‘Every brand needs to consider sound’: Pandora’s executive creative director Lauren Nagel

Does every brand need its own sound or need to participate in audio?
Every brand needs to consider sound as a key part of its initial strategy. It’s the same way as everyone is looking across mediums and thinking about the expression of the brand, with the goal of meeting audiences where there are. When you start looking at the stats of people consuming audio, your audience is listening, and in that sense, it seems amiss to me to not be considering a sound in an audio strategy. That said, that’s the beginning of the conversation. That doesn’t go to every brand needs a jingle. The manifestation of a sound strategy could be a voice activation, jingle or just how does the expression of our brand exists in the space. Because people are less familiar with audio as a creative medium, you see the shortcut into a jingle.

What do you think about the state of maturity for measuring audio ads?
I think when you think about traditional formats of audio messaging, it’s radio, and it’s going out into an abyss of no metrics. Did someone hear it? Switch stations? Those are the metrics, and insights have traditionally been really poor. But Pandora operates differently. Not only do we know did [the ad] play; our entire insights lab is around measurement — who is hearing this, how are they responding? — to really drill down and demystify: Did someone skip, is someone hearing this or is it jarring? Some of that comes down to the way that audio advertising shows up on Pandora. Having one to two ads every four or five songs is very different than AMFM blocks. I think one of the challenges Pandora has had is helping people understand we’re not in that old school terrestrial radio space. There are ways to measure audio and the consumer behavior of audio.