Online audio advertising is a particular form of advertising used abundantly in online music streaming services. In these platforms, which tend to host tens of thousands of unique audio advertisements (ads), providing high quality ads ensures a better user experience and results in longer user engagement. Therefore, the automatic assessment of these ads is an important step toward audio ads ranking and better audio ads creation. In this paper we propose one way to measure the quality of the audio ads using a proxy metric called Long Click Rate (LCR), which is defined by the amount of time a user engages with the follow-up display ad (that is shown while the audio ad is playing) divided by the impressions. We later focus on predicting the audio ad quality using only acoustic features such as harmony, rhythm, and timbre of the audio, extracted from the raw waveform. We discuss how the characteristics of the sound can be connected to concepts such as the clarity of the audio ad message, its trustworthiness, etc. Finally, we propose a new deep learning model for audio ad quality prediction, which outperforms the other discussed models trained on hand-crafted features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale audio ad quality prediction study.

For consumers seeking convenience and speed, it all sounds great. But how will any of it make Google money? The Mountain View, Calif., company's apparent transition from go-to search engine to omnipresent virtual assistant probably will require rethinking its advertising business. By tracking Web browsing, emails, chats and more, Google has become a dominant force in digital ads. It mines that wealth of personal data to present ads to the people most likely to care about them.

Google Inc.'s latest technological marvels point to a future where you'll never need to visit websites, write a term paper or stress over what to buy for your mother's birthday. For consumers seeking convenience and speed, it all sounds great. But how will any of it make Google money? The Mountain View, Calif., company's apparent transition from go-to search engine to omnipresent virtual assistant probably will require rethinking its advertising business. By tracking Web browsing, emails, chats and more, Google has become a dominant force in digital ads.