NEW YORK: Pandora’s acquisition earlier this year of digital audio exchange AdsWizz is set to transform the audio advertising market, bringing in new buyers and shifting budgets, according to the latter’s CEO.

It’s all about simplicity and scale, Alexis van de Wyer, chief executive officer at AdsWizz, which Pandora bought in March, explained to Ad Exchanger.

“We’re trying to make it easy to buy, on one platform where buyers can access all of the audio they’re interested in, in a similar format, with similar data,” he said.

“We’re going to continue to invest in growing [our platform]. We don’t need to build, but we need to scale up,” he added.

De Wyer was optimistic that existing clients were not going to be deterred by the exchange’s new owner – a competitor to many of them.

“They have some concerns around data confidentiality, insulation and protection,” he acknowledged, adding that a lot of attention has been given to creating systems that ensure “no commercial data from our publishers is flowing through Pandora and vice versa”.

More generally, de Wyer reported that there was a widespread acceptance that “Pandora’s [intention] to innovate fast, make audio easier to buy and invest in a platform is very positive for the industry”.

As an example, he cited holistic yield optimization. “We’re optimizing all types of demand – direct, programmatic, programmatic guaranteed, PMPs – from not just a pure yield point of view, but around the user impact, the impact on listening and the long-term impact on performance.”

Pandora’s own inventory is currently only available programmatically in beta to a few clients but a wider rollout is planned for later this year.

“I expect you’re going to have a lot of buyers that haven’t started buying programmatic yet do so,” said de Wyer. “And you’ll see some budget from video and mobile flow into audio.”

Sourced from Ad Exchanger; additional content by WARC staff