Octave Audio taps valuable new audiences for big brand clients by harnessing Covatic technology
Overview
Octave Audio, a joint venture between commercial radio operators News UK and Bauer Media, was looking for ways to maximise first-party data for advertising purposes, by bringing true addressability to the digital audio space, enabling its clients to target audiences at scale across premium audio environments.
Samsung wanted Octave’s help to tap into a rich pool of regular commuters and activate those listeners with digital audio ads for their Samsung Buds headphones. Retail client ASDA, on the other hand, was already running campaigns with Octave and looking to increase the addressability of their digital audio campaigns. The goal was to identify and activate shoppers of competitor supermarkets in addition to Octave’s regular Savvy Shoppers segments.
With access to high-quality data from a shared pool of media titles, podcasts, and apps, Octave Audio wanted to categorise users into segments based on the devices they used and where they shopped, enabling Samsung and ASDA to efficiently target previously undiscovered relevant audiences. However, with privacy at the forefront of advertisers’ minds and a growing concern for consumers and businesses alike, the priority was to monetise existing audiences anonymously, without exposing personal data.
What was the role of digital within the media mix?
Octave applied Covatic’s, ID-less, privacy-first technology, A-Type, to support its clients – including Samsung Buds and ASDA – in maximising addressable reach among target audiences through digital audio advertising.
Covatic’s on-device technology employed probabilistic methodologies to determine customers who are currently unlikely to be ASDA shoppers, generating new audiences for the brand to target via mobile and smart speaker. In the case of Samsung Buds, the solution used deterministic modelling and on-device processing to understand the mobile phone's brand and the devices connected to it. These insights were exposed to the Adswizz ad engine as anonymous advertising segments so that an ad could be served to the user without any party knowing the identity of that user.
Covatic’s technology is integrated into all of the Bauer Media and News Broadcasting radio apps served by Octave – such as Talksport, Greatest Hits Radio, Virgin Radio, Absolute, and Kiss – and uncovers insights and patterns to be leveraged by advertisers to reach high-value audience segments.
What results did you attain? What was the biggest achievement?
Octave was able to help ASDA target regular shoppers at core competitor supermarkets using Covatic’s audience segmentation technology, delivering:
- 11.4 million impressions
- 98.2% listen-through rate
Additionally, the supermarket giant has significantly increased campaign delivery since using audience segmentation to reach high-value target audiences.
The technology also helped to deliver ads to regular commuters for the Samsung Buds campaign, which saw:
- 385K impressions
- 98% listen-through rate
The results surpassed expectations and the digital audio company helped to maximise Samsung Buds and ASDA’s audience reach in a privacy-first way, emphasising the potential of the partnership between Covatic’s innovative solutions and Octave’s rich pool of online commercial radio listeners. Samsung and ASDA have since continued to run campaigns through Octave’s network with ongoing successful results, with ASDA's average monthly spending increasing 70% since implementing the Covatic segments.
The partnership's most significant achievement was generating new revenue for Octave’s business – hitting the six-figure mark.
What’s the killer headline?
Octave Audio achieves six-figure incremental revenue and identifies new audiences for retail clients by harnessing Covatic technology.
