The current state of buying podcast advertising

Quotes

• “I’m the CMO of Ad Results Media and my day-to-day consists of going out there and evangelizing the podcast ecosystem and audio ecosystem. So part of my role is educating the marketing ecosystem in terms of how podcasting is a viable medium to connect with and engage with audiences, has critical mass in terms of reach, a great way to educate folks on your brand and I also get to say where results fit in that ecosystem.” - Kurt“Going into my background, I happen to be on the client side of one of the first ever tests in the podcast. I saw how well it worked and now just a huge supporter of this space for a decade now. But really, I am the CRO and of course my main goal is to try to drive revenue for the clients.” - Steven“Ad Results is here to be best in class as an audio agency to help our advertisers to make sure that they own that audio space, own that messaging, and really drive home performance. I am mostly behind the scenes working with our clients.” - Steven“Going back to the early days like Adam Carolla, Bill Burr, Joe Rogan were the first ones taking advertising and didn’t really necessarily know what they were doing. It was more like deals being done on paper vs. how they are being done today. With all that, there were plenty of opportunities for smart direct response marketers to get in there and really push their brand forward.” - Steven “Two major things happened. Serial launched and the popularity of that podcast and bringing a bunch of eyeballs or ears to podcasting, and Apple made the podcast app where it was a permanent mainstay on the iPhone. That coincided with Serial launching and that’s really when podcasting took off.” - Steven“Continuing with that trajectory, you would see that more direct response advertisers start to get smarter, jump into the game, a lot of B2C brands started popping up, revolutionizing individual industries and they recognized that podcasting was a great place to get influencers to speak about their brands and how they are disrupting an industry. From there, the space completely blew up.” - Steven“So confluence of events. We’ve got a developing media, we sort of have the tipping point piece of content with Serial but also a different distribution method with Apple creating their own podcast app as opposed to folding it into iTunes. Since then we’ve had Spotify getting into the game, and million other podcasts and podcast apps.” - Ben“Podcasting is still pretty nascent but over the last few years,  it has been hard to measure especially relative to digital channels. If you look at advertising on Facebook or Google, it’s very data-centric. You’re able to see the linear attribution and non-linear attribution of how users are interacting with certain touchpoints of your marketing efforts. With podcasting, we don't necessarily have that visibility.” - Kurt “We’ve used promo codes, post checkout surveys, and even vanity URLs. Surprisingly, we’ve been able to triangulate the results pretty well based on those three factors using conjunction and it’s actually been fairly accurate in terms of understanding the multiples applied.” - Kurt “To your point, a lot of the large brands haven’t necessarily gravitated to podcasting for two reasons historically. One is the reach, listenership had to really grow and grow pretty exponentially for brands to take notice of the medium itself and two, was the lack of visibility in measurement and a lot of them are used to measuring things digitally and podcasting in general didn’t necessarily fit that model very cleanly. It’s more a square keg in a round hole.” - Kurt “Fast forward to the last 18 months, there has been quite a trajectory with technology development with companies, we’re now able to track measurements with a pixel. So we’re moving to the digital measurement realm which is making it much more interesting and easier for brands to understand the results they are getting.” - Kurt “I believe that as brands know more about the changes, they are going to grow into the podcast space exponentially. We are seeing a lot of the CPG brands and others get in but they are coming in with more of a produced message who are buying tonnage on 4 o4 5 individual networks, not really understanding the natural landscape.” - Steven“We also have a ton of direct to consumer companies coming in because they know that other media are getting more expensive, paid social and other things are getting figured out and therefore how do they take advantage of podcasting as a medium and making sure that they are utilizing this in their overall media mix as they realize it’s an important channel. So really, everyone is getting in, they’re just getting in, in different ways.” - Steven“A lot of podcasting historically has been about storytelling and I think a lot of them realize now this is a great place to tell their story.” - Kurt “I tell all of my sponsors, ‘Look, podcasts can do three things for you. Depth of the message, reach and frequency and that’s what you really need to do to drive end results.” - Ben “I do think that podcast are a wonderful medium for advertisers because, at least in what we do here, we do a lot of advertorial content and it’s one of the only channel where someone can come on to a marketing medium and have their prospects listen to them for more than 30 seconds at a clip and to me, that’s really the beauty of this medium.” - Ben“It’s the reason why I’m here, you’re not only able to tell a story but you’re able to incorporate the people who are investing in your podcast into the end product which creates some synergies and a powerful medium.” - Ben