Media plans get decided by comparison, and whatever cannot be compared tends to stay at the share it already has. Audio has had the reach and the targeting for years. What it needed was results a brand could line up next to everything else on the plan.
At this year’s Built with Audio, SiriusXM Media’s annual industry event, Sherene Hilal, Senior Vice President and Chief Advertising Product Officer, made the case that reach and targeting only matter if a brand can see what the investment did.
Measured properly, audio can be evaluated alongside every other channel in the media mix. That means delivering results into the systems brands use to make budget decisions, measuring outcomes that matter to them, and validating results against accepted industry standards.
Results land where budget gets decided
Audio performance has to show up in the same systems a brand uses to judge every other channel.
AdsWizz has built one of the most connected measurement ecosystems in the industry, with direct integrations across the measurement and attribution partners brands already use, including Nielsen and Veritonic. Measurement providers verify that an ad was delivered and who heard it. Attribution partners connect that exposure to subsequent action. Audio runs through both, so when someone asks what audio delivered, the answer is already in the system they use.
A direct integration matters because of what it replaces. Without one, audio’s results must be exported, reconciled by hand, and mapped onto a reporting structure built for another channel. Each step is a chance for audio’s contribution to be approximated, discounted, or dropped altogether.
Audio takes 21% of daily media time and 4.5% of ad budgets. Closing that distance is a measurement job. When advertisers can prove audio works against their other channels, more of that budget lands on publisher inventory.
What gets measured, and when
Landing in the right system is one thing. What the data shows once it gets there is another.
AudioPixel is AdsWizz’s tracking pixel for audio. It uses device or household matching to connect an ad exposure to what the listener did next, across devices and across time windows, which is how an impression becomes a site visit, a phone call, a booking, or a walk into a store.
ShakeMe, AdsWizz’s gesture-activated format, captures interaction inside the ad itself, a first-party engagement signal from a format the industry long treated as non-responsive. Listen-through rate shows whether the creative was heard to completion or abandoned midway through.
AudioPixel conversions, ShakeMe engagements, and listen-through rates land in one reporting layer instead of three, so one definition of success holds for the whole flight. That is what makes real-time optimization possible. Advertisers and publishers can spot a campaign that is underperforming and correct it while it is still running, and as more buying moves to AI agents, that same single layer is what will let those corrections happen automatically.
A creative that is not converting gets swapped in week two, and a placement that looked right in planning gets cut before it spends the rest of its budget. For brands, that is a campaign to manage rather than one to review. For publishers, it is a flight that gets corrected and comes back next quarter.
When the result is a test drive
Hyundai Türkiye tested that measurement setup on in-game audio, a format that reaches listeners without interrupting what they are doing and that had no established way to connect exposure to anything downstream. Havas Media Network bought the IONIQ 6 campaign there programmatically.
AudioPixel matched exposed listeners to site visits and test drive requests. The campaign produced a 1.3% in-game audio-to-test-drive conversion rate, the first of its kind, alongside a 6.3% companion banner click-through rate, and more than 8,000 leads. Once audio reports outcomes like that one, a plan can be built around when people are actually listening rather than around which channel gets the line item.
Numbers publishers and brands can trust
Attribution only counts if both sides agree on the delivery numbers underneath it. Certification is the least discussed part of a measurement stack and the first thing a deal depends on. AdsWizz is certified with IAB Podcast Measurement 2.2 and has been through recertification since.
For publishers running on AdsWizz’s platform, impressions and downloads are counted against a standard brands already accept, which takes delivery disputes off the table. For brands, it means nobody has to audit the delivery numbers before the conversation moves on to what the campaign did.
A bigger piece of the plan
When audio is measured the same way as every other channel, it changes how a plan gets built. Once its results land where the rest of the plan’s results land, the question stops being whether audio belongs on the plan and becomes how much of it the numbers justify. That is a better question for everyone selling audio inventory and everyone buying it.
Because those numbers arrive while a campaign is still running, the answer comes during the flight instead of after it. An advertiser can decide in week three to move budget out of display and into audio, rather than waiting on the wrap report to make that call next quarter.
Want to see how audio measures up against the rest of your plan? Let’s talk.
by Jerome Camerlynck, Director of Product Management at AdsWizz
