The advertising industry has spent the better part of two decades staring at screens, which may explain why it has largely forgotten that human beings have ears.
Kay Hsu, the global head of Creative Lab at Spotify, made this point during a conversation at Brandweek in Atlanta on Tuesday, where she suggested that marketers have become so preoccupied with visual formats that they have neglected the one element that travels across all of them: sound.
Ms. Hsu, whose unit works with brands on audio advertising for the streaming service, argued that the old distinctions between audio, video, live events, and text have collapsed. A podcast, she noted, can now exist simultaneously as a show, a video series, and a touring live experience — a kind of content hydra that would have confused media planners of an earlier generation. (They had enough trouble with print and broadcast.)
Yet sound, she said, remains the connective tissue running through all these formats, and the thing brands most often overlook when attempting to build what the industry now calls "fandoms" — a word that has migrated from comic conventions to media plans with remarkable speed.
The argument is not entirely new; audio advertising has been making the case for ears over eyeballs since roughly the advent of radio. But it arrives at a moment when Spotify and its competitors are working to convince marketers that streaming audio deserves a larger share of budgets that have historically flowed toward television and, more recently, toward the various rectangles of social media.
Whether brands will shift their attention from screens to speakers remains to be seen. Old habits on Madison Avenue tend to die slowly, and the advertising business has always been more comfortable with things it can see.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Spotify’s Creative Lab Chief Lobbies for Sounds Over Screens"