Music boosts ad recall

Warc, 15 February 2013

LONDON: Music streaming services need to be "more imperial" about demonstrating the effectiveness of music in brand advertising, a leading industry figure has declared.

Speaking to Marketing Week, Nic Jones, vice president of international at Vevo, the music video streaming service, said: "The strongest emotional connection is with music content – it's the best kind of content for viewers to encode ads to memory."

Vevo ran a study last year in the US, which it plans to repeat in the UK this year, that found consumers viewing music videos were more likely to remember subsequent advertisements than those watching online TV clips.

Jones admitted the industry had so far failed to get people to think about advertising around music in this way.

But Arnon Woolfson, head of content, rights and intellectual property at Anomaly, the marketing communications agency, anticipated the music industry's relationships developing in a new direction.

"My feeling is that we will see the music industry working much closer with brands in more strategic partnerships as opposed to one way financial deals, where brands part with money and see little ROI," he said.

"I predict brands moving into the finance and marketing roles for the newly created entertainment IP," he added.

This area was addressed in a recent Warc Trends Snapshot which suggested that analysis of music data will increasingly be used as a source of consumer insight and engagement.

It included the example of Skoda, which invited invited Swedish singles to share their Facebook and Spotify profiles, before matching people who shared musical tastes and offering them a shared test drive as a 'date'.

Data sourced from Marketing Week; additional content by Warc staff