“Pandora wants advertisers to know: No cookies, no problem,” Tim Peterson reports for Advertising Age. “Even if privacy concerns and a shift to mobile devices neuter the web’s ‘cookie’ tracking software, companies like Pandora can still target consumers with the data they get every day when users sign in.”
“Now Pandora is pitching ad buyers on two audience segments it’s assembled exactly that way, one for Hispanic listeners and another for Spanish speakers in particular,” Peterson reports. “The Internet radio company — which counts more than 200 million registered users and 70.9 million monthly active listeners — stocks up on first-party data by collecting an individual’s age, gender and zip code information when someone signs up for the service. Recently Pandora began digging into that registered user data to mine specific audience segments that are similar to the cookie-based ones to which online display advertisers have grown accustomed to.”
“Late last month Pandora finalized the first two of these proprietary audience segments — one for Hispanic listeners and a sub-segment of Spanish-speaking listeners — and has been pitching these audience targets to agencies over the last few weeks,” Peterson reports. “To create the first two sub-categories, the company cross-referenced its registered user data with U.S. census data (i.e. publicly available first-party government data) to identify zip codes with high populations of Hispanic and Spanish-speaking people and ran tests overlaying the two data sets to infer which listeners fit into those buckets… Pandora aims to add two new segments every four to six weeks, depending on how quickly it can access and assess the data needed to model those listener groups, Mr. Krawczyk said. The next batch will surface listeners with high-household incomes through the combination of census data and registered user information.”
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