using that data to make other formats better.
I’ve been in ad tech for a while, and it’s always been the dream to know what someone is thinking the moment that they are introduced to your brand or introduced to a new product. There just hasn’t been a format with a feedback loop where you could understand that in the moment, and I think we’ll get there, and hopefully SiriusXM is leading that charge.