powered by Sounder
Today, we are introducing the Audio Data Cloud, a dedicated, secure, and customizable cloud environment for publishers and platforms to accelerate content discovery, audience engagement, and advertising revenue. It allows publishers and platforms to dramatically increase ad supply through brand safety and suitability analyses, auto-generated segmentation, and rich contextual insights.
The Audio Data Cloud adds the data layer to your audio content strategy that has been historically missing in the industry. It offers publishers and platforms the chance to make their content more accessible, engaging, and monetizable. We use our AI-powered speech-to-text technology to transform audio content to relevant insights, bringing the audio ecosystem up to speed with where we think text and video are today.
Technology-wise, we have finally reached the right level to make audio content analysis more powerful and useful to everyone. Whether it’s AI at large or more specifically machine learning and natural language processing capabilities, this type of tech is no longer reserved for just big tech companies that can build all of these capabilities in-house from scratch. This is groundbreaking technology for audio content, and when leveraged correctly we call it Audio Intelligence.
The Audio Data Cloud provides the opportunity for you to tap into the power of Audio Intelligence at scale.
Drive Content Discovery
There is so much audio content in the world right now. And creation has been increasing more rapidly in the last two years. From January 2020 to now, about 60% of all podcasts ever were published in this period. It’s a wild stat given podcasting has been around for 17 years. That said, getting your content discovered and heard is a bigger challenge today than ever before. And publishers we’ve spoken to tell us just how competitive it is out there. New solutions are required to drive new audiences to engaging content.
Thus, enterprises must pursue strategies that make it easier for listeners to find their content. The Audio Data Cloud drives content discovery in four ways:
- Convert Voice to Text — Translate audio files to text with Sounder’s proprietary speech-to-text technology at faster speeds and lower costs. With this data, the Audio Data Cloud creates valuable insights that drive audience engagement and unlock advertising opportunities.
- Transform Text to Insights — Detect topics, companies, products, people, and places in audio content to improve discovery. These insights are vital for creating engaging discovery experiences both on and off your online home.
- Connect Content to Audiences at Scale — Generate relevant search results and suggestions within your content experience that connect new listeners to your audio. With search, listeners can search beyond just podcast and episode titles and descriptions. The content within each episode is now available to be searched, just like a webpage. Suggestions keep listeners engaged with your catalog of content—highlighting the next best piece of audio content based on a listener’s previous engagement.
- Automatically Optimized Audio SEO — Improve search engine optimization, driving new audiences to your content. Search results on Google or Bing are no longer limited to web pages, videos, and images. Transcripts and keyword identification enable improved search engine performance, driving greater discovery for your entire catalog.
Deepen Audience Engagement
Once a listener is drawn to a piece of content, it’s then essential to nurture that relationship. Finding ways to create immersive audio experiences that enable deep listener-content connections. The Audio Data Cloud allows you to create engaging experiences automatically. Here are the four ways the Audio Data Cloud deepens audience engagement:
- Enable Deep Content Connectivity — Transform a listener’s content interests into deeper engagement with the content they love the most. This allows you to unlock hidden passions amongst your listeners. Say, for example, a listener is listening to an episode about basketball. Our recommendations API can automatically showcase relevant content within the same topic: highlighting other episodes or clips about the Milwaukee Bucks, Western Conference, Madison Square Garden, or LeBron James.
- Generate Automatic Highlights — Access auto-generated content clips and audio chapters to spark audience engagement and sharing. Segmentation allows listeners to jump into the content at the right time. Think of it like someone reading the chapter of a book that is most relevant.
- Create Audio Notifications — Re-engage listeners with relevant updates that draw them back into your content at the right time. Drawing previous audiences back to your content is essential for creating deep and meaningful listener relationships. With the Audio Data Cloud, you can create custom push notifications, email alerts, text messages, or any other type of notification that can inform listeners when there is new, relevant, and interesting content to consume.
- Create New Interactivity Experiences — Reimagine how listeners interact with your content. With our data, you can create dynamic polls, quizzes, betting, and other engaging activities for listeners to participate in the conversation. Transform podcasting from a one-way to a two-way conversation.
Unlock Advertising Revenue
Finally, Audio Data Cloud unlocks a host of new advertising solutions for you to improve the quality and increase the quantity of your ad supply. According to a Statista report, podcast audio advertising is a fast-growing market, expecting to reach $4 billion worldwide by 2025.
The Audio Data Cloud helps accelerate how you can maximize revenue from their thousands of hours of content in three ways:
- Enable Brands Safe Advertising Experiences — Allow any brand to engage with your audience, adhering to industry standards while also providing customizable brand safety guidelines. This API is based on industry standards such as GARM, ensuring that brands can have a safe environment to pitch their products and services to engaged consumers.
- Identify New & Natural Ad Placements — Drive more revenue by delivering audio ads at organic and high-value moments. Discover hidden breaks in the conversation, or rather perfect new moments for an ad break, increasing your ad supply and expanding revenue potential.
- Offer Brands Contextually Relevant Ad Placements — Create premium advertising opportunities next to relevant topics, people, products, places, sentiment, and more. Brand suitability enables you to help brands find evergreen topics such as horror movies, basketball, or Marvel content to advertise alongside. It can even identify more topical and trending moments such as Squid Game, Spider-Man, or Adele’s new album. It unlocks your ability to offer contextual advertising to your advertising partners, enabling a highly memorable moment for a brand to share its message with potential consumers.
Get started
The Audio Data Cloud is available to every audio publisher or platform. If you’re eager to learn how our solution would work for your company, please email me at joey@sounder.fm.
Joey Fernandez
Head of Product at Sounder
