Last week, Pandora, the premier provider of personalized radio service online, announced it had reached two million downloads of its iPhone application. This week Pandora significantly extended its mobile marketing options for advertisers with an application on Windows Mobile, the second most popular mobile operating system in the U.S. according to comScore/M:Metrics. The move further readies Pandora's strategy of being poised to ride the wave of a projected mobile advertising market of $12 billion by 2013, according to research firm Informa Telecom & Media as reported on CNNMoney.com in October. That projection would also constitute a significant uptick in mobile advertising dollars over the next five years, estimated to be only $1.72 billion for 2008.
"It's not by accident that we are aggressively building out our mobile marketing strategy," said Cheryl Lucanegro, senior vice president of advertising sales for Pandora. "When high-speed mobile networks are the norm and smartphones meet critical mass, we want to be able to offer our clients interested in mobile advertising a vast array of options, including location-based tools to find concerts and restaurants, on every mobile platform."
In 2007, smartphones only accounted for 11% of total handsets shipped worldwide according to Strategy Analytics. The research firm sees a dramatically different composition by 2012 where smartphones will comprise nearly 30% of shipped handsets, representing 452 million devices.
"We expect the evolution to continue at the same accelerated clip. As we've seen with the iPhone and the surge in applications in the App Store and corresponding rapid adoption by users, not to mention iPhone competitors such as the Android and the BlackBerry Storm, the market is gathering momentum," said Tom Conrad, Pandora's CTO and head of application development. "These are obviously big players who will deliver exciting, fully featured smartphones that will make engaging ad platforms and Pandora will be ready as well."
About Pandora
Pandora ( www.pandora.com) is a personalized Internet radio and music discovery service available anytime and anywhere on the PC, in the home, and on mobile devices via partnerships with AT&T, Apple and Sprint. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project begun in 2000 and is the most thorough analysis of popular music ever undertaken. Each song in this massive collection is analyzed by more than 30 trained musicians, and assessed against nearly 400 distinct musical attributes such as melody, harmony, and rhythm to capture its unique musical identity. Using this information to build playlists based on musical similarity, listeners can simply enter a favorite song or artist, and instantly launch a personalized listening experience which includes discovery of new bands, artists and songs. Pandora is the largest online music site based on monthly unique visitors, has a growing user base of more than twenty million registered listeners, a database of over 575,000 songs, and national advertisers such as HP, Microsoft, Honda, Procter & Gamble, and Nike.