iHeartRadio launched in beta in the Australian market today. With it, ARN is bidding to compete in a packed streaming music market via "strong connections to local media" and via branded music channels to major brands.
But it's more than just streaming music and custom playlists: the system combines live radio too. Kate Beddoe, iHeartRadio national director, said that was important because people's needs change during the day: breakfast and drive talk shows for example, switching to music as background in the evening.
Beddoe said the system also has major opportunities for brands as media channel owners: Using the service brands can also create custom channels for campaigns based around the music they wish to associate themselves with.
For example, in the US, where the service has over 60 million monthly users, Pepsi and Coke have custom radio stations which are promoted on air and via social. "We're trying to drive connections between brands and audiences," said Beddoe.
Locally that option will be offered to advertisers either on a sponsorship or campaign basis. "We work with brands to come up with an idea of what type of music they want to be associated with and then we will build it in New York," she told AdNews.
Similarly, brands can target audiences via artist or genre. By way of example an energy drink brand could target against Swedish House Mafia, Beddoe suggests.
Other advertising slots will be available in the in-app version, when it launches in September. For now, the beta service is internet only.
In radio mode, it will play the usual radio ads. In streaming mode, users will only receive a 15 second pre-roll when they choose a custom station, they will not face further interruption until they change onto another custom station, said Beddoe.
ARN hopes to build on the data sets it acquires from customers using the custom version (no sign-up is required to use the radio version). They will be required to submit email, age, gender and postcode. Over time, iHeartRadio will be able to build up more data about their content preferences. That will be useful not only for the service, which will be able to see which artists are trending, but for advertisers and marketers, said Beddoe.
While agreeing that the market was becoming saturated, with Pandora gearing up for commercial launch last week alongside other tech giants, Beddoe said that those with strong links to local media aligned with a "strong international roadmap" would be the ones to survive "highly likely" consolidation and make it out alive to mainstream audiences.
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