Short Ads

Those of you who use immem have surely noticed that they have started inserting audio ads between playlist tracks. Bravo immem! Audio ads are the only format that works with audio content.

This morning I heard two ads on imeem; one for the Zune and one for T-Mobile. The Zune ad was about three seconds and the T-Mobile ad about 10 seconds.

With these short ads I believe imeem is using the right approach to audio advertising.

A few weeks ago Steve Smith, author of The Mobile Insider column on MediaPost, wrote an article about the value of short, frequent ads (video and audio) in new media.

Steve followed up that piece with a column that contained this quote:

Randy Haldeman is the CMO of Apptera, the voice ad company behind many of the free-411 services. When the company runs focus groups to test all kinds of audio ad inserts on these free calls, “you can see the people’s faces cringe at anything over 12 seconds,” he says. And the ads that are not related to the user or to the voice-activated query in the directory assistance call get an even worse response. “When they put down the phone on untargeted ads, they ask us ‘What the hell was that?’”

I believe that long ads can work in the medium of ad-supported recorded music. However, I think we are learning, from these other media, that short, frequent audio ads will be the primary format of ad-supported recorded music advertising.