An Award that Speaks Volumes
The Digiday Awards is an annual recognition of brands, agencies and platforms. For their 2020 Awards, Digiday focused on honoring companies that were able to pivot and innovate in one of the most tumultuous years in recent history.
We are extremely honored to have received Digiday’s Most Innovative Technology Platform award – a high distinction recognizing the technology platform that has been most effective in helping partners achieve their goals. Our technology platform today powers leading audio companies like Pandora, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iHeart, NPR and more.
Making an Impact in Audio Advertising
So, what did we accomplish in 2020? Lots, but we have four major achievements that Digiday acknowledged as illustrating our dedication to innovation, contributing to our partners’ success, and having made a distinctive impact on the industry. Here they are in detail:
- Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), launched in May of 2020, allows advertisers to create a more personalized listening experience by generating audio ad variations and personalized creatives based on the listener’s context. By tapping into a multitude of data points – such as location, weather, device type, age/gender, just to name a few – advertisers not only have the power to deliver thousands of ad variations that are relevant to each listener, but they also have the power to optimize the creatives based on performance in real-time.
- Our Programmatic Host-Read Ads* technology lets agencies create scripts which are automatically sent out to numerous podcast hosts, who can then choose to record these ads, and send them back to AdsWizz to have them delivered programmatically within the participating host’s podcast. Traditional host-read ads have been a consistently powerful ad format (they build trust with the listener and create a seamless listening experience) but scaling the manual process has posed a challenge—one that our Programmatic Host-Read Ads solves. This capability will help accelerate and democratize the podcast industry, so that advertisers can more easily access all podcasts, and not just the top shows.
- In September 2020, we shared the work we had done with NPR, via a case study, highlighting their successful dynamic campaign, utilizing the AdsWizz programmatic stack to create a richer listening experience by combining relevant local news with their award-winning nationally produced daily content. The national/local on-demand experience was a first-of-its-kind for public radio, and for the podcast industry as a whole—made possible through the power of AdsWizz technology.
- AudioGO, our B2C audio advertising solution, has been gaining momentum since it emerged out of public beta in August of 2020. With so many small businesses struggling last year due to COVID-19, AudioGO has provided an opportunity for those businesses to reach new audiences through an advertising format that they may not have considered prior. To date, thousands of campaigns have run on the platform, and those numbers have continued to increase since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. The platform took home two awards in The Wires 2020: “Best New Buy Side Platform” and the prestigious “Grand Prix” award.
Continuing to Innovate
At AdsWizz, our teams are passionate about the power of audio, tirelessly working to enhance our products through innovative features for publishers, advertisers, and podcasters. It is a tremendous honor to receive recognition for all our accomplishments. We would like to thank Digiday for such an incredible award and congratulate all the other winners and nominees in this year’s (virtual) award ceremony. We have some amazing things in store for 2021!
*Programmatic Host-Read Ads are available in our Innovation Labs for existing partners (publishers and advertisers). To learn more about our Innovation Labs, contact your AdsWizz Account Manager.
Looking to harness the power of audio advertising? Reach out!
