Success Stories

Issuu builds awareness with an audience-based podcast campaign

Spotify Advertising Team

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Publishing platform Issuu created podcast ads with Spotify Ad Studio and scaled their campaign to reach professional content creators.

The media mix:

Brand vertical: Technology
Objective: Brand awareness
Target audience: Adult professionals who publish content online (marketers, designers, realtors, educators, etc.)
Targeting used: Demographics; Age (25-40)
Market: U.S.
Flight dates: March - May 2021
Format(s): Audio (podcast placement)

The Brief:

Issuu is a content publishing and marketing platform that helps creators grow their business and inspire audiences. The platform transforms content into assets for every digital channel—no reformatting needed. It makes it easy for all creators—from marketers to designers to educators and realtors—to share their collateral, like brochures, white papers, reports, magazines, and more. The company used podcast ads to raise awareness and scale reach with their diverse target audience.

The Solution:

Issuu regularly uses podcast advertising to drive authentic brand connections with their target audiences. But in the past, they focused on direct podcast buys, establishing relationships with individual shows and hosts. For this campaign, they wanted to try self-serve, audience-based podcast buying on Spotify Ad Studio.

Spotify's audience-based solution—the Spotify Audience Network—connects advertisers to podcast listeners. The network’s scale enabled Issuu’s ads to appear on multiple podcasts and reach a larger pool of listeners. "So many people listen to podcasts and use Spotify as their go-to podcast source," said Stephanie McQuade, a performance marketer at Issuu. "Audience-based podcast buying through Spotify is a way for us to grow our awareness and get people to know our name across many different touchpoints."

Issuu and their digital marketing agency, Outshine, also worked with Ad Studio to write and produce a podcast ad at no additional cost to their campaign.

"Within 24 hours, we received an incredibly polished and professional audio ad—recorded by Spotify Ad Studio's talent—that greatly exceeded both Outshine and Issuu's expectations," said Hillary Gillis, a Consultant at Outshine. "Not only was the quality of the work above what we had anticipated, but the creative team was great to work with — quick, courteous replies and the client could make revisions or alterations as needed (though they were happy enough with the first take). If you're looking to fold an emerging medium into your awareness strategy, I can't recommend running self-serve podcast ads with Spotify Ad Studio enough."

Their voiceover script used one of Issuu's core phrases, "Create Once, Share Everywhere," and highlighted the platform's ease of use. "Word-of-mouth testimonials carry more weight with our audiences than just being targeted with an ad," McQuade said. "With Spotify, we wanted to test how our audience resonated with podcast ads in some of their favorite shows."

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Hear the spot for yourself.

The Impact:

Issuu’s campaign reached more than 70,000 listeners on Spotify across its target audience. An audience-based buying approach proved itself as an efficient tactic for the brand, enabling them to share a singular message in many different shows, wherever their audience listened. In fact, we’d argue that’s the real beauty of this campaign’s success: Issuu adopted an advertising strategy similar to their own tagline, creating a message once and sharing it across many podcasts.

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