This week’s guest is Marco Bertozzi, who is the Vice President of EMEA Sales & Multi-Market Global Sales at Spotify. He talks to us about how Spotify’s ad business has evolved from the early days, why the company believes strongly in the future of podcasting, and what the audience’s relationship is like with advertising in audio. He also explains why they’ve just launched a #Loveads campaign.
In the news roundup the team discusses the BBC’s latest plans to save local democracy, the NYT’s comments about Apple’s latest foray into news, and asks if MySpace deleting every upload prior to 2016 is the future of social media. Plus, cupcakes!
In our own words: Esther Kezia Thorpe
The timing of this chat with Spotify’s VP of EMEA Marco Bertozzi couldn’t have been better. Not only has Spotify been at the forefront of industry news over the past few weeks, but they’ve also just launched their own #Loveads campaign to reinforce positive sentiment around music and advertising.
There can be no doubt behind the company’s growth intentions following their acquisitions of Gimlet, Anchor, and just this week, podcast studio Parcast.
“Our goal is to become the number one audio platform in the world. And you can’t do that without thinking about the other ways that people are consuming audio,” Bertozzi told me.
Although they’ve not necessarily been early to the podcasting table, Spotify see podcasts as more than just hype – the numbers are there to back up the investment.
“People who listen to podcasts on our platform spend more than twice as long on the platform, than those who only listen to music…I think we’ve got a huge opportunity to revolutionize all of this.”
It was also encouraging to hear from Bertozzi that Spotify is doing a lot of work with advertisers to educate them on how valuable that audio audience is. Much of the current thinking is still based in radio, but music and podcasts are available wherever and whenever people want to listen to it, which gives a vital layer of context and value to that audience.
We may be biased, but when the biggest music streaming service in the world sees an opportunity to invest heavily in podcasting, it must be more than a passing media fad.
Sign up for our newsletter! Get the latest episode, plus all the week’s news, links, and what we’re reading in your inbox every week.
