marketing

In a new round-up of various music platforms' marketing effectiveness, Pandora topped competitors like Spotify, Last.fm, Deezer, and Grooveshark. Given Pandora's long lead in audience size over the other services, this is probably little surprise.

"While they do have an unfair advantage (they’ve been around for 13 years, have ~1,000 employees and $56.3m funding) it’s worth pointing out that they’re far from having a monopoly," wrote Marcus Taylor, director of online marketing firm VentureHarbour. "Spotify, Last.fm, Deezer and Grooveshark all give Pandora a serious run for their money."

In categories Social Media, Brand Awareness, Website Traffic / SEO, and (as mentioned) Number of Users, Pandora came out on top. For in Online PR category, however, Pandora's streak ends at the hands of Last.fm (with Spotify in second place).

Taylor wrote, "Last.fm receives an impressive amount of search engine traffic to their website, which appears to be attributed to building a vast quantity of backlinks and the creation of 48 million or so user generated pages."

Read about Taylor's sources and other findings in Hypebot here.

Online audio ad rep firm Katz 360 Sales is going global. Katz Media Group announced yesterday that its digital division is expanding to be a "global interactive ad network" offering "local" and "location-based" audio and video capabilities across "all platforms."

The division will be completely rebranded and rebuilt, according to Katz, over the next few months, with a new brand name and an international sales team. Mort Greenberg, who was recently appointed to President of Katz 360 Sales, will head up the transition.

Meanwhile, Triton Digital announced a new partnership with OXIS Media, who will represent Triton to market its streaming, measurement, loyalty and ad-insertion products to media in the UK and Ireland. OXIS Media has engaged leading radio futurologist James Cridland for the task.

Database and e-mail marketing firm Presslaff Interative Revenue has published a new white paper demonstrating the importance of collecting user ZIP codes for online media properties.

"In addition to e-mail address and permission, we believe the single most lucrative piece of data is a user's ZIP code," the paper, called "Finding Gold in ZIP Code Data," opens.

According to the paper, being able to associate a user ID with that user's ZIP code provides three unique benefits: methods to generate revenue, the ability to improve your marketing and promotional efforts, and an enhanced way to drive audience engagement with your brand and content.

Presslaff Interactive Revenue works with more than a thousand radio stations, television stations, and newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. Download "Finding Gold in ZIP Code Data" for free here.

Some great coverage in Inside Radio today on what mobile advertising can do for radio, if broadcasters are ready for it.

Consider that more than 234 million Americans (13+) use mobile devices, but advertisers have yet to spend more than 1% of their media budgets on mobile. The Mobile Marketing Association says mobile's share should grow to 10% over the next four years, and eMarketer says U.S. mobile ad spending will double this year alone. It's obvious a big change should be coming.

"BIA/Kelsey VP Mark Fratrick says radio is poised to do well in mobile because of it offers unique content and has cross-promotional opportunities and armies of local sellers," writes Inside Radio. "But to cash in on the mobile shift requires building out platforms, such as optimizing station websites for the mobile web in order to increase page views and impressions," as groups like Cox, CBS Radio, Entravision, and Emmis have.

Spanish-language radio is already seeing the windfall. An Entravision told Inside Radio that mobile is the company's fastest-growing revenue source, pacing 200% year-over-year, and is now 20% of Entravision and Spanish Broadcasting System interactive revenue. "Mobile will probably be our second biggest ad category outside of broadcasting within the next few years. Mobile is already showing signs that it will leap ahead of online display advertising with a 50% year-over year growth rate," Univision Radio EVP/Sales Lee Davis told the news source.

Subscribe to Inside Radio here.

This year, online will overtake newspapers' share of the global ad market. And in the U.S., digital ad dollars could surpass television by 2017.

Medialife Magazine reports on a new report from market research firm Mintel, writing, "Online's sharp growth curve, combined with slight declines for television, will continue to be sparked by new innovations, such as mobile advertising and increased use of online video streamed directly to television sets. The growth of online radio services, including Pandora and Spotify, will also bolster online ad sales, coming at the expense of terrestrial radio. And the continued shift in consumption of information on digital devices rather than in print will prompt many advertisers to move their money out of newspapers and magazines and put it online."

Meanwhile, media agency Carat says online will overtake newspapers in the global ad market this year (they had earlier predicted it would happen next year). Digital will account for 15.3% of all spending in 2012, second only to television. Newspapers will account for 14.4%, says Carat.

Read more on these developments from Medialife Magazine here and here.