Shazam driving ad engagement

Ninety-six per cent of all US TV programmes are now Shazam-enabled and users are increasingly engaging with Shazam-enabled ads, according to Sam Woods, sales director, Shazam.

The company started out as an app to let people discover details about music they were listening to and has developed into a service that lets users interact with TV shows. According to Woods, speaking at the Future TV Advertising Forum in London this morning, the evolution was a natural progression because 85% of Shazam users were already using it to find out what music they were listening to in a TV show or TV ad.

Woods told attendees that the company was building a second-screen bridge between mobile devices and the TV. “Nothing has the combined power of TV and mobile. Mobile is an incredible medium – it has lots of scale, proximity, it is non-disruptive, highly personalised and most importantly, it’s portable,” Woods said.

Woods said that Shazam had become so popular that the service now had the scale to deliver key data about how users are interacting with content, including adverts. In a recent study, Shazam found that 100% of people who ‘Shazamed’ a particular advert could recall seeing the ad and its key message, while 79% took immediate action to engage with the brand and 55% spoke to other people about the ad. “Using Shazam, people are three times more likely to engage with your brand,” Woods said.

Shazam now has over 250 million users and is atrracting new users at a rate of two million per week.