Spotify Launches Ad Creation Studio in Canada

March 14, 2018

One of the most popular music streaming services in the world has announced a new way for Canadians to advertise through their platform.

Spotify has officially launched their Ad Studio Beta in Canada, allowing Canadian companies or entrepreneurs to create ads for the Spotify platform in mere minutes.

“Ad Studio lets you create audio ads to be heard by listeners of the Spotify Free service during ad breaks between songs, on both desktop and mobile platforms,” reads the Ad Studio website. “Each ad can be 15 or 30 seconds long. The ad will also need to contain a clickable image to be shown for the duration of the ad. The clickable image can link to a single URL of your choice.”

The ads will only be heard by those who use the free version of Spotify. It was reported in mid-2017 that there are over 55 million paying customers for Spotify, and over 90 million free users, so ads on the service have the ability to reach a massive audience. Back in 2016, Spotify said that Canadian users spend an average of 150 minutes on the platform.

Those who use the service can create ads in a few different ways. They can upload a fully completed ad and run it as is, or upload guidance and have Spotify create voice-overs for them. Either way, the ads must run 15 or 30 seconds in total.

Ads created on the platform can be specifically targeted, just like ads created through Google or Facebook. Of course, Spotify ads rely heavily on musical taste, location, gender, age and activity, so those are the main points for advertisers to focus on. Ads can even focus on specific genres, playlists or fans.

Budgets and dates can be customized for ad campaigns and tracked through the Ad Studio insights platform. In press for the Ad Studio, Spotify has cited studies from Nielsen Media Lab that indicate audio ads are twice as likely to boost purchasing intent when compared to regular display ads, with a 24 per cent higher ad recall in total.

The Ad Studio platform has been used by over 1,000 companies to create over 4,700 campaigns in the U.S. so far. The minimum spend for a Spotify ad is $250 in the local currency.

Along with launching in Canada, the Ad Studio also launched in the U.K.