Dive Brief:

• For its 2017 Sponsored Listening campaign, Pandora partnered with HP and saw a 3.98% engagement rate and a 90% rich media completion rate, according to campaign results provided to Marketing Dive. The campaign also had a 0.94% click-through rate on in-reward banners.
• Through the campaign, HP wanted to drive brand consideration and purchase intent among millennials and Gen Z for its notebooks, Spectre and Envy, by leveraging interactive features. For example, Pandora users could unlock an hour of uninterrupted music streaming by drawing an image in the Pandora app, simulating HP's inking pen.
• The campaign also led to an increase in brand awareness, a 34% increase in purchase intent and exceeded Millward Brown benchmarks by 750%, according to the data provided to Marketing Dive. Among 18- to 20-year-olds, the campaign led to a 44% increase in brand awareness, 87% boost in ad awareness, 55% in inking capability message association and an overall increase in purchase intent. 

Dive Insight:

HP's campaign on Pandora illustrates how marketers can drive brand metrics by taking advantage of interactive features on mobile and providing rewards for watching ads. 

"We authentically reached consumers during moments that they were most receptive to our message with Pandora's engagement-based solution, Sponsored Listening," Emily Ketchen, HP regional head of marketing, Americas, told Marketing Dive in a statement. "Partnering with Pandora and their design team allowed us to create an engaging, first-to-market unit to showcase the functionality of Windows Ink and HP pen technology."

Since many users are on mobile, campaigns can take advantage of a phone's interactive features like a touchscreen to create more interesting experiences and driven brand metrics. In the HP example, users could draw on an image of a guitar to unlock ad-free listening. 

Interactive digital marketing campaigns, like rich media banners, are more memorable, generate higher levels of interaction and produce some of the best ROI for marketers. Interactive video ads have a 9x bigger impact on purchase intent, according to a study from Magna, a media strategy group of IPG Media Lab, and lead to viewers spending 47% more time with ad compared to non-interactive ads.

Pandora has been experimenting with interactive marketing campaigns to grow the number of subscribers of Pandora Premium, its paid streaming service that launched last year. Recently, Pandora began offering ad-supported users access to a free Premium session if they agreed to view a 15-second video ad. Early tests of the campaign found that about two-thirds of listeners accessed the Premium reward, and among those, about 90% watched the entire video.

By providing a reward like ad-free listening, consumers have an incentive to engage and come away from the experience feeling like they received something of value. A recent Tapjoy survey found that mobile app users who engage with rewarded ads are 4.5x more likely to make an in-app purchase.