Spotify: ‘we are focused on growing with SMBs’

Ella Sagar

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August 30, 2023

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2 minutes

Spotify is ramping up efforts to get more ad revenue from small and medium-sized businesses.

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Ella Sagar Ella Sagar is a reporter for The Media Leader and leads our audio and out-of-home coverage. She joined in September 2021 and has a gold standard NCTJ. She previously wrote for the South West Londoner, Ealing Times, and The Hillingdon Times. At the University of Leeds, she received a First Class Honours Degree in French and Spanish with distinction in speaking and during her time there regularly presented radio shows on Leeds Student Radio, wrote for the student paper The Gryphon and was editor of Her Campus Leeds.

Spotify is ramping up efforts to get more ad revenue from small and medium-sized businesses with a spate of “education” pieces to promote its self-serve offerings.

The streaming music giant has launched two initiatives to help SMBs and their agencies learn about digital audio advertising.

The Spotify Advertising Academy and Spotify Partner Certification Program offer free interactive courses with modules including “Digital Audio Foundations”, “Intro to Podcast Advertising”, “Intro to Ad Studio” and “Creative Audio Best Practices” to show advertisers how to create, optimise, and measure Spotify campaigns, and how to change the approach from radio creative.

They are now live in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and the United States, and advertisers in Europe and Brazil can access the content in English with localised versions to be released at a later date.

A spokeswoman explained: “While the number of SMBs is growing on Spotify — up almost 30% YoY — we are focused on further growing their footprint on our platform as we look to grow ad revenue to 20% of total revenue. We are building a platform that doesn’t just help advertisers reach our audience of over 500 million but delivers real results across the marketing funnel.”

Over 40 agencies are certified, Spotify said, including Mediabeast, Directwest, and Mediaspark.

Former Snap exec Samuel Bevan joined Spotify this month as global head of SMB advertising. Bevan had been at Snap for more than seven years, most recently as global director of small and mid-customer sales, and also held previous positions at Facebook and Google.

Spotify’s SMB play comes after a spate of price increases and analysts’ concerns about the strength of its ad revenue growth and its investment in podcast content. Despite posting its best ever quarter for monthly active user growth in July, Spotify founder Daniel Ek warned of a “soft ad market” that was “dampening advertising growth”. Ek pointed to developing markets lagging behind the US in terms of strength of advertising, and a delay in advertisers catching up with user growth.