SoundCloud Doubles Its Programmatic Ad Inventory by Partnering with Rubicon Project

Advertisers are increasingly looking to gain healthy momentum in programmatic across mobile, video, audio, and other media formats. As advertisers continue to thrust internet’s power to connect with today’s audiences using interactive screens and content, the ad tech landscape will see a dramatic change in coming months, especially in Programmatic. To provide a programmatic customer-friendly ecosystem for ad publishers prompted online audio streaming platform SoundCloud to partner with Rubicon Project.

“Together with Rubicon Project, we are now able to serve up our global audio and video inventory on one platform for the first time in an automated fashion,” stated Alison Moore, SoundCloud CRO.

SoundCloud, the leading Berlin-based social media online streaming platform has announced a strategic partnership with the CA-based advertising automation cloud platform Rubicon Project. The partnership will open up SoundCloud’s premium sound and video inventory to programmatic ad buyers and sellers. Through Rubicon Project’s automated advertising platform, advertisers across the world will be able to offer first-party and content-level targeting solutions across SoundCloud’s user base. Rubicon Project will extend its programmatic automation ad platform on SoundCloud to US, UK, Ireland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany. More countries are expected to be added to the list in 2017.

Moore went to add, “Together with Rubicon Project we are now able to serve up our global audio and video inventory on one platform for the first time in an automated fashion, making it easier than ever for advertisers to share their message with the right person, at precisely the right time.”

“We really believe that audio ad formats are going to be an important component for how we talk to users in the future,” said Tom Kershaw, Rubicon Project’s chief product, and engineering officer.

“Today’s announcement further establishes Rubicon Project’s leadership position in programmatic audio and underscores our ongoing commitment to providing buyers the ability to access premium, highly sought after supply at scale via automated channels regardless of ad format. We are very excited to work with a streaming audio leader like SoundCloud to open up its users to advertisers and brands seeking to leverage the many benefits of transacting their ad spend programmatically.”

This is the second partnership in programmatic for SoundCloud in 2017, within a space of two weeks. The media streaming platform announced its partnership with Triton Digital – an audio supply advertising platform for live and on-demand ad publishers. The partnership ushered programmatic ad buying and selling opportunities on SoundCloud for US advertisers. Now, by extending its partnership to Rubicon, it is evident that SoundCloud is going deeper into the programmatic ecosystem, enhancing its revenue-generating capabilities.

According to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report published in December 2016, US advertisers invested $17.6 billion in digital advertisements in Q3 of 2016. The figure marked 20% increase from the previous year’s record, accounting for 4.3% increase over Q2 2016. The share of programmatic advertising in this figure has grown significantly in last two years.   By offering enriching and target-specific ad inventory, advertisers can monetize their ad revenues significantly.

2017 is stated to be the “tipping year” for programmatic ad spending, especially after registering 40% growth in 2017 (According to emarketer, US programmatic ad spending was projected to touch $22 billion by 2016-end). Programmatic advertising with mobile-first strategy is a serious business opportunity for ad publishers eyeing targeted audience base in the North America, Europe, and APAC.

SoundCloud’s partnership with Rubicon Project signals a remarkable ad spending transformation ahead, encouraging businesses to become more comfortable with ad tech that can be adopted across a variety of mediums and social channels.