Product Advertising 101: How to improve your product ad campaigns on Spotify

In a successful marketing campaign, advertisers don't simply create a single series of similar product ads and hope for the best. This approach might have been a good fit for Madison Avenue in the 1950s, but today's digital era requires a bit more nuance.

A smart, modern campaign casts a wide net, dispatching multiple, varied types of product advertisements to different audiences, platforms, and formats. Not only do custom-tailored ad campaigns tend to reach more people, but they also give advertisers what they truly need: valuable data about what's working—and what's not.

In order to navigate the ever-evolving product advertising landscape, Spotify Ad Studio is becoming more flexible and expansive. The self-serve platform, where marketers create original audio, video, and display ads that can be embedded in playlists and podcasts, now offers updated features. Advertisers can craft complex marketing strategies and test their ads in new, seamless ways.

Here's an overview of how to improve your product ads.

What is product advertising?

Simply put, product advertising is spreading awareness about your product in a way that converts listeners into buyers. Tactics for advertising products differ from those for advertising services—as Houston-based publication Chron puts it, "The customer can touch carpet, but not the act of cleaning it."¹

In other words, product advertising refers to ads selling goods with specific use cases—everything from food and beverage items to digital products.

A strategic product ad campaign usually looks something like this:

Ad sets are typically defined by topline categories like format (podcast or music, for example), budget, and target audience. Multiple ads are grouped into their corresponding ad sets.

On Ad Studio, marketers produce ads by using a simple interface, and they can see how each ad is performing based on real-time metrics like conversion rates and audience engagement. The sheer variety of the platform features makes it easy to figure out answers to important questions: Which audience is the most receptive, and to which creative? Where should the team be putting their marketing dollars when advertising products? When do people respond best to the ads? What format seems to resonate the most?

Product advertising examples that get the job done

1. Issuu showcases content publishing capabilities on Spotify

To promote Issuu's content publishing and marketing platform, the brand leveraged podcast advertising on Spotify. They wrote and produced a campaign to double down on the message of "Create Once, Share Everywhere." The brand adopted their own advice, creating a message once and sharing it across many podcasts.

2. Kimbo Coffee campaign on Spotify

Coffee chain Cafè do Brasil wanted to raise awareness about their new offshoot, Kimbo Coffee. Specifically, they wanted to showcase one of their flagship products, the Nespresso Linea Barista-compatible capsules in aluminum. To reach as many listeners as possible, the brand created two different ads and targeted a broad audience.

3. Pizza Hut 2021 UK campaign on Spotify

To attract new UK customers, Pizza Hut wanted to engage the nation's sports lovers, gamers, and parents. They created an immersive audio campaign that equated "game day" with "Pizza Hut day" for the family. In the creative, they utilized real-time arena sound effects and a sports announcer.

How to create compelling product ads

Here's a quick, three-step process for creating captivating product advertising campaigns.

1. Test the audience. Understanding your audience is the most important factor when it comes to advertising products. By testing audience targeting through multiple ad sets, companies can gather critical details about potential customers.

For example, say that a hypothetical makeup company broadly gears its latest campaign toward women in their 40s—but conversion rates are all over the map. By creating different geographical ad sets, the company learns that East Coast listeners buy more makeup if they hear ads after 6 p.m., whereas West Coasters tend to hit "add to cart" before 11 a.m. These insights can inform future advertising choices.

2. Test the creative. Ad sets vary widely, even when they're advertising the same product within the same campaign. From the music to the script to the voiceover, the creative should directly reflect the campaign's ethos—while being distinct enough to pinpoint clear factors that either are or aren't resonating.

In the makeup example, based on their audience metrics, the company might decide that the West Coast ad set will respond better to high-energy creative that incorporates fitness and work. The East Coast ad set may respond to calmer, more sultry evening themes like romance-themed playlists.

3. Test the format. Advertisers should consider which format makes the most sense for their message: podcasts, music, etc. Most people don't like ads interrupting their audio content, so ensuring a seamless listening experience is critical. The format can make a huge difference, but there's no exact answer—advertisers should test different tactics in order to see what fits their product best.

How Spotify can help advertise your products

Previously on Ad Studio, advertisers could only submit one ad set with one ad at a time. But we know that just like your customers enjoy personalized experiences, marketers want options when it comes to the tools they use for product advertisement. That's why Spotify is launching a new feature that makes it easy to create many ads and ad sets in a single campaign.

Now, brands can enable multiple ads in step one of the workflow. Each ad set can vary in terms of the creative—or you may opt to target different demographics or formats with each set, depending on what products you want to promote. However you want to diversify your marketing efforts, Ad Studio makes it a cinch.

There's no "one size-fits-all" approach to a successful product advertising campaign—but when brands create and test their ads with seamless tools, the sky's the limit.

Learn how to create multiple ad campaigns in one click in Ad Studio today.