SOURCE: Pandora Media

September 22, 2008 09:00 ET

Best Buy, Beck's Nab First Positions on Pandora's iPhone Mobile Ad Platform

With Over 1 Million Application Downloads, Platform Is Ready for Prime Time

OAKLAND, CA--(Marketwire - September 22, 2008) - Calling all advertisers who want to take their branding messages to the mobile platform: Pandora Media (www.pandora.com), the premier provider of personalized radio service online, is open for business. But you'll have to get in line behind Best Buy and Beck's beer who signed the #1 and #2 premiere contracts for Pandora's iPhone advertising platform. The contracts secure their rights to be the exclusive advertisers on the new mobile platform: Best Buy for the first thirty days, Beck's for the subsequent thirty days. Best Buy's campaign on the iPhone, activated when users launch the Pandora application on their iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod touch, goes live today and will be the first beneficiary of Pandora's hugely successful iPhone application which still hovers around the #3 most popular application in Apple's App Store.

Pandora's current 1.1 million downloads of its iPhone application since July 11 when Apple launched the App Store means Pandora's reach extends to nearly one out of every ten iPhone and iPhone 3G users. With their respective campaigns, Best Buy and Beck's will be the first to tap the highly attractive and affluent demographics of Pandora's registered iPhone users who are predominantly male and aged 36 on average. Among all iPhone users, they skew somewhat older with a higher than average household income and wield greater purchasing influence among their family members and friends.

"Pandora is out in front of this emerging platform which they demonstrated with their iPhone application launch. Their users' high affinity for Pandora means they'll spend significant time interacting with the iPhone application as well," said Julia Mize, brand manager for Beck's. "Pandora has been one of Beck's marketing partners for a number of campaigns and to be among the first to advertise on their iPhone mobile platform is very exciting."

"We're thrilled that Best Buy and Beck's are our first advertisers on our iPhone mobile platform," said Cheryl Lucanegro, vice president of advertising sales for Pandora. "Through diligent product development and research, we figured out what works best online to generate a high level of engagement and response for marketers while enhancing the user experience at the same time. Our goal is to translate this knowledge, advertising philosophy and product development schema to the mobile platform."

Pandora's iPhone ad platform also has the ability to hyper-target audiences for highly relevant and personalized marketing communications, such as by gender, age, geographic location, music genre and day part listening.

"As we see users react and engage with the Pandora iPhone platform, we'll develop and launch new advertising products consistent with this strategy that increasingly leverage the mobile experience," added Lucanegro.

About Pandora Media, Inc.

Pandora (www.pandora.com) is a personalized internet radio and music discovery service available anytime and anywhere on the PC, in the home, and on mobile devices via partnerships with AT&T, Apple and Sprint. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project begun in 2000 and is the most thorough analysis of popular music ever undertaken. Each song in this massive collection is analyzed by more than 50 trained musicians, and assessed against nearly 400 distinct musical attributes such as melody, harmony, and rhythm to capture its unique musical identity. Using this information to build playlists based on musical similarity, listeners can simply enter a favorite song or artist, and instantly launch a personalized listening experience which includes discovery of new bands, artists and songs. Today, Pandora has a growing user base of more than sixteen million registered listeners, a database of over 550,000 songs, and national advertisers such as HP, Microsoft, Honda, Procter and Gamble, and Nike.