We’ve talked a lot about how smart link services are evolving to differentiate themselves from the competition and to provide more and more useful tools for artists and their teams. It’s been a while since we last covered Found.ee, a tool that’s not merely a smart link provider but an advertising platform, and is now owned by Downtown Music Holdings. Found•ee has launched a string of new features within the last couple of months, so Music Ally has taken a look at them to see if they are a powerful enough argument for music marketers to switch to the platform.
New Feature #1: Pre-Save Function for Amazon Music
Found•ee has built and recently launched a pre-save feature for Amazon Music, which is automatically available to all users of the platform. This makes Found•ee one of the few platforms that artists and their teams can use to engage Amazon Music users before release – the other being Feature•fm. It’s an official function, not a work-around: Found•ee, Feature•fm and Amazon Music’s engineering team have worked together to make this feature available. Pre-save and pre-add functionalities on Spotify and Apple Music have been around for a while, but with Amazon Music going from strength to strength in some of the biggest music markets, this is a feature that has long been overdue and will help many more artists to build their audiences across these DSPs.
New Feature #2: Premium video ad-buying tool
Earlier this year, Found•ee launched a unique feature to help those in charge of release campaigns enhance their advertising channels. Its self-service premium video ad-buying tool allows users to book advertising campaigns on platforms including MTV, Discovery, Roku, Disney/ABC, Vevo and Xbox, with artists such as Aloe Blacc, Andrew Bird and Sylvan Esso having been amongst the first that have used the new feature within their campaigns. The idea behind this feature was to bring tools into the music business that have previously only existed in other industries. It makes video advertising – across connected TVs, streaming video services and website pre-rolls – accessible for any kind of artist. It’s priced on a CPV (Cost-Per-View) basis, with the user being able to set their start and end dates, alongside specified budget and targeting needs, which in turn creates their own bespoke list of destinations where the impressions will run. This is a useful tool to help artists teams create different touchpoints between their artists and fans, in an environment where they might be more receptive to ads compared to other channels.
New Feature #3: Evolution of the Universal Pixel
Found•ee has also evolved its pixel offering. Previously users had an Advertising Conversion Pixel, Remarketing Audience Pixel, Pre-Save Page Analytics Pixel, and Shortlink Analytics Pixel – but they will now find an automatically-created Universal Pixel in their account as a single pixel to use across their campaigns. The pixel is capable of tracking PR success, launching email capture modals, enabling one-to-one messaging from artists directly to their fans, building remarketing audiences – and now it allows promoters and artists to track ticket sales. Found•ee provides audience remarketing tools too, specifically designed for music marketers. The platform automatically creates predefined remarketing audiences, by looking at parameters like whether or not someone has visited a certain music service, a ticketing website, or a music blog. These audiences also define whether or not someone has – for instance – “high propensity to streaming” or has “high propensity to purchase tangibles and experiences.” This helps marketers refine targeting across different audience segments, and combining all of an artist’s data into one pixel should make these retargeting capabilities more simple to implement.
Pricing and competition
To put all of this into perspective, Found•ee’s most expensive tier is priced at $10/month, which provides access to these advertising features, as well as the smart link functionality. This is competitive pricing when compared to other smart link providers such as Linkfire, or feature.fm. However, these latter services have a host of additional fan engagement tools – like competitions and rewards – baked into their pricing. So the choice of platform is a case of horses for courses: however the Amazon Music pre-save functionality will be a big pull for artists with a decent audience on that DSP; and artist team keen to run ads on premium music blogs and video services should also explore this as a useful option.
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