During childhood, the majority of the adverts that stick in our memory are the ones with the catchy music and jingles. In the 90s most ads on the radio and TV seemed to have elaborated, yet often cheesy, jingles and claims. Unfortunately, most original jingles have since disappeared.

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However, having high-quality audio in your ads is still a game-changer in the advertising space. But how can your business take advantage of this in a scalable and affordable way?

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The costs of Audio Production

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There are many reasons why audio and video ads feel so much more generic than they used to 20 years ago: maxed-out media time, short campaigns, or cross-channel-marketing just to name a few. With the internet being omnipresent for the majority of people nowadays, advertising has accelerated and become more competitive than ever. 

On top of that, there’s an ever-growing discrepancy between the budgets of huge corporations as well as unicorns on the one side, and everybody else on the other. There are many unicorns that we could mention memorable ads from, however not so much because of their wit and memorability, but rather because of their sheer volume. That kind of media volume costs a lot of money.

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Delivering More Value

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In principle, radio and audio ads are not rocket science. Still, they require serious planning, concept work, and flawless execution. These things often take months, which equals a lot of expenses and time for your company. The worst part of it all is that you have no idea how the campaign will go down your audience, and what you could have done better.

The challenge is that audio production is not scalable. Yes, you can create 3 or 4 different versions and test them against each other but not only will that increase your production costs, it’s also still very limited in terms of version-testing.

That's why Aflorithmic created a solution for creating audio at scale. With API.audio you can now create thousands of audio ads in a matter of minutes. We think this is a no-brainer use case for our technology because it can address all of the issues previously mentioned, and offers limitless additional possibilities:

1. Production cost and time to market

Instead of hiring an ad agency, contracting a matching voice actor, booking a studio, hiring an audio engineer, and polishing things up in post-production, you can now do all of this in minutes with API.audio, saving you thousands, as well as your precious time which is priceless.

2. Personalization and dynamic content

Just imagine a drugstore offering a specific product range in some, but not all of their stores. Another case would be offering discounts for sunscreen when it’s hot outside, and umbrellas when it’s raining. You can now create automated ads that are personalized with different variables, making each ad feel personal and relevant to the listener. 

Another example would be offering tickets for the artist you’re listening to on Spotify if they have a concert coming up in your area, or a supermarket offering daily deals. Recording these would not only be expensive, but also the turnaround time would take longer than the offer being valid. And there are countless other options in industries such as Gaming, Health, Education and more.

3. A/B and Multivariate-Testing

Given that audio production with API.audio is so fast and easy, you can now create an unlimited number of versions of your ad. You can try different copies, personalized and non-personalized content, different music choices, or different speakers. There is literally no limit to how many versions of your ad you can produce within minutes. 

API.audio will also produce a VAST file to go with your ad. This will make it incredibly easy to hand your ad over to a wide variety of advertising players. There is no reason not to optimize your audio advertising campaign in the same way you would optimize your search or display campaign.

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A game-changer in advertising

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All of this means that, for the first time, you can now truly treat your audio advertising as a programmatic channel. It’s fast to produce, you can create an unlimited number of versions for 1:1 targeting and you can optimize your campaign on a granular level never seen before. API.audio is powered by our ExO rendering engine, which is capable of creating thousands of audio files in under 1 minute. You can use API.audio not only for audio ads but also for voice overs for your videos.

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How does it work?

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All of this sounds too good to be true, right? Let’s take a look how it works:

1. Create a script by simply typing a text
2. Add your personalization variables such as user name, local weather, store address or product price
3. Select a speaker out of 500+ available text to speech voices in 60+ languages
4. Select a sound design that matches the look & feel of your ad
5. Run the code (this will render the speech, create the versions, mix & master the audio and optionally produce a VAST file to accompany them)
6. Load the VAST files into your favorite advertising platform and create a campaign
   

How does it sound?

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Here are a few examples of audio ads created with API.audio:

Here's a typical car ad. The personalization elements are the car types (92 Santa Fes) and location (Bank Street Hyundai).

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And this one is for a Squarespace ad that doesn't use any personalization parameters:

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Conclusion

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Audio ads have been excluded from programmatic marketing for a long time but now, for the first time, API.audio is enabling the creation o audio ads that are fast and cost-effective to produce, available in unlimited versions, and conveniently delivered with a VAST file, the gold standard format for advertising.

Synthetic voices, audio templates, and the API infrastructure allow your business to create ads that are closer to the consumer, highly relevant, and feed into existing ad platforms.

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About Aflorithmic:

Aflorithmic.ai is a London/Barcelona-based technology company. Its API.audio platform enables fully automated, scalable audio production by using synthetic media, voice cloning, and audio mastering, to then deliver it on any device, such as websites, mobile apps, or smart speakers.

With this Audio-As-A-Service, anybody can create beautiful sounding audio, starting from a simple text to including music and complex audio engineering without any previous experience required.

The team consists of highly skilled specialists in machine learning, software development, voice synthesizing, AI research, audio engineering, and product development.