Adding Programmatic Audio to CTV Drives Vehicle Sales

+21.8%
increase in local market share for auto dealerships who pair CTV & streaming audio

Cross-platform streaming campaigns prove more effective for local market reach, according to new research with EMG.

The CTV + Digital Audio Opportunity

CTV and digital audio are powerful forces in the advertising landscape, both seeing huge growth in viewership and listenership in recent years. When used together, they can seriously boost your media mix by reaching a wide range of logged-in, verified users. With their strong targeting and cross-platform reach, CTV and digital audio help advertisers connect with unique audiences you might not reach otherwise.

If you’re already investing in CTV, let’s get into why you should add digital audio to your media mix. For starters, scale. Digital audio is reaching 79% of Americans monthly, which is a 4% year-over-year increase. What’s even better? This scale is unduplicated by CTV’s also impressive reach.

Complementary and unduplicated reach are just the tip of the iceberg. Digital audio also delivers passionate, leaned-in audiences who are listening during key (often screenless) moments along the path to purchase.

By combining the expansive reach of CTV with the mobility of digital audio, advertisers can meet consumers wherever they are—owning the living room through connected TVs and extending reach into screen-free moments to keep brands top of mind as consumers move throughout their day.

The Study with EMG

The Objectives

Today’s dealerships and automotive ad agencies are under more pressure than ever to prove their advertising is working. CTV and digital audio both share valuable strengths like growing audiences, verified user bases, and precise targeting. And auto brands can leverage both to enhance their local advertising strategies. We’ve already shown you how adding SiriusXM Media adds incremental reach to CTV, but we wanted to dig deeper and see how harnessing both of these mediums together delivers results for advertisers.

The Study

We turned to EMG, a leading provider of streaming advertising solutions for retail automotive, to evaluate the impact of combining CTV and digital audio ads for dealerships. EMG has supported over 1,400 dealerships with their streaming campaigns and as a result has access to a treasure trove of data that powers their analytics platform Maven.

Knowing that the study was exclusive to automotive advertisers, market share was the perfect KPI to measure impact. Market share is often the clearest indicator of real-world performance in retail automotive because it reflects how well a dealership is converting marketing into actual vehicle registrations within its area. While metrics like impressions and engagement rate offer insight into consumer interest, only market share shows whether that interest is turning into sales.

A few key factors were put into play to ensure accurate analysis:

Product mix: We looked at auto campaigns that activated across the audio ecosystem, including both podcast and streaming audio content.
Targeting: Because most car purchases happen close to the buyer’s home, we analyzed the local market share lift driven by each campaign.
Impact: Market share was measured using verified DMV new vehicle registrations.

“
We’ve seen measurable improvements when pairing CTV with digital audio. EMG’s Maven platform helped us identify local market gaps and tie our media strategies directly to vehicle registration outcomes. That level of clarity has reshaped how we approach planning and optimization for our clients.”

Justin Simon, Managing PartnerDriven Media Group, an agency partner to automotive dealerships

The Results

The study was based on an analysis of over 1,400 dealership streaming campaigns and their local market share movement —and the results were very clear: Adding streaming audio to a Connected TV advertising campaign helps dealerships achieve an average 21.8% gain in their local market share, compared to campaigns that ran without audio.

“
With over eight years of data from thousands of dealership campaigns and millions of conversion points, EMG’s Maven platform provides the most comprehensive view of streaming effectiveness in automotive retail. This study confirms that dealerships not integrating digital audio into their streaming mix are significantly missing out on market share potential.”

Brian Singleton, CEO and FounderEMG

EMG’s analysis is already proving its value, driving meaningful results for clients who are leveraging the combined power of CTV and digital audio. Rather than just increasing reach, the two platforms complement each other—filling in critical gaps and amplifying performance. One dealership group is already seeing the impact firsthand:

“
Our dealership group has been working with EMG through Driven Media Group for over a year, and across all our stores and brands, we’ve seen steady, month-over-month growth in market share. In April alone, we saw a 17% lift across all stores, well above the average for our DMA. At Delaney Chevrolet of Indiana, the results were even more dramatic, with a 60% increase in a single month after adding digital audio to our CTV campaigns.”

Jack Delaney, Dealer PrincipalDelaney Chevrolet of Indiana

With results like these it’s clear that when you add digital audio to your CTV buys, the result is better, more effective campaigns. Digital audio offers solutions for advertisers to buy programmatically, similar to CTV. So now, you can approach both of these mediums with the same programmatic buying strategy, making it easier than ever to integrate into both.

We did it for them, we can do it for you. Let's talk.