Case Study: Pandora Grows Awareness By 52% for the Ad Council With Sponsored Listening

Originally published on Pandora.com

The Ad Council is a private, non-profit organization that has produced thousands of PSA messages since 1942 to address the most pressing social issues of the day. Many of them you’d instantly recognize, as they’ve served as iconic messages throughout the years, including “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires,” “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” and “Take a Bite Out of Crime.”
In 2015, the Ad Council aimed to further diversity and inclusion through a campaign called, “Love Has No Labels.” The campaign leveraged video of real-life relationships to drive home the message that love comes in many forms, and often transcends traditional boundaries.
The Goal:
The Ad Council launched a new social awareness campaign to:
1. Increase Awareness of the “Love Has No Labels” message among  adults 18+
2. Influence perceptions of issues related to diversity and inclusion
3. Create positive change in society by celebrating diversity
The Opportunity:
The success of any PSA lies in its reach, so when it came time to buy media for “Love Has No Labels” the Ad Council needed a media partner that could provide innovative, engagement-based advertising solutions that would capture the attention of a wide audience.
The Pandora Solution:
The Ad Council recognized that Pandora could significantly scale the “Love Has No Labels” campaign with its high-quality audience of 78 million active monthly listeners1. They chose to leverage Pandora’s latest engagement-based advertising solution, Sponsored Listening, to push the campaign beyond awareness to achieve meaningful engagement with their target audience of adults 18+. Sponsored Listening enabled the Ad Council to place their campaign content in front of a highly engaged audience, who received 1 hour of uninterrupted listening on Pandora in exchange for watching branded video content. The value proposition of Sponsored Listening not only resonated with the Ad Council’s purpose as an organization, but also its goals for the “Love Has No Labels” campaign.

The Results:
By combining massive reach with an engagement-based media solution, the Ad Council was successful in moving the needle on a significant social matter. The campaign successfully generated:
+52% lift in Ad Awareness among adults 18+2.
+72% lift in Ad Awareness among Young Millennials, ages 18-242.
To confirm that the PSA campaign also created positive change in society — one of the campaign’s primary goals — a Millward Brown Digital study reported a 63% lift among Young Millennials wanting to learn and research more on the topics of diversity and inclusion2.
Beth Ellard, Executive Vice President at the Ad Council, also added:
Pandora’s Sponsored Listening ad product was a wonderful opportunity to extend the reach and engagement of our ‘Love Has No Labels’ campaign. We were able to reach Pandora listeners at scale, while increasing message awareness and intent to learn more about diversity and inclusion issues. We were thrilled with the impact of the campaign and look forward to continuing our partnership with Pandora and Sponsored Listening to further our messages about implicit bias.
The success of the “Love Has No Labels” campaign on Pandora reinforces that real engagement drives meaningful results for brands. Pandora was pleased to partner with the Ad Council to support such an important social message.
¹ Pandora Internal Metrics, October 2015
² Millward Brown Digital, Brand Lift Study, November 2015