SoundCloud, Deezer and Pandora Audio Media Buying

Two of these three are wrong for you, and the work starts by establishing which. Pandora sells in the United States only. Deezer's ad-supported weight concentrates in France, Brazil and the telco-bundled markets and thins out fast outside them. SoundCloud sits with the eighteen to thirty band and around music that has not been signed yet. A plan that names all three is a plan that has not been made. Pandora: Bought through SiriusXM Media, self-serve at low weight and by insertion order above it. The reason to be there is the registered-user data, which is declared rather than modelled: age, gender, postal code, station and genre behaviour. Sponsored Listening, where a listener trades an interaction for a block of uninterrupted playback, returns engagement figures that flatter a deck. We use it when the offer genuinely needs an interaction and never as the shape of a whole plan. Deezer: Worth buying where the audience actually is. In its concentration markets the reach is real and the ad load is lighter than its competitors, which matters for a thirty-second read that wants to be the only thing in the break. Outside those markets we have watched a serious weekly budget fail to spend against the targeting a client asked for, and the correct response is to move the money rather than widen the targeting until it delivers. SoundCloud: The one platform of the three where the surrounding content is mostly unsigned artists and the audience is aware of it. That works for a brand with a credible reason to stand next to it, a marketplace or a product with a creator user base, and reads as trespassing for everyone else. Bought self-serve and through the open exchange, promoted audio alongside standard inventory. How the decision gets made: Week one splits budget across whichever platforms survived the first conversation, running identical creative at identical frequency settings, and holds until each has served enough to separate from noise. That threshold is set and written into the plan before launch, so the decision is not made by whoever is most persuasive in the review meeting. From there one platform takes the majority of the flight and the others hold a token presence or stop. What we refuse: Listen-through rate as a success metric. On non-skippable inventory it will read above ninety percent whether the campaign worked or not. Running all three permanently so a media plan looks diversified. Setting Deezer or SoundCloud to worldwide because a brief said worldwide. And accepting platform-reported conversions as the only evidence: every flight carries a code, a spoken URL or a matched-market read that lives in your analytics, not theirs. Fit: This is for brands already running something in audio and asking what belongs beside it. If you have never bought audio at all, start with one platform and one market you can measure. If your market is the United States and the budget is substantial, most of it belongs in the broadcast networks and their podcast inventory rather than here, and we will say that on the first call and lose the brief rather than build the wrong one. Not for: Teams who want one dashboard covering all three. There is not one, the reconciliation is manual, and anyone promising otherwise is showing you a spreadsheet with a chart on it. Also not for flights under about six thousand dollars a month split across platforms, which buys three campaigns each too thin to read.