With this partnership, Gaana – India’s largest streaming service – will integrate Instreamatic’s technology to place fully-measurable interactive voice ads within audio content
SAN FRANCISCO – Instreamatic, the voice dialogue marketing platform that allows media companies and advertisers to measure, manage, and monetize audio content by utilizing new interactive voice AI technology, and Gaana, India’s largest music and content streaming service, have partnered to integrate Instreamatic into Gaana’s platform. This partnership enables advertisers on Gaana to leverage Instreamatic technology and serve fully-measurable, interactive voice dialogue ads both in India and internationally. Gaana, with a userbase of more than 125 million monthly active users and more than 3.2 billion monthly streams, is also joining Instreamatic’s voice ad exchange for enhanced voice ad monetization as part of the new partnership.
Advertisers on audio-based apps have struggled with the “click challenge” inherent to the medium: because audio can’t be clicked – unlike the visual-based digital ads published on web and mobile interfaces – measuring and attributing the success of audio ad campaigns is often difficult and only estimates. Instreamatic’s technology provides a definitive answer to this challenge through fully-measurable interactive voice ads. With this partnership, Gaana listeners will engage with voice ads that present them with verbal prompts from a brand. For example, an ad’s call-to-action might invite the listener to respond affirmatively in order to receive more information about a product, or negatively to simply skip the ad. The ads are powered by Instreamatic’s True Voice AI technology, providing natural language understanding that enables audiences to engage with the ads in a native, conversational manner – with interactions that go far beyond simple “yes or no” responses.
“At Gaana, we strive to connect listeners with the experiences that put them in the driver’s seat, whether it’s choosing to listen to their favorite songs or, through this partnership, engaging with interactive voice ads where they control the conversation,” said Prashan Agarwal, CEO, Gaana. “With voice poised to be the interface of choice in the coming decade, we’re excited to introduce Instreamatic’s pioneering technology on our platform, and look forward to helping advertisers deliver the positive experiences it makes possible.”
Instreamatic is especially valuable – and differentiated – to advertisers because it enables continuous dialogue communications with listeners, allowing brands to engage in ongoing conversations not only across ads, but even across channels and audio publishers. Advertisers can retarget listeners with fresh ad content optimized with a full awareness of each individual’s engagement history with a campaign (and their responses to each ad).
Gaana has constantly innovated on behalf of its customers, be it in the form of lyrics, Gaana videos, or voice search. Gaana prides itself in being a dominant regional player with more than one-third of its playouts coming from languages other than English and Hindi. Apart from India, Gaana also has an engaged user base in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and UAE.
“As the popularity of streaming audio continues to increase, advertisers require empirical real-time ad metrics to fully understand the impact of their ad campaigns, while listeners seek more of a say in what shape those ad experiences take,” said Stas Tushinskiy, CEO, Instreamatic. “We’re proud to be partnering with Gaana and expanding into India in such a big way, and to play a role in delivering superior audio ad experiences for listeners and advertisers alike.”
Instreamatic also gathers metrics on all ad interactions and provides advertisers with rich and empirical data to fully measure the impact of ad campaigns, understand audience responses, and perform data-driven campaign optimization. Additionally, Instreamatic’s AI leverages deep learning mechanisms designed to iteratively refine and enhance the service to better understand user intent, further improving the user’s ad experience and the impact of campaigns. The robust potential of Instreamatic’s technology and dialogue advertising to deliver consumer engagement exceeding that of passive ads – while also providing indelible brand experiences – has been demonstrated in preliminary performance results.
By leveraging Instreamatic, Gaana is continuing to make emerging AI technologies a key component for creating more personalized experiences for its massive listener base. Gaana, which is owned by Times Internet and backed by Tencent, is growing at about 100% year-over-year, both with ad revenue and subscription revenue.
About Instreamatic
Instreamatic is a voice dialogue marketing platform utilizing voice AI technology. The company provides an end-to-end solution for managing, measuring and monetizing voice-enabled advertising including a programmatic Ad Exchange for assisting clients with advertising sales. Founded in 2014 with services focused on digital audio and ad sales, the company shifted its focus to establishing the first voice-enabled end-to-end solution for digital audio publishers and marketers. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.
About Gaana
Gaana is India’s No. 1 music streaming app with more than 125 million monthly active users. Featuring more than 45 million songs across Bollywood, International and 30 Indic languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi, Malayalam, English, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Bengali, Assamese & Oriya. Launched in April 2010 by Times Internet, it is India’s go-to music app across genres and languages, offering unlimited, free and legal access to music. Gaana is owned by Times Internet and Tencent.
