• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, June 16, 2015

Pandora on Tuesday announced it has made all of its smartphone and tablet display inventory available for programmatic buying. The move comes six months after the company began selling desktop display inventory programmatically, and three months since the company began beta testing mobile programmatic via in-app ads.

Pandora claims marketers can now use programmatic ad technologies to reach its 80 million actively monthly users -- 80% of whom tune in via mobile devices.

"We always take a device-agnostic approach,” commented Jack Krawczyk, VP of ad product management at Pandora. “Due to our persistently logged-in user base, we are able to do this. And now with our cross-device programmatic offering, advertisers are able to leverage that in a more frictionless and more efficient way."

Clients using Pandora’s mobile programmatic offering include major automotive brand Ford and Essence, an independent media-buying agency.

With log-in data, Pandora is able to accurately create audience profiles that can be targeted across devices. The log-in data -- also referred to as “deterministic data” in marketspeak -- ensures that the same audience is being reached across screens. This gives marketers an extra layer of comfort when running cross-device campaigns.

Not everything at Pandora has shifted toward programmatic, however -- at least not yet. Real-Time Daily was recently told that video interstitials and audio ads are still sold on a direct basis because Pandora did not want to risk losing the “fidelity of the creative, because it’s such an intimate part of the user experience.”