Brief:

• Hulu is running an audio campaign on Pandora to promote this week's season two premiere of the comedy series "PEN15." The campaign is running on Pandora's nostalgic stations centered around music released in the 2000s, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
• "PEN15" creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle are featured in the audio ads developed with Studio Resonate, Pandora's in-house creative shop. The team provides audio creative development, sonic branding, strategy services, visual design, rich media production, web and mobile experiences and live activations.
• Pandora in the past decade has collected what it describes as "the largest pool of data in streaming" to identify trends in listener preferences and behaviors, helping Hulu to predict how nostalgic millennials may respond to advertising like this of PEN15.

Insight:

Hulu looks to reach an audience of young adults with its Pandora campaign for "PEN15," which is named after a middle-school prank and set in the early 2000s, as the millennial generation was coming of age.

Nostalgic shows like "PEN15" have experienced a resurgence in recent years, notably with Netflix's hit sci-fi series "Stranger Things" that takes place when Gen  Xers were teenagers. The trend has influenced marketing campaigns, which increasingly have adopted era-appropriate cultural signifiers — something Hulu is looking to leverage by marketing around playlists centered on hits from the early aughts. 

Through its work on the "PEN15" push, Pandora continues to lean into Studio Resonate, an in-house consulting arm it introduced last year to capitalize on trends like brands building sonic identities and logos. Developing stronger internal marketing services could help Pandora create stronger relationships with marketers that might otherwise look to third-party agencies for such tasks. Pandora deepening a well of advertising partners is critical as the streaming audio market gets more crowded and rivals like Spotify ramp up their aggression in emerging formats like podcasting. 

Pandora and SoundCloud currently command a combined 117 million monthly visitors, or roughly 44% of the U.S. population, per Comscore findings cited in the company's media kit. Pandora is ranked No. 1 among listeners ages 18 to 49 in 154 U.S. markets, while 90% of its listening hours are on mobile devices, according to internal data. The demographic profile of Pandora's audience helps to ensure that Hulu will reach nostalgic millennials.

Hulu's campaign for "PEN15" also comes as the video streaming market grows more crowded with a variety of subscription video-on-demand and advertising video-on-demand services. Hulu, which is majority-owned by Disney, is forecast to end the year with 94.5 million viewers in the U.S., making it the third-most-popular over-the-top platform after Netflix (about 169 million viewers) and Amazon Prime Video (130 million viewers), eMarketer estimates. However, the researcher forecast this week that Disney+ will surpass sister platform Hulu by 2024 when it reaches more than 123 million viewers in the U.S.