‘Virtual professor’ Mark Ritson says advertisers should be allocating circa 11 per cent of media budgets to total audio. Problem is, the market’s not buying Ritson’s line. Audio’s dollar share is sitting just over half of that and static, despite broadcast audiences increasing 6 per cent since Covid and time spent on total audio surging 49 per cent.  SCA thinks media planners may be behind the curve – and aims to change that by hammering home both the audience growth message and the fact it now has the tech firepower and user data to compete with the likes of Meta, Amazon and Google on performance-led conversion.

Via audio platform LiSTNR, approaching 2 million logged-in users, SCA is armed with personalisation smarts and first party data matching via data cleanrooms that enable highly efficient and effective audience targeting via dynamic creative messaging. That means it can deliver both sharper behavioural and contextual targeting as well as broadcast reach – and some major QSR and cosmetics brands are piling in for a deeper read on where key audiences are, and what they are consuming. But you need to cover both bases, per National Head of Audio Sales Luke Minto, because SCA uses the tech stack in its own marketing efforts – and watched conversion plummet 30 per cent when broad reach was wound down for targeted performance alone.

While advertisers need a deeper understanding of what audio can now deliver, Head of Digital Ad Product and Operations, Kim Loasby, says her key message to advertisers is “you don’t have to be an expert.” SCA will walk buyers though the layers.

Loasby says SCA has just done that for a certain mattress brand – where buyers are in market every five years at best. By ingesting the brand’s data, SCA found its high value customers “significantly over-indexed in listening to Abbie Chatfield … So then we could definitively say ‘people who are lookalikes to your highest value customers are likely to be entertained by this piece of content’.” It worked. “They immediately pushed some more data.” Other brands, she says, are using SCA’s new data capabilities and dynamic creative optimisation to re-engage lapsed buyers while suppressing others – making the budget go further. “So we are seeing our ad tech pay dividends for brands already.”