Veritonic, which provides data and insights on audio marketing, has compiled a list of the Top 20 audio advertisers across radio and podcasts. This isn’t a tally of the most played spots. Rather it is the advertisers whose commercials performed the best in Veritonic’s spot testing.
“The pandemic of 2020 rocked and changed the lives of nearly every person on earth. And being that a marketer’s job is to reach and engage those people, I’d say the task marketers were faced with this year has been harder than anything the industry has faced to date,” Scott Simonelli, CEO & Founder of Veritonic, writes in a blog post setting up the list. “How do you console, support, not offend, and ultimately sell to an entire world in crisis? It’s not easy.”
Topping the radio list is an advertiser well known on the radio airwaves: O’Reilly Auto Parts. While Simonelli calls the spot “pretty standard in content for an auto parts brand,” he points out that the ads include sonic branding at both the start and the end of the commercial. “Only about 12% of ads include sonic branding, even though sonic brands are shown to improve brand recall, especially when they contain a brand mention,” Simonelli says. And who doesn’t know the brand’s “Oh! Oh! Oh! O’Reilly” audio signature? While Simonelli concedes the ad doesn’t score very high for uniqueness, he says its inclusion of sonic branding across the ad “is definitely something to emulate.”
No. 2 on the Veritonic hit parade of radio ad creative is competitor Napa Auto Parts, followed by Walgreens at 3, AutoZone at 4 and It’s Just Lunch at 5. That makes three of the top five auto parts retailers.
Online banking site Varo comes in at No.6. It ranks high because it is “one of very few brands that give female voices the wide majority of airplay,” Simonelli notes. In fact only about 20% of ads use only a female voice, while 50% use only a male voice. Yet Veritonic research shows female voices to be more trustworthy than male voices. “Hopefully in 2021 scientific evidence will prevail and we’ll see many more brands jump on the female-voice bandwagon,” Simonelli says.
Rounding out the top 10 are Macy’s at 7, JC Penney at 8, Dairy Queen at 9 and The Home Depot at 10.
Listen to clips of the top ads and view the complete lists HERE.