[Interview] Eric Davich, Co-Founder & CCO of Songza

by Dave Mainella

Last week, music streaming service and 2013 FlashFWD winner of Best in Discovery, Songza, announced a successful round of equity financing to the tune of $4.7 million.  Among the many investors are two additional FlashFWD honorees – Troy Carter and Scooter Braun – both of whom were recipients of the FlashFWD SoundWAV Award.

Songza is gaining significant traction since the 2012 launch of its Music Concierge feature that emphasizes situational listening.  The company is quickly shaping up to be a leading lifestyle-enhancement music streaming service, where music and playlists facilitate moods and situations.  Songza hopes to similarly bring personal and curated brands to the listening audience through non-disruptive native advertising.

We had the opportunity to talk with Songza co-founder and CCO Eric Davich about the recent financing, native advertising, and the musical curation of our everyday lives.

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SoundCtrl: Native advertising is meant to incorporate brands into the musical experience of a user’s daily routine.  Can you describe how this advertising will continue to enhance the lifestyle of the listening audience?

Eric Davich: Everything we do on Songza is aimed at making what you’re doing right now better. With Sponsored Moments, our new native advertising solution, we are providing brands with the capability to tap into the personal, trusted connection we have with our users in order to provide contextually relevant experiences at the right place and the right time. So far we’ve worked with brands like Taco Bell and Samsung to provide the Songza audience with great experiences for “Getting Hyped” and “Going Back to College,” and as we continue to integrate more partners you can expect to see brands providing valuable experiences for every moment from everyday situations like “Drinking Gourmet Coffee,” and “Working Out,” to quirky, aspirational scenarios like “Saving the World” and “Quitting Your Job.” In all these cases, we work closely with brands to tell their story with the personality and human touch that Songza users have come to expect from our team of expert curators.

SC: This round of financing include investments by Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter and Justin Beieber manager Scooter Braun.  Will these industry experts help to move Songza forward in any way beyond just the financials?

ED: Our investors and advisors have been extremely valuable mentors and partners. Their passion for our product and our team has been an invaluable resource in growing and scaling every aspect of our business and will continue to be especially important in evolving the ways that we continue to innovate, grow, and monetize our platform. We’ve already had the pleasure of working directly with Atom Factory, Scooter Braun, William Morris Endeavor, and their clients in order to provide great experiences for both their fans as well as the Songza community as a whole.

SC: How will this round of funding directly affect the implementation of native advertising?

ED: We’re a small team (currently 28) with limited resources, so it’s that we continue to add more all-stars to our roster as we grow. This new round of funding will help us add to grow our already amazing team with key engineering, sales, editorial and marketing hires so that we can continue to innovate and improve the user

experience while dedicating a great deal of attention to our clients and business partners.

SC: Songza successfully curates music, and curating advertisements seems to be a logical extension of that.  Does Songza take an active roll in seeking out advertisers to best fit the many moods and experiences of its playlists? 

ED: Absolutely. In the digital age, consumers have become increasingly savvy and immune towards traditional advertisements. In order for brands to actually reach consumers in a meaningful way, they need to contextualize their message in a way that relates to the consumer’s context – not just who they are and where they’re from, but also what they’re actually doing at that very moment. An athletic apparel brand, for instance, has a lot of valuable products to provide to

consumers when they’re “Working Out,” but a consumer will be less receptive to purchasing sportswear at a moment when it’s not relevant like “Bedtime” or “A Fun Cocktail Party.”

SC: Do you hope native advertising will cause users to be more forgiving of ads during Songza’s free music listening experience?

ED: We don’t think that users hate ads, rather they hate ads that are irrelevant to them as individuals. The beauty of Songza’s native advertising solution is that it provides new forms of branded experiences, but also allows brands to better target their traditional ad units in a much more powerful and relevant way at a place and time in which a consumer will be most receptive to the brand’s message. Collaborating with brands on this type of content that’s both native to the platform as well as the user experience helps us better improve every possible moment of our users’ lives.

SC: You’ve announced brands such as Samsung, Nissan, Taco Bell, and Victoria’s Secret PINK as early adapters of the native advertising platform.  Is there now a proven record of greater advertising success over traditional, and potentially more intrusive, advertising?

ED: We’ve had great success so far. With the first native campaigns we’ve done, we’re measuring user engagement with brands not only in terms of clicks and impressions, but also in terms of days spent with brands and users that save branded playlists as one of their favorites. In all the examples you mentioned, these brands have also seen an increase in users that are explicitly broadcasting their brand story and message through social networks as well as frictionless sharing via our deep integration with Facebook’s timeline.

SC: In addition to native advertising, Songza also offers brands options like Pre-Roll Video and Type-In ads.  Do you expect to see a shift in advertising preference from those traditional models to the more integrated native advertising?

ED: The pre-roll video and branded captchas that we’ve recently integrated are great, high impact units that allow us to monetize in a way that doesn’t have to interrupt the user experience in the middle of their listening session. It also makes the relationship between advertisers and consumers very clear in that completing a captcha or watching a video ‘unlocks’ commercial free listening.

Furthermore, we’ve been able to leverage these types of ads to complement our native campaigns to present a high impact ad when a user has opted in to a branded experience. With Taco Bell, for instance, if you opt in to their experience for “Getting Hyped” and click through to listen to their “Hyped All Day” playlist, you’ll see a short video pre-roll that showcases their new Fiery Doritos Locos Taco before you begin listening. This enables brands to provide first a useful tool with the experience in the Concierge followed by a point of purchase. In other words, we think brands will be more successful if they flirt with you before asking for your number.