Spotify’s ad business is trying to evolve beyond audio. At this year&#x27;s Cannes Lions, Digiday senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy catches up with Brian Berner, VP of advertising partnerships at Spotify, about automation, AI, video and Spotify’s push for bigger media budgets.

Spotify rebuilds ad business around automation, AI to win bigger media budgets

The Digiday Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** The Digiday Podcast

## Participants

- **Kamiko McCoy** (Digiday)
- **Brian Berner** (Spotify)
- **Brian Berner** (Spotify)

## Transcript

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Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Digiday Podcast. I'm Kamiko McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter here at Digiday, and this episode is coming to you live from the CanLion International Festival of Creativity, where Digiday and the team is on the ground covering some of the massive shifts that are happening right now in the ad industry.

Yesterday, my colleague Seb Joseph kind of set the stage with our Cannes Lions briefing, so if you haven't had the opportunity to check that out, please do. But he essentially mapped out what's going on with the industry's power shifts in the sands from platforms to agencies and creators, and how AI is accelerating changed across all of media, how it's bought, sold, and everything in between.

I'm here live at the Spotify studio in Can, and I'm joined by Brian Berner, VP of Advertising Partnerships at Spotify, to talk about Spotify's evolving ad business, its push into the video ads, and how it's evolving to solve the audio measurement challenge that media buyers are working through. So, super excited to have this conversation. Brian, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. How's it been so far? Can, that is? Yeah.

Very hot. This is, I think, the hottest can, at least I think I've experienced in the past decade. Yeah. But very excited for the week. I'm very excited for the programming lined ahead for Spotify, our daytime programming, our nighttime concerts. We're very much looking forward to another wildly successful cam. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I am super excited to talk to you. The point of the conversation and why I wanted to chat with you today is advertising, right?

That's obviously the reason why we're all here on the ground with marketing and creativity and things like that. But Spotify's ad business is in growth mode, I would say. At Investor Day, you guys had a couple of talking points about kind of what the road ahead looks like. So, hoping to get a better perspective on where you guys have been, what you guys see happening on the ground now with your ad business, and then moving on to the future. So, start by telling me, like I said, Spotify has spent the last couple of years rebuilding its ad techs and hacks.

So, there's more ad formats, more ways to buy, better measurability and things like that. But talk to me about what that growth looks like to you from this year, from last year...

Spotify rebuilds ad business around automation, AI to win bigger media budgets

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
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Spotify rebuilds ad business around automation, AI to win bigger media budgets

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.