Pandora Product Lead on Building Digital Marketing Products

Digital Marketing: Challenging Traditional Models

Are you familiar with “deep value” advertising? Unlike early forms of digital marketing, deep value advertising focuses on forging a personal relationship with customers through collaboration. Simply put, you’re not spamming your customers with ads and hoping that a small quantity get the message. This way, you can ask them to do something that leads to an objective that you are looking to identify and reward them for it. In doing so, they are actually monetizing their free time and ability to try new things.

Difficulties With Informing Users of New Features

Often companies struggle to inform customers of a product’s brand new feature. For instance, most people are aware that Pandora can stream music. However, despite being a company with 70 million users, Pandora has difficulties in getting the word out about a crucial new product feature. The new feature that some people are not aware of is that Pandora can now stream music on-demand in a similar way that Apple Music and Spotify can stream music. Perhaps, this could open the doors to a new way of advertising.

Traditional Digital Marketing is Broken

Traditional marketing methods, based on digital advertising, are often insufficient and inefficient for trying to get the word out and help people to understand the new product feature. We propose that there is a better way to do this. Rather than spamming folks, you target them directly and you actually ask them to do something relevant to them and relevant to you. This lets everyone win by directly monetizing attention. Plus, we become aware of our own time and attention rather than being the target. We become the beneficiary of that ad personalization rather than being the target. 

If we look at digital ad spending, it’s obviously increasing and increasing. It’s taken over TV and it’s now the number one type of media spent. We have obviously Google and Facebook who are behemoths in this space. It is really amazing how much money is going through here. Especially when you consider that it is so dysfunctional and inefficient. You can’t even see half of the ads. For instance:

•  People generally find them really annoying.
•  There is increasing use of ad blocking technology.
•  Fraud and inconsistent data. 

The reality is that in our rush to monetize and make all this money we have not always made the best decisions and really not all of us are complicit in this.

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