Triton Digital acquires Sounder, enhancing audio advertising capabilities

Triton Digital today announced the acquisition of Sounder, an innovative audio intelligence platform. This strategic move will strengthen Triton Digital's position by combining their renowned audio streaming and podcasting technology with Sounder's cutting-edge AI-powered podcast insights and brand suitability solutions.

"We are thrilled to welcome Sounder to the Triton Digital family," said John Rosso, President and CEO of Triton Digital. "The Sounder team are visionaries in audio intelligence, and their technology adds an essential layer to our offerings. This acquisition empowers us to deliver more value to advertisers and publishers with highly targeted, contextually relevant, and brand-suitable audio advertising solutions. Looking ahead, we are excited to leverage our combined strengths to drive innovation and growth in the digital audio marketplace."

“Becoming part of Triton Digital is a significant milestone for Sounder, giving us the ability to accelerate our growth and innovation while continuing to work across the entire podcast landscape," said Kal Amin, CEO and co-founder of Sounder. “Our AI-powered content analysis enables Triton to bring unprecedented insights, targeting, and promotional capabilities to the audio marketplace."

Key Benefits of the Acquisition:

• Enhanced Contextual Targeting: Sounder's best-in-class contextual targeting tools ensure ads are aligned with relevant content, boosting campaign effectiveness. This integration offers a more robust, scalable targeting capability within Triton's Ad Platform with transparent reporting and forecasting.
• Premium Brand Suitability: Sounder's unparalleled brand suitability solution provides advertisers with peace of mind, ensuring their messages are placed within appropriate listening environments.
• AI-Powered Promotional Tools: Triton publishers will gain access to Sounder's AI-powered promotional tools, creating unparalleled promotional opportunities.

Triton Digital is a global leader in technology and services for digital audio, podcasts, and broadcast radio. Operating in over 80 countries, Triton provides innovative technology that enables broadcasters, podcasters, and online music services to build their audience, maximize revenue, and streamline operations.

Sounder is an audio intelligence platform that provides advertisers and publishers with the tools for deeper podcast understanding. Powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence, Sounder delivers brand safety solutions, contextual targeting insights, and data-driven promotional tools.

Sounder: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Audio Content

In today's rapidly evolving digital media landscape, audio stands out with its profound ability to forge connections with audiences. Podcasts, audiobooks, and other forms of spoken word content offer a level of intimacy and engagement that can be difficult to achieve through text or video alone. This growing influence underscores the importance of tools and platforms that help creators, advertisers, and publishers harness audio's unique advantages. Sounder, a technology company founded in 2019, has emerged as a leading force in this mission to unlock the true value of audio content.

The Challenge of the Audio Landscape

For businesses and creators working within the audio realm, several key challenges can hinder growth and success. Chief among these is the absence of reliable and comprehensive data insights. Unlike text-based digital content, which is inherently easier to analyze and categorize, audio has traditionally existed as a somewhat opaque format. Understanding the full content and context of an audio file has presented significant difficulties without a way to transform it into a more readily analyzable form.

Another obstacle is the sheer volume of existing audio content. With thousands of hours of podcasts, audiobooks, and other spoken-word media uploaded daily, manual processes for searching, sorting, and promoting this audio become rapidly unfeasible. Scalable tools that automate parts of these workflows are essential for creators and publishers to keep up.

Sounder's Solution: Data and Insights for Audio

Sounder's primary objective is to convert audio content into actionable insights for an array of business needs. Its founders recognized the untapped potential of audio and sought to create a platform mirroring the technological advancements that fueled the boom of digital and video advertising.

Central to the Sounder platform is a suite of powerful technologies driven by sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies offer the ability to:

• Transcribe audio to text: Transcription transforms audio content into a textual form that can be easily searched, analyzed, and categorized.
• Leverage Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) ASR algorithms process audio files to pinpoint essential topics, keywords, and overall sentiment, empowering more granular insights.
• Ensure brand safety and suitability: Through contextual analysis, Sounder's AI helps advertisers avoid placing ads alongside potentially harmful or undesirable content within audio media.
• Generate promotional materials: The platform can automatically generate elements like video clips, concise summaries, and social media posts from existing audio, streamlining content marketing efforts.

The ability to process vast quantities of audio in mere minutes forms a core strength of Sounder's solution. This translates into tangible time and efficiency gains for podcasters, publishers, advertisers, and other audio industry stakeholders.

Applications in Podcast Advertising and Beyond

One of the most promising use cases for Sounder's technologies is in the podcast advertising domain. The rapidly expanding podcast industry has faced challenges including difficulties in targeting the right ads to the most relevant audiences, ensuring brand safety, and offering effective analytics. Sounder's focus on comprehensive audio content data helps address these pain points.

With Sounder, advertisers obtain deeper insights into podcasts before committing budgets, helping ensure ads are a good fit for the shows they sponsor. It also becomes easier to verify that podcasts align with a brand's values and are an appropriate environment for its advertising. Additionally, the ability to quickly generate promotional snippets tailored to different social media platforms is a boon for podcast creators.

Beyond podcasts, Sounder's tools are valuable in any context involving large quantities of audio. Publishers of audiobooks, educational audio courses, and spoken-word news content all stand to benefit from the company's transformative capabilities.

Company Culture and Vision

Sounder's emphasis on data-informed solutions is mirrored by a core value the company terms "Data-Informed, Human-Driven." This means leveraging data for strategic decision-making while preserving a human touch in execution. Other pillars that form the company's culture include:

• A "community first" approach that centers on service to audio creators.
• A "founder mentality" that encourages every employee to take ownership and drive growth.
• A commitment to audio accessibility.
• A focus on constant growth and learning through feedback.