To match the personalized and immersive experience Spotify has created for fans, we offer brands various ways to thoughtfully reach their audience throughout the day, across different formats and devices. You can get your message heard with audio ads in screenless moments, and engage Spotify users with video ads that leave a lasting impression.

Spotify Ads Manager, our self-serve advertising platform, lets you combine audio video advertising to maximise the impact of your message, and drive even better results. With both audio and video integrated into your campaign, you can create captivating, personalised ads for your target audience based on how they tend to interact with the Spotify app.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of audio and video advertising, and see how some advertisers have leveraged both to create ad campaigns that blew the roof off their target metrics.

The benefits of audio ads

Soundtracking “unreachable” moments

It’s no secret that people come to Spotify to listen—whether it’s for entertainment, motivation, or simply to enhance the moment. In our sound-on environment, audio ads fit seamlessly into a listening-only experience, letting advertisers connect with listeners in moments when visual media can’t.

Flexibility and efficiency

With Ad Studio, all you need is a script for your audio ad. We can help you with the rest—for free. You can also record and upload your own ad, if you prefer. Either way, you don’t need to limit yourself to one creative idea—you can easily create multiple versions of your message to test engagement, or even add video elements to create an immersive audio visual experience for your listeners.

Immersing the listener

With audio media advertising, there’s no limit to storytelling—it can communicate emotions and capture moods in seconds, allowing listeners to paint a picture with their imagination. And you don’t need a huge budget or production crew to make it happen.

Video engagement is on the up

People are watching more and more video on Spotify. In fact, time spent with video content has increased by 48% year over year—driven mostly by video podcasts. Gen Zs are leading this growth, spending 136% more time with video on Spotify year over year.¹

A multi-sensory experience

Video ads on other platforms are often played on mute, but not on Spotify. The sound-on environment means you can tell stories with both audio and visual elements—and feel confident they’re being seen and heard. Plus, this sensory combo extends your creative options, giving you the immersiveness of audio with the helpful visual cues of video.

Cross-channel throughlines

If you’re running a big campaign across other visual channels like TV, social, or out-of-home, it can be helpful to tap into Spotify’s visual moments to quickly associate your Spotify ad with your overall campaign.

The case for audio + video advertising

Spotify’s ad technology is fuelled by user context, meaning we optimize when to serve a video ad and when to serve an audio ad based on how a user is interacting with the app. We serve audio ads when listeners are streaming and not looking at their screens, and video ads when the Spotify app is in focus. So there's an opportunity for advertisers to reach their audience as they use Spotify in different ways throughout their day.

Moreover, our Consumer Decision Journey research shows that multi-format advertising on Spotify is influential across the entire path to purchase. During the earlier stages—when brand awareness is often established—we found that ads played during music listening sessions (i.e. in between songs) were 2.6 times more effective than the all-media average. Similarly, ads read out by trusted podcast hosts during the latter stages of the journey—when consumers are often choosing which brand to buy—are 2.1 times more effective.²

An audio video advertising case study

With the help of Spotify Advertising and a dash of wanderlust, travel brand Contiki created a winning campaign to reach 18-to-24-year-olds in the U.K. Their ads used a mix of audio and video to encourage adventure-seekers to book bucket-list trips.

Contiki’s “Make Every Moment Count” campaign leveraged user-generated travel content to give an enticing glimpse into real people’s getaways, complemented by curated soundscapes and playful emojis.

The CTA directed users to the brand’s website, and the campaign was a hit: It generated a 267% surge in website clicks and Spotify outperformed Contiki’s other advertising channels by 32%.

This is an updated version of a story originally published in August 2020. We aim to keep our content fresh and up to date so that advertisers have access to our most relevant first-party data and insights.