With the huge number of platforms out there driving the success of modern marketing campaigns, it is increasingly challenging to get the full picture of how a campaign is performing and to then decide where to invest or what to amend. Wavo aims to solve this problem for those investing in artist development and marketing, combining media planning services and technology.
Wavo’s CEO Conor Clarke says, “Streaming has created a surge in artist investment, but many marketing decisions are still made by gut or in silos. Our goal is to make investing in artists more predictable and scalable.”
Wavo currently ingests data from various data sources, such as major advertising platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Spotify as well as publicly available social data. It is also working on integrating more sales-focused data from sources like Shopify and Ticketmaster.
Its interface is based on two tabs: the Dashboard, presenting visualised data ingested from various data sources; and the Timeline, providing an overview of all your running campaigns.
When logging into the platform, users can click into ‘My data sources’ where they can authenticate their ad accounts on various platforms. You will then be able to take all campaign data to form one data source and create a unified dashboard. For example, you can add in campaigns from Google Ads, Snapchat, Spotify Ad Studio or any of those sources that you are currently running a campaign on for a song/album and then create a marketing dashboard. By tagging the data with an artist name, you will later be able to look at benchmarks – which is a very helpful feature.
From there, you get into the actual visualisation of all the data you’re connecting and unifying. Wavo has pre-built visualisations across the main verticals for an artist: recorded music; merchandise; live events; and video.
These pre-built visualisations focus on goals that you set alongside the overall marketing calendar to show flight dates (run time) and current performance metrics.
When looking into the data dashboard, you can see a visualisation of your media mix, giving users a quick overview of how different platforms are weighed into the campaign. You see information such as campaign duration, spending and an aggregation of all main results across all channels which is put into high-level data such as delivered impressions, views, engagements or clicks on Spotify (due to its direct streaming attribution on Spotify Ad Studio).
One of the most interesting features is Wavo’s goal pacing ability. With all of the data that you are building up for an artist and the benchmarks being created as a result, you can set goals for each platform. Wavo then provides automated tracking of your pacing towards that goal. For example, if in advance of a campaign you decide that your main media goal is to drive views for an official music video, Wavo sets a forecast of the expected performance based on the average performance of this artist over time.
Wavo’s dashboard will then give you a live top-level view of your main marketing objectives and if the campaign you are looking at is on-track to achieve its objective or if the platform is expecting it to hit within X% of the variance of the forecast.
You can also see when you are off-track and under-pacing, alerting you to look into what is going on with that channel and why you might be underperforming there. That means, at any point in the campaign, you will know how it is performing in relation to the goals you set, thereby enabling you to take actions.
Clarke argues, “The days of marketing without goals and relying only on intuition are over. You can no longer go into a campaign without a plan or way to compare this plan to the actual results. Knowing the impact of your marketing efforts on an artist’s business goals is crucial to justify spend and report results.”
From this view that combines all connected platforms, you can also choose to look at each platform individually, compare various KPIs with each other and, over time, manipulate the data in any way you need to look at any KPI that might be most useful to you in a campaign.
The next page is a heat mapping section, providing users with an audience and creative comparison analysis. You can compare all audiences against your main KPIs. For example, you might find an audience is performing best in terms of view rate but might be more expensive; therefore you can look at what is cheaper and figure out what is performing best and most efficiently, then make decisions based on that.
When clicking on each audience, you can see the ads that are currently running against this audience and see which ads are performing best to optimise around that. There is also a live preview of each ad available. In this way, you can get insights into both top-level data and move down to a granular evaluation of creative results.
Besides these main analysis functions, Wavo has integrated a text editor that users can pull out and easily copy in the main stats to pass along in an email to facilitate sharing. The platform wants to make it as easy as possible to communicate within its dashboard and provide more and more features around better oversight and auditing what is happening. One of the features it is working on is a timeline providing an audit trail of changes made within a campaign – e.g. when the creative or targeted audience has been changed.
When you click back into your main page and onto the Timeline tab, each user will find a timeline view of their marketing calendar. This is a directory that is broken down by all artists that the user has connected, meaning you can get a sense of all the campaigns that are currently running. When hovering over a campaign, you get a quick card – including information like flight dates and whether the campaign is on-track or off-track to achieve its goals. That means you are able to quickly get an overview of how all of the campaigns you are working on are performing and share updates on them.
Feature-wise, Wavo resembles Tradable Bits in how it provides access to various advertising platforms to track and attribute marketing activities from one dashboard in order to drive marketing decisions. Tradable Bits, however, is much more focused on collecting data to help understand an artist’s fanbase. It has a lesser focus on unifying the management of a campaign or forecasting performance.
Another marketing analytics platform that comes to mind is Chartmetric. It integrates a constantly growing number of data sources and the company has TOOLS introduced its own CPP (CrossPlatform-Performance) metric which aims to give similar insights into an artist’s overall performance, yet more in relation to other artists than in terms of actual campaign data.
Wavo currently offers three pricing tiers: Starter; Growth; and Enterprise. The way it is charged depends on the number of users and the amount of data you are creating (and that Wavo is storing for you). The Starter tier starts from $1,400 a month for 4m rows of data and 10 users. The Growth tier starts from $12,500 a month for 100m rows of data and 60 users. The Enterprise tier will be completely customised with pricing on request and discounts for large enterprises.
Throughout the second half of this year, Wavo is working to add additional features to the platform, with e-commerce being a big focus as well as other partners to make it easier to look for correlations between marketing spend and actual results on streaming.
Additionally, Wavo also wants to use the same algorithms it is already using for its automated forecasts to give projections on streaming and follower growth as well as how that changes over time based on your marketing investment. Its platform will also be available completely white-labelled and the product can be adapted to integrate features that clients want in order to power and unify the campaign management across teams.
Wavo counts all three major labels among its clients, as well as key talent agencies and management companies, noting that it wants to make its offering suitable and scalable for any size of business.
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