In a nutshell
Mearra and Bauer Media co-created a media and advertising technology solution that revolutionises the entire workflow of audio ads. Deliverable: Audiomator — an AI-powered, self-service audio advertising platform.
The Client
Bauer Media Audio Finland is the audio innovation engine of one of Europe’s largest media groups — reaching over 200 million people across print, digital, and audio, with 61 million weekly radio listeners across nine countries. The Finnish team doesn’t wait for the industry to catch up. They lead it.
The Challenge: Heavy, complex and slow processes
Radio spot has always been slow to change. Producing a spot requires studio time, agency coordination, and days of turnaround time. Updating a price or swapping a seasonal message? Start the whole process again.
Digital platforms — Google, social media — have made display and text advertising instant and self-serve. Audio was being left behind, as it lacked the dynamic workflows of digital platforms. Audio advertising offers unbeatable coverage, but without the ability to act on and quickly alter messages, it’s hard to compete with international digital platforms.
Bauer Media Audio Finland saw what others hadn’t yet acted on: that the same dynamic, self-service model that transformed digital advertising could work for audio — if someone was willing to build it.
How We Moved Fast
Bauer came to Mearra with a bold idea and no fixed spec. What the platform needed to connect to, how it would fit Bauer’s workflows, how advertisers would interact with it — all of it had to be figured out from scratch.
Rather than waiting for a perfect brief, Mearra started building. Fully functioning PoDs (Proof of direction*) replaced lengthy documents. Each iteration gave Bauer something real to react to — keeping decisions grounded, aligned, and moving. The architecture was redrawn multiple times as the true picture of Bauer’s systems emerged; in some cases, the hierarchy of systems and data was unclear. That’s exactly the kind of ambiguity that kills slow-moving projects. It’s what fast, adaptive teams are built for.
”I almost cried – that process diagram is so beautiful!!” – Director of Tech & Innovation, Sini Kervinen, Bauer Media
This approach — making things tangible early, tolerating uncertainty, and building trust and stakeholder alignment through delivery — is at the core of the Mearra Method (a groundbreaking digital development project model), now being formalised in a forthcoming book by Mearra.
*Pod, proof-of-direction, is not a deliverable. It’s a shared reference point – a living prototype that makes an idea tangible enough to react to, evaluate, and improve together. Instead of describing a solution in words or slides, you put something real on the table.
The Solution: Audiomator
Audiomator is a self-service platform that makes audio advertising dynamic, manageable, and accessible to advertisers of all sizes.
A Bauer media professional creates a base audio spot and marks the editable elements. The advertiser updates those elements themselves, and the platform generates a broadcast-ready version automatically. No studio. No waiting. No agency calls for every small change.
”Holy s***, how beautiful!!” – Sales Director, Janne Turunen, after the first portal demo
Everything else an advertiser needs lives in the same place: what’s live, what’s scheduled, what’s run. Uploading spots, managing fallbacks, approving content, controlling delivery timing — all in a single, intuitive interface. A credits-based model makes pricing transparent and access scalable, particularly for advertisers entering audio for the first time.
Audiomator is a comprehensive cloud-native service on the AWS platform. It connects to transfer data to Aquira, and it also integrates with Zetta in the background, which functions as the playout system.
The Results: Updating time from weeks to minutes
Audiomator is the first platform of its kind in the world and one of the most advanced, industry-specific ad tech solutions in the Bauer Media Group. Bauer Media Audio Finland keeps doing what pioneers do — offering advertisers a capability that simply didn’t exist before, and a business model built for scale rather than individual account management.
For companies using audio advertising, the barriers are gone. Updating an ad takes minutes, not days. Audio is finally competing with digital on flexibility and accessibility. Advertisers who once directed every euro to online platforms now have a credible, easy-to-use audio alternative.
The roadmap points further: broader self-service formats, more sophisticated dynamic capabilities, and more innovation. This is the beginning of a much bigger shift in how audio advertising is bought and sold.
