Olympic Social Media Bumps, Evergreen Brand Focus, & More

This Week in the Business of Podcasting

What a week! Olympic medals all around and some half-decent weather in my neck of the woods, to boot. With sunny skies on the mind, let’s look at some news that pitches a blue sky future for podcasting, and shows how the industry has made itself more accessible for coverage outside the small group of journalists with podcasting backgrounds.

Transparency. Performance. Automation.

Olympic Medalists Go for Gold on Social Media

This Thursday from Paul Hiebert at AdWeek: As the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic games wind down, the impact of the games on the profiles of athletes becomes more apparent. While the Olympics remains a rare example of a mass media event, even that has become more fractured and personalized, with platforms like Peacock offering multiple live stream options of multiple events simultaneously. In pre-internet Olympics, audiences watched a given network’s coverage. Now audiences can filter for sports and athletes they care about the most.

As a result, the social platforms of this year’s athletes are undergoing more growth than usual while on the world stage. Instagram follower counts are jumping, TikTok videos are pulling in millions of views.

Social platform Dash Hudson, which has tracked engagement and growth of almost 200 athletes in Paris for the Olympic and Paralympic games, attributes the organic performance to entertainment, authenticity, and community. Making podcasting a natural option for athletes post-Paris who wish to maintain that connection and authenticity with their growing fanbase.

True Crime, an Advertising Opportunity

This Wednesday from Tom Webster at Sounds Profitable: True Crime has performed well in podcasting for over a decade, yet the genre still has an advertising issue. Brands want to connect with the audiences of true crime podcasts, but are averse to the ‘brand unsafe’ topics discussed.

Webster highlights research from Sounds Profitable’s 2022 study Safe and Sound, which looked at audience perceptions in regards to podcasting and brand safety-related topics. One survey question asked respondents how they responded to the phrase “I like it when a brand supports my favorite true crime podcast.” Only 9% of respondents responded negatively to the sentiment. A quote from Webster:

“Moreover, the content itself is often far less graphic or disturbing than many assume. A significant portion of true crime podcasts more closely resemble police procedurals or detective stories, making them accessible to a broad audience. This misconception about the nature of true crime content has likely contributed to brands’ hesitancy to engage with the genre.”

True crime podcasts represent a not-common blend of audience engagement, brand loyalty, and societal impact, and advertisers would do well to reconsider blanket bans on the genre.

How Making Industry Info Accessible Benefits Podcasting

This Monday media critic Erik Wemple published an op-ed in The Washington Post. The piece takes a look at the growing world of video podcasting from the perspective of a media critic with a background in covering cable news. Wemple opens with a recollection of the first ever live video broadcast of Don Imus’ WFAN radio show on C-SPAN, analogous to the modern topical chat podcast.

The piece sources podcast industry research numbers from Signal Hill Insights, Cumulus Media, and Triton Digital. It also features pull quotes from interviews with Pierre Bouvard of Cumulus Media/Westwood One, and Steve McLendon (product lead of YouTube’s podcasting arm). While an article about podcasting in a paper of record like WaPo on its own is nice, Wemple’s op-ed is an example of what happens when an industry puts the effort into hyping itself up and showing data strong enough to empower coverage by journalists, regardless of their background in podcasting.

Marketers Balancing Performance and Storytelling for ‘Evergreen’ Brands

This Tuesday from Kristina Monllos at Digiday: Companies like Nike, which previously focused strongly on performance marketing, are now shifting their focus to a balance of performance and brand storytelling. For Nike specifically, this means re-instituting a marketing division specifically for brand storytelling that had previously been dissolved. A quote from the article:

“Nike is far from alone in managing the difficult balance between performance and brand. There was a pendulum shift in marketing organizations to focus on performance, seemingly above all else, a few years ago. The rise of direct-to-consumer brands at the time, many of which were basically performance marketing brands, caught the attention of C-Suite executives in major marketing organizations. The opportunity to truly track what was working and what wasn’t – at least, in terms of driving sales – and lean into that was all too tempting to budget-conscious marketing execs.”

As it becomes easier for consumers to communicate back at a brand, building an image and maintaining it long-term is vital. Something podcasting, with legions of engaged audiences that are proven to think positively of brands that make their favorite programs possible, could help with.

Sneak Peak, Q2 2024 PPB

Podscribe Performance Benchmark Report

How Do Issues in Ads Affect Performance?

According to Podscribe’s upcoming Performance Benchmark Report (PPB), ad errors significantly impact performance. Our analysis of the most common ad errors that trigger verification flags (such as short ads, competitor overlap, low ad read scores, stacked ads, and double spots) reveals that these issues can decrease ad performance by up to 59%.

Quick Hits

While they may not be top story material, the articles below from this week are definitely worth your time:

Building a Better Sales Pitch for Podcasting by Tom Webster. The recording of Tom’s 45 minute free webinar is now available, featuring tips on how to pitch podcast advertising to brands and agencies.
The Podscape Midyear Update. Sounds Profitable and Magellan AI have published the midyear update to the Podscape, an infographic providing a top-down view of the podcasting industry.
New Adalytics report raises new questions about use of AI systems for brand safety by Marty Swant. The report alleges to have found ads with brand safety code on user-generated content sites like Tumblr and Fandom, including pages with racial slurs in the headlines and urls.
‘The Headlines’ to Be Released on Podcast Platforms. The news recap spinoff of The Daily, the most popular podcast on NYT Audio, is now on open podcasting feeds.
Here’s Where Democrats and Republicans Are Putting Their Presidential Ad Dollars by Paul Hiebert With the Kamala Harris campaign spinning up late in the game, millions are being invested in social and digital campaigns in battleground states on both sides of the election, which could trickle down to podcasting.