Pandora Taps Adobe Campaign to Make Its Marketing as Personal as Its Music Recommendations

Few things are more personal than one’s taste in music. And Pandora didn’t become a leading music and podcast delivery platform by offering generic listening experiences. If all the service offered was genre channels, it would be no more personal than the mass-market radio stations of the last century. Instead, Pandora uses a proprietary recommendations engine that offers up new audio content to users by relying on insights into individual tastes, not mere adjacency.

Despite being in a business dependent on fine-grained personalization, however, marketing at Pandora was decidedly old school. According to Mike Millard, director of growth marketing operations and audience strategy at Pandora, “The personalization strategy didn’t extend into the marketing that Pandora was doing. In some cases, we were hitting all of our users with generic messaging.”

Pandora realized that it needed to bring personalization, at scale, to its marketing activities. True, it had implemented processes for sending targeted emails to customers depending on where they were in the customer journey, but there was more to do. More individualized communication was needed to truly connect with its users. Pandora wanted to provide highly targeted and personalized experiences to listeners across every channel, including email, push notifications, and more. To deliver, it chose Adobe Campaign, a part of  Adobe Experience Cloud, for cross-channel campaign management.

Personalization at Scale

Moving to Adobe Campaign as a single solution for cross-channel marketing provided many benefits. One of the most important was the development of a single, cross-channel data set that could be used for personalization at scale. Before deploying Adobe Campaign, Pandora used several point solutions that trapped data in silos that couldn’t be viewed or acted on in a cohesive manner.

In addition, Pandora was able to centralize many aspects of its marketing stack in Adobe Campaign to improve operational efficiency. One benefit of centralization is that marketing teams no longer need to engage engineering every time they want to launch a cross-channel campaign. That means campaigns can be rolled out more quickly, and Pandora can support personalization at scale with a single campaign platform.

With many of the mundane tasks completed by the platform, marketing can now deliver more creative campaigns with better results. One example of this is the ability to adjust messaging for users who haven’t listened for a specific period of time with personalized music recommendations. Pandora can do more effective product recommendations, tightly tied to individual customers and where they are in their customer journey.

For Pandora, delivering personalization at scale is an important competitive advantage in a highly competitive marketplace. And for users, marketing messages are as individualized as the music and podcasts suggested by the Pandora recommendations engine. Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Cloud enable Pandora to consistently improve the results from its marketing activities and enhance the customer experience by delivering personalization at scale, across channels, and with insights that deliver constant improvement.