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 fans visually with video ads and display ads that leave a lasting impression.

With both audio and video integrated into your campaign, you can deliver captivating, personalized ads for your target audience based on how they prefer to interact with the Spotify app depending on what they're doing at the time.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of each format, and how combining them can lead to improved, measurable results for your Spotify Advertising campaign.

Audio: For screenless moments

Sound-on environment

Audio is Spotify's first language. Fans come to us to listen to their favourite music, to plug into their latest podcast obsession, or to immerse themselves in the narrated chapters of an audiobook. 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 Spotify Ads Manager, 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 audio asset, 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 advertising, there’s no limit to storytelling—it can communicate emotions and capture moods in seconds, letting listeners 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 44% Y/Y—driven mostly by video podcasts. Gen Zs are leading this growth, spending 81% more time with video on Spotify year over year.¹

But video podcasts are only one of many ways people are spending in-focus time with us. Overall we’ve seen a +38% Y/Y increase in people spending in-focus time with us on mobile.² From lively comment sections to personalized discovery feeds and expert-led courses, every session is an opportunity for deep engagement.

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 intimacy of audio with the immersive power of visual storytelling.

Increased attention vs other platforms

We all know people are glued to their phones, but not all time spent is created equal. Consider, for example, how much attention someone pays as they blithely scroll through their social media feeds, versus how much they pay during activities that are purposeful and intentional—say, watching an educational video podcast, or exploring and discovering new music during a commute. It's content like this that makes Spotify a unique and more positive environment for people to spend their in-focus time—and for brands looking to land a message through video.

Audio + video: For full-funnel impact

Audio will always be at the heart of what we do, but video is the key to supercharging your Spotify campaign. Just like other leading platforms, the more formats and placements you include in your campaign, the more opportunities you have to meet people where they are.

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.

What's more, research shows that audio and video advertising on Spotify is influential across the entire marketing funnel—driving increased awareness, consideration, and sales, compared to audio-only campaigns:

An audio video advertising case study

With the help of Spotify Advertising and a dash of wanderlust, travel brand Contiki created a multi-format 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. They leveraged user-generated video content to give an enticing glimpse into real people’s getaways, complemented by curated soundscapes and playful emojis. The campaign was a hit, generating a 267% surge in website clicks and Spotify outperformed Contiki’s other advertising channels by 32%.