Before I get into the news, just a quick heads-up on Sounds Profitable stuff coming next week at The Podcast Show London! Yesterday we talked about panels Tom Webster will be attending/hosting, today I’ve got the details for Bryan Barletta’s (many) appearances in London:
- Wednesday 21
- 1:10 -1:40 Mic Check: Are You Reaching the Right Podcast Audience (Brand Works Stage)
- Thursday May 22nd
- 10:00-10:30 Brand Stage Unlocking Revenue Opportunities for your Podcast (Brand Work Stage)
- 10:40 -11:20 – The Global Sales Opportunity – Podcasting’s Worldwide Boom into Ad Revenue (Brand Works Stage)
1:00 -1:30 The Studio Stage Earning Money from Video Podcasts: Has the Game Changed? (The Studio Stage) - 2:30 – 3:10 PM – The Future of Audio in an AI-Driven Creative Landscape (Ask the Expert Stage)
Eventful Podcast by Tom Webster
In anticipation for The Podcast Show London, Tom shares some tips from his book The Audience is Listening regarding running podcast events. Sometimes a live show version of a podcast is itself big enough to be a “special event” for audiences, but especially in the context of digital events podcasts need to pull out all the stops. Big-swing guests, callbacks to beloved running jokes. Scarcity also works to make them special. Whether that’s physically limiting how many live shows, or keeping the number of possible tickets relatively low. This helps prevent audiences simply thinking “I’ll catch the next one.” And one of the biggest secret weapons with live events: breaking the fourth wall to engage the audience directly, especially in a virtual context. Fan engagement goes a long way, even if it’s something as simple as occasionally acknowledging the audience chat.
YouTube Launches Weekly Charts by Ashley Carman
This afternoon Ashley Carman posted to LinkedIn a screenshot of a new YouTube chart, Weekly Top Podcast Shows. The first iteration of the cart tracks the watch-time for podcasts on YouTube from May 5th through the 11th. The U.S.-only chart, unsurprisingly, favors video-forward podcasts with The Joe Rogan Experience, Kill Tony, and Rotten Mango in the top three. Meanwhile audio-only hits like Dateline make no appearance in the top ten while niche YouTube-first productions that don’t regularly chart in Spotify or Apple (e.g. Smosh Reads Reddit Stories) fill those spots. The new chart landing page is available here.
Digiday covers several creator platforms, such as CreatorIQ and Captiv8, who have been building out their measurement and AI functionality to better enable brand safety and creator vetting options, all in hopes brands and agency users will be more open to working with their creators. Specifically, Captiv8 signed a deal with Perplexity that includes embedded automation tools, creator vetting, an AI assistant, and brand safety scoring.
This Surprising Strategy Helps Toyota Reach Latino Consumers by Sonia Thompson
Spoiler alert, it was podcast advertising. Toyota’s move involved partnering with Sonoro, whose content and audience skew heavily towards Latino communities. The result of the partnership was a branded video podcast series hosted by AJ Ramos that interviewed Latin music artists. Thompson then goes into detail about why the show worked as well as it did, such as the host and guests conversing in both English and Spanish. Her experience with clients is the presumption an English-speaking company needs to fund Spanish-language content exclusively to appeal to Hispanic consumers. A presumption that narrows audience appeal, as the U.S. Latino community is not an exclusively Spanish-speaking monolith. Authenticity is what makes podcasts, and the branding campaigns associated with them, work.
Acast has launched a new format advertisers can purchase that leverages Acast podcast talent to voice their scripted ads, which will then run across the Acast podcast network programmatically. Tests on shows like Couples Therapy, We Mean Well, and Equity Mates show promising early results. In addition to the mechanical benefits of running a podcast ad from a recognizable face with context-targeting ensuring the ad goes to the right audience, this also opens the door for communal fabric between podcasts within the larger network.
As for the rest of the news…
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- This week Podcast Perspectives from The Podglomerate interviewed Katie Konans, Program Lead for Audio and Podcasts at NASA about NASA’s audio strategy and how they bring science communication to podcasting.
- Axios covers a new partnership between The Atlantic and Apple that includes the launch of direct subscriptions on Apple Podcasts and premium subscriber benefits for the Atlantic Out Loud premium feed.
- Wondercraft’s new report on generative AI use in content creation, debuted yesterday in a Digiday article, is now fully available for download
- RedCircle has a new blog breaking down lessons podcast advertising can learn from Alex Cooper and her strategies.
- Central Talent Booking has announced they’re handling booking for IMO, the podcast hosted by Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson.
- Twenty Thousand Hertz host Dallas Taylor is taking the brand into the third dimension, with the first episode of a YouTube version (built from the ground-up to be a YouTube show, not simply video versions of audio-only episodes) launching June 25th.
- Podnews covers the Radio Academy ARIAS, including Goalhanger winning the inaugural UK Audio Brand of the Year award.
