Audio pre-roll

An audio pre-roll is a short advertising message played right before the content, at the moment the user starts an audio article. It is the audio equivalent of the ad before a video, with one significant difference: the listener has just performed a deliberate action (pressing play), so attention is already secured.

Inventory that did not exist before

For a news publisher, every article listen creates an advertising opportunity that the text version never had. This is what ad sales call inventory: a stock of sellable slots. A thousand listens a day means a thousand possible plays of a ten or fifteen second spot.

This inventory has specific strengths. It is stitched into the audio stream itself, so ad blockers that strip banners cannot touch it. It is heard rather than glanced at: no banner blindness, the message owns the audio channel for its duration. And it suits local sales particularly well: a car dealer, a retail chain or a local authority speaks directly to residents listening to their own newspaper.

The rules of the format

Pre-roll is unforgiving of excess. Too long, and it drives listeners away before the article even starts; practice converges on short spots, ten to twenty seconds. The transition must be clean: listeners should always be able to tell the ad from the editorial content, a matter of advertising law as much as of the publication's credibility. And the load must stay reasonable: one spot per listen, not a tunnel of them.

On measurement, pre-roll is managed through the listen-through rate: if drop-offs cluster during the spot, fix the spot, not the format. The WeDispatch audio advertising feature handles these campaigns end to end, from delivery to listen counting, including for local advertisers sold directly by the publisher's own team.