Pandora, the personalized online radio experience, is opening up their advertisement platform to aid regional and small businesses in their marketing. By delivering advertisements to their mobile music app based on the location of the phone, it will mean that listeners will be hearing advertisements relevant to their locale. Over half of the daily listening on Pandora is on smartphones. With over 65 million registered listeners in the US, this represents a truly significant local mobile audience in every market around the country.

From the released statement:

To facilitate this new SMB advertising solution, Pandora has expanded an existing partnership with AdReady, a company that delivers best-in-class software solutions for digital display advertising. Technology from AdReady is helping to make SMB advertising on mobile a turnkey process by offering support to build mobile banners at no additional cost to the advertiser. Now, local and regional businesses have access to an affordable, streamlined campaign implementation process to run sophisticated localized campaigns on Pandora’s mobile applications. To support the growing roster of SMB advertisers, the Pandora SMB team size has continued to increase.

“Historically, up-front costs associated with running a mobile campaign made it difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to advertise on mobile,” said John Trimble, chief revenue officer, Pandora. “This streamlined platform gives local and regional advertisers, from universities and banks to car dealerships and entertainment venues, the ability to implement multi-platform digital campaigns that effectively reach very large local audiences on Pandora.”

Terrestrial radio is already a powerful stage for local advertising, it only makes sense that Internet radio played via mobile phones take advantage of locale. Pandora’s adoption of this service with AdReady puts both companies on a lucrative marketing path. With the number of listeners using smartphones, it means that there’s thousands of potential customers hanging around any given region, listening to music and ads.

And, as with any good advertising, if they happen to be within arms reach of the product, the more likely they are to show up to check it out.