  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.
