Spotify’s Anne Bouttier on why digital audio is advertising’s biggest untapped opportunity

Digital audio is having a moment — but advertisers haven’t caught up.

In the U.K., adults spend 13% of their day listening to digital audio, according to Spotify, but the format accounts for less than 1% of ad spend.

That gap represents a big opportunity for brands to connect with consumers in one of the most personal mediums available.

Spotify is at the center of this opportunity, investing to bring audio out of test buckets and into programmatic buys alongside connected TV and out-of-home. With AI making creative production easier than ever and the incrementality benefits of including audio on media plans, the case for digital audio in omnichannel buys has never been louder.

Anne Bouttier, Spotify’s global head of automation sales, sat down with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik to discuss the investment gap, the role of measurement and why audio plus video is a winning combination for advertisers.

What do you think is the biggest opportunity for advertisers in audio today?

Fundamentally, there is a major investment gap that we’re seeing when we look at the audio space. If you take the U.K., for instance, the average U.K. adult spends 13% of their time on a daily basis listening to digital audio. And yet audio only represents 1% of the total advertising spend.

So that’s a really big gap and an opportunity at the same time for brands and marketers to tap into.

Audio is also the most personalized medium you can think of. It’s a very one-to-one relationship. We joke at Spotify that people call Spotify “my Spotify” as if it was their own. This is a testament to how personal it feels to the user and the consumer.

What is the state of omnichannel in EMEA right now, and how do you think advertisers could be leveling up their media plan?

The fundamental shift that has happened over the past couple of years is we have formats like audio, out-of-home and connected TV that have moved into the programmatic space. So they now live in the same programmatic pipes, the same DSPs, the same identity frameworks as the more traditional formats like display or online video in EMEA .

We at Spotify have leaned into programmatic pretty heavily with the Spotify Ad Exchange launch at the beginning of the year. Netflix has done the same. So you are seeing these streaming platforms really lean into programmatic.

In terms of how to tap into the omnichannel opportunity, I would call out a couple of things for advertisers.

One is to think about the incrementality element. That’s something we look at closely at Spotify. With linear TV, for instance, that’s up 27% in the U.K., linear radio, plus 28% in the U.K. as well. Even social, plus 18% in the U.K.

Second, looking back at the history that we’ve had running Spotify Ad Exchange over the past nine months, audio and Spotify added onto a media plan change some of the performance KPIs that we’re seeing.

Advertisers who added Spotify to their media plans on The Trade Desk saw a 9% lower cost of household reach and a 44% lower cost per action. That’s a pretty significant insight as well that we’re surfacing to buyers to help them understand how to position Spotify as part of omnichannel. 

What innovation are you looking forward to most right now? What’s getting you excited? 

I’m excited about audio taking a bigger space in the programmatic ecosystem. It’s about time that audio comes out of test buckets. Quite often, the lack of creative comes up as the main challenge for a brand to lean into audio. That’s changing. With AI coming in, it’s going to completely change how easy it is to produce an audio creative.

And in video, we’re seeing the time spent watching in the Spotify app up 36% year over year in the U.K. That’s a big shift versus the way people were engaging and consuming content on Spotify just a year ago. 

How do you advise advertisers who want to take advantage of that foreground and background experience?

We’re bringing them the proof points, showing that when you use audio plus video on Spotify, your sales intent metrics are up about 24% on average, and incremental sales up by 66% on average.

And then the other one, which I think is still very much a work in progress for us as an industry, is measurement. And that’s where we partner super closely, because we have a role to play as a platform, with DSPs and measurement partners, making sure that we build measurement frameworks for audio that make sense for brands and help them leverage the format within their omnichannel strategy. 

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.