Spotify relaunched Spotify Ads, its self-serve ads platform

Spotify, has announced the relaunch of its self-serve advertising platform, Spotify Ads Manager, formerly known as Spotify Ad Studio. With a refreshed design and significant enhancements, Spotify Ads Manager offers advertisers of all sizes and industries a streamlined user experience and advanced tools to maximize the impact of their ad campaigns.

This comes after Spotify announced year-on-year ad revenue growth of 13% in its Q2 earnings report. Similarly, Spotify's 'self-serve' advertising platform saw significant double-digit year-on-year revenue growth.

With Spotify Ads Manager, the company continues to invest in advertising as a long-term growth driver. To achieve this, "it is key to continue to offer new opportunities for advertisers across the marketing funnel, from brand advertisers to performance-focused small and medium-sized businesses."

New features of Spotify Ads Manager include:

• Global expansion. Spotify has also made significant investments in its Ads API, which will eventually bring Spotify Ads Manager's capabilities to more than 50 new markets.

• New redesign. The user experience has been simplified to make it easier for advertisers to navigate and achieve their goals using Ads Manager.

• Advanced targeting features. In order to enhance audience and targeting capabilities, Spotify will be expanding its interest segment menu at the end of the month, giving advertisers more options when it comes to the audiences they reach and test in Ads Manager. In addition, the Audience Manager will also soon be launched, which will create a specific space for advertisers to manage their saved audiences.

• New ad formats. New ad formats available exclusively in Ads Manager have recently been introduced, including Canvas and Opt-in video. These new formats reinvent ads on Spotify and allow advertisers to connect with audiences using both visuals and sound. Canvas is a complementary feature that gives Spotify's audio ads a constantly repeating visual effect. For its part, the Opt-in video format allows a brand to appear in the foreground next to the music content the user is listening to, which increases its consideration.

• Measurement tools. A healthy media ecosystem includes proprietary and third-party measurement solutions to quantify performance. Thus, 'first party' measurement solutions have been introduced in Spotify Ads Manager with Spotify Ad Analytics and Pixel. Third-party solutions have also been expanded through IAS and DoubleVerify, Appsflyer and Kochava.

Spotify Ads are aimed at Gen Z 

This revamp of Spotify Ads services and solutions aims to capture the Gen Z audience. 

"At Spotify, we are constantly innovating to deliver a premium ad experience that helps advertisers achieve their business goals. The new, redesigned Spotify Ads Manager offers greater ease, control and performance, making it easier than ever for advertisers of all sizes to get started with Spotify Advertising and connect with a highly engaged audience of 626 million users," said Sam Bevan, Global Head of Emerging & Scaled Advertising at Spotify.

Brands such as World Rugby, Ionos and Monge, among others, have already used Spotify Ads Manager to engage new audiences and drive campaign results. To highlight one success story, Spotify shares the case of UK travel brand Contiki , which used Spotify Ads Manager to encourage young people to enjoy the company's group travel programs.

In order to reach Generation Z travelers and get them to click through to Contiki's website, the brand used a combination of audio and video ads on Spotify that included user-generated content to highlight real travel stories. Among the results, there was a 267% increase in clicks to its website, with Spotify outperforming other channels by 32%.