Dive Brief:
- E-commerce brand 1-800-Flowers.com announced it's extending its relationship with Veritone One to make the agency its exclusive partner for radio and podcast advertising, and will specifically leverage Veritone One's AI platform to craft more efficient and scalable broadcast campaigns, per a joint press release.
- Veritone One is the agency arm of Veritone, an artificial intelligence (AI) company with a platform that analyzes public and private audio and video data in near real-time, the release said. Veritone's AI platform will provide 1-800-Flowers with actionable intelligence on the performance of its radio spots and will ensure the "speed, transparency and accuracy" of broadcast advertising spend.
- "The near immediate knowledge surrounding our spend allows us to make business-critical decisions quickly, like scaling up personnel in call centers based on expected call volume from offline, including radio spots," 1-800-Flowers CEO and President Chris McCann said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
On-air radio endorsements is an area where 1-800-Flowers spends a significant amount of its advertising budget, but the format can be difficult to track and analyze manually. The expanded relationship with Veritone One points to how bleeding-edge technologies like AI and other cognitive intelligence solutions can boost offline measurement and analytics for traditional channels like radio and also podcasting, the latter of which is seeing some explosive growth when it comes to marketing.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau recently forecast podcast ad revenue would hit $220 million this year — a dramatic 85% increase of 2016. Radio is perhaps a less trendy marketing channel, but the Veritone Platform seeks to provide equally deep insights, analyzing audio spots and mentions minutes after air to confirm target messaging, per the release.
This is also just the latest example of digital integrations boosting marketing channels sometimes thought of as static or stale such as radio and even out-of-home. 1-800-Flowers and Veritone eventually plan to expand their work together past radio to include things like placed advertising, the release noted.