To maintain control and security of our first-party data, Pandora stores user data on Google Cloud Platform. We chose to build our own data management platform to develop, host, and activate our first-party audience segments.
And to help advertisers find their desired audiences, we developed our Audience Explorer tool. This allows our sales and customer service teams to compare a client’s audience segments to the broader Pandora audience based on affinity index attributes such as age, family status, and artist preferences, and music attributes such as the mindset within the lyrics.
Approximately half of all ads sold by SXM Media are targeted truemoney database using enhanced audience targeting. This includes both Pandora and partner platforms such as SoundCloud, where we use their data assets to extend first-party audience targeting through a secure and anonymous data partnership. SXM Media became the exclusive US advertising representative for SoundCloud in 2019.
We develop enhanced advanced segments using our own data, data incorporated from advertiser clients, or data we purchase from high-quality vendors. The increased cost per impression we generate on enhanced segments is critical to our ability
►Preparing the business for the future
As we look to future-proof our business and reduce our use of third-party data, we’re beginning to experiment with how we can use our rich first-party data to develop new audience segments that we historically haven’t been able to define, such as homeowners or self-employed individuals.
To do this, we start by building a statistically significant set of anonymous users who we know fall into the segment we’re trying to build. Using this set of listeners, we can build and train a predictive model based on the thousands of first-party attributes available in our app. Once we’ve tested and validated the model, we can determine how many listeners fall into the segment and help our advertising partners reach them with promotions that are relevant and useful.
As SXM Media continues to grow, we’ll look to extend Pandora’s personalized listening experience across all of our brands. This will enable rich and scaled first-party targeting opportunities, while maintaining the privacy of our publisher, listener, and advertising partners.
►Leading with privacy
Privacy has always been paramount in our relationships with users. We take pride in the way we protect listener data, carefully understand where our data comes from, and only use data from users who have given their consent.
Pandora has a decade of experience enabling rich data first-hand. With these learnings, we will continue to expand our capabilities to the rest of the SXM Media portfolio.