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Friend-of-the-newsletter Karen Burgess (now at CBC, formerly Pacific Content) sent along a podcast ad that, frankly, we just loved here at Sounds Profitable. She spotted this ad from Acast in The Telepathy Tapes podcast:
This is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing MORE of. I think the kids call it “eating your own dog food” but I prefer to refer to it as drinking our own champagne. If we believe that podcast ads are the best way to reach an engaged audience and move them to action, why not put our CPMs where our mouths are, and reach an extremely valuable segment of our audience: prospective buyers!
In my career, I have executed many projects to measure the effectiveness of my (second) favorite form of ad-supported media, Digital Out-of-Home. I’ve researched projects for brands that have placed ads in cinemas, elevators, taxi cab screens, and even screens on gas pumps. They all have one thing in common: they are reaching a captive audience that doesn’t have much else to focus on besides your messaging. It shouldn’t come as a shock that this form of advertising is incredibly effective.
Something that the best DOOH vehicles have in common is that they frequently ALSO promote the channel as an effective place to advertise. After all, at least some subset of the humans getting on those elevators in NYC running ads on the Captivate network, or in Ubers running Enroute screens, are potential buyers of advertising. And those of you who talk to agency teams and other buyers about podcasting have probably been told (even in the middle of an objection) that those buyers listen to podcasts themselves. If that is the case, then perhaps one of the best ways we can reach those buyers is using the best arrow in our quiver: our great content.
There are probably some podcasts that are particularly great at reaching brands and buyers in the same way that Mad Men’s ad sales wildly outperformed what the show’s peak audience would have suggested. There are any number of podcasts extant that draw more weekly consumers than the typical Mad Men episode did, and there are also podcasts that are highly likely to draw exactly the kind of targeted decision-makers who control advertising budgets, and these are wonderful places for us to show our best work, even if the audiences are small. Asking prospective buyers what podcasts they personally listen to might be more than just small talk!
As I write this, I am reminded of a story from my radio research career that I think I have been sitting on long enough for the statute of limitations to have expired. I spent a decade working with a broadcast group in Dubai on two radio stations that primarily featured Western music (CHR, and a kind of Classic Rock station). Every year, in the pursuit of optimizing those two signals, I would dutifully execute research with the population, and every year, I would report that those two signals would get higher ratings if they changed formats.
They never did (that group also doesn’t exist anymore, but I am actually going to call that unrelated). One format that popped to the surface every year was a kind of news/talk station geared towards the majority South Asian population in Dubai, which was shot down every year because a) it would cost a lot, and b) it’s hard to really talk openly in the UAE. I can tell you, for example, that the radio stations would almost NEVER report the temperature as higher than 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) because at that temperature laborers working outside would have to stop and schools would have to close. The “unofficial” temp on those days was thus “48”. I have personally gone to work there when it’s been in excess of 125.
It took me nearly all of my ten years consulting there to figure out what was ACTUALLY going on. See, even though those Western music signals underperformed stations featuring Arabic content or Bollywood music, the sales team knew who they were selling to: expats from the UK, Australia, South Africa, and even Russia who made up a significant part of the brand and agency teams they talked to. Though changing formats to a Hot Bollywood or Hindi News/Talk station might have doubled or tripled the audience for those stations, the radio group had keyed in on a simple fact of human psychology: they were playing music for a very small audience of people who wanted to hear their own ads on the music stations they were listening to.
I don’t know if Dubai is as culturally stratified today as it was then (I am using “stratified” politely), but it was still a powerful lesson: if you have buyers listening to your stuff, it’s a lot easier to sell them your stuff.
Kudos to Acast for recognizing this, and thanks to Karen for thinking of us when she heard the ad! We have talked a lot in this space about developing a campaign to better spread the word about podcasting to the general public, but we also shouldn’t forget the power of our own podwaves to reach the brands that can help us fund that messaging!
