by Annalise Nielsen, Head of Podcast Strategy & Development at Lower Street

I spent years selling podcast ads. First at a small network, negotiating directly with inbound sponsors, then later at a larger media company educating sales teams about podcasts and coordinating between sales and production. I had a pretty solid understanding of how ads are delivered, how campaigns can be measured, how audience targeting works, and what a reasonable CPM looks like. I felt like I knew a lot about podcast advertising. 

That’s why I volunteered to fill a temporary position on our team doing some media buying promoting the podcasts we produce for our clients – largely through ads on other podcasts. I was genuinely excited to dive into this work. I believe in podcast advertising, especially host-read ads. They’ve worked on me as a listener, I’ve seen them work for clients I used to sell to, and I’ve seen the data to back up their effectiveness. I’ve generally felt that the lack of revenue in the industry was due to overly cautious and uncurious advertisers. 

Then I actually tried to buy some podcast ads. And it was eye opening. 

This is the story of one recent campaign, and how it changed how I think about the industry’s revenue problems. 

The brief: Create a media plan with a $72k budget promoting a podcast from a global consultancy, targeting CEOs and senior executives at Fortune 500 companies. Prioritize host-read ads wherever possible. Wherever not possible, prioritize large reach, low CPMs, and strong brand alignment with our client. 

Roadblock 1: Who even sells this? 

The first step was to build a list of podcasts we’d like to target. As I said before, I’m starting out here with an advantage many marketers wouldn’t have, as I already have on hand a lot of data and research into what types of podcasts our target audience would listen to. I knew our audience over-indexes for news, tech, business, and self-improvement podcasts, so wanted to build a plan to reflect this. Building that list of podcasts wasn’t so challenging, since I listen to so many podcasts myself, have a pretty good understanding of which shows have ads and do host-reads, and have some idea of their audience size. 

The real challenge came when it was time to try to buy ads on their shows. Here’s an example of what I experienced. 

• Identified a self-improvement podcast that does host-reads and aligns with our client’s goals and brand. 
• Checked out the podcast’s website. No contact email or form, no indication of who sells ads for them, no reference to a network or ad selling marketplace. 
• Searched the podcast’s name and “buy ads”. Came upon a Podnews press release announcing the show would be repped by a large media organization. 
• Checked out that media organization’s website and found the podcast listed in their network. Reached out to the sales rep I already have a relationship with there. 
• Learned that this show is no longer represented by this ad seller, and they aren’t sure who reps them now. 

An option to cut down on this asinine runaround would be a subscription with a third-party research partner that offers information about who sells what. But frankly, I shouldn’t have to pay a third-party just to figure out who to email. The step from identifying a podcast I’d like to run ads on, to speaking to someone who sells those ads, should be much easier and clearer. 

Roadblock 2: Is anyone going to answer me? 

Not every podcast made it impossible to figure out who to talk to about buying ads. I filled out many contact forms and sent many emails I found on various websites. And then… nothing happened. I never heard back. Even after following up several times. This happened with a large newspaper’s podcast network, a massive independent podcast, and a handful of smaller, less-monetized independent shows. It’s hard not to feel like, at the end of the day, podcasters just don’t want my money. 

Roadblock 3: Who can afford this? 

I understand the logic of a minimum spend, especially for host-read ads. Producing the read and coordinating sponsorships takes real time and money, so I expected that most (if not all) vendors would have minimum spends. But very quickly into my process, I began running into minimum spends of $150k to even engage at all. I came across this from more than one large financial publication, all of which have relatively small podcast networks. And to be clear, this was not a minimum spend for host-read ads. There would be no production required on their part, and we would provide the 30-second spot. This $150k was the floor to get any ad on any of their shows, period, with no CPM disclosed and no real sense of the audience scale I would be buying into. 

I’m not saying those shows aren’t worth $150k. Their audience might be exactly that hard-to-reach group I was targeting. But as a media buyer, how do I walk into a client meeting and recommend spending their entire promotional budget on one untested podcast, with zero evidence that it will convert? 

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a rare outlier. Minimum spends were frequently $30k, $45k, $50k– all just to engage at all. If I could test a slate of shows first with a lower-cost, agency-supplied ad, I could see which ones actually convert and come back to negotiate a host-read buy at a higher minimum with real evidence behind it. I could work up to those six figure spends. But $150k isn’t a test budget. It’s just too much money to risk on something that, thus far, is completely unproven for my client and goals. 

Roadblock 4: Do you think I’m stupid? 

After hitting a wall with going directly to individual podcasts, I decided to try a self-serve podcast ad marketplace instead – one that sells host-read ads at a more reasonable minimum, with inventory on some well-respected business shows. This felt like a safer way to test the format. 

I confirmed a buy with a show that advertised host-read (not producer-read) ads and confirmed inventory availability for my window. I got quick confirmation that the host had approved the buy. Then, a day later, I was forwarded an email indicating that, actually, the host had declined to do the read – he “doesn’t promote other podcasts” – so a producer would do the read instead. Oh, and also, the show doesn’t have any pre-roll or mid-roll inventory, so my ad would run post-roll. As a consolation, I was offered an extra 5,000 post-roll impressions at no charge. 

The CPM for this buy was $54. 

It’s fine if a host doesn’t want to read an ad. I do understand the complications that arise when managing hosts with their own personal brands, and I’m not opposed to a process that allows hosts to veto buys. But this needs to be disclosed up front, and the buy should have just been immediately declined. Instead, I got a quiet downgrade: host-reads became producer reads, pre/mid-rolls became post-rolls, no reduction in CPM, and the only consolation being “free” post-roll impressions– inventory that’s generally considered unsellable. That’s insulting. 

We need to be realistic about what we are selling and the value it actually has to the marketers buying it. I believe in the power of podcast ads more than most, but even I can’t justify a $54 CPM on a post-roll ad. 

Roadblock 5: Why do I need a third (or fourth) party to buy your ads? 

I quickly realized that many of the podcasts our target audience regularly listens to just simply don’t sell host-read ads. Many journalists simply can’t do host-read ads for journalistic reasons, which is understandable and reasonable. So, I resigned myself to focusing on buying ads on broadly listened to news podcasts that carry strong brand recognition and would lend authority to our client’s show. I was also prioritizing shows that carry a reputation for being non-partisan and non-controversial.

I reached out to many large news organizations that have podcasts. Many came with hefty minimum spends, as I outlined above. This is what I encountered when trying to buy ads on a national news podcast. I was told flatly that every campaign on their network has a $50k minimum spend. I pushed back – was that really the minimum, even for a simple supplied :30s spot, with no production involved on their end? Apparently, yes. $50k minimum. But, they added, there are programmatic options available at a lower spend. 

Great, a solution! Until you realize what this requires: a seat on a demand-side platform. Engaging with another third party, with large minimum annual spend commitments and more contracting work required. 

This Shouldn’t Be This Hard

I love podcast ads. I believe they work, and I believe in the premium CPMs they command. And I came into this process with a real head start: an existing relationship with a third-party attribution service, real connections across the industry, and a working knowledge of who the major players are and how to reach them. And it was still extremely difficult to spend $72k. 

That’s the part that should worry the industry. We talk a lot about podcasting being undervalued and budgets being smaller than they should be. And I agree. But how is a marketer supposed to test this channel at all, when there’s such a high barrier to entry? Right now, a $10k – $50k budget hits multiple roadblocks before the opportunity to scale into a potential six figure budget. With no opportunity to meaningfully test podcast advertising, we can’t reasonably expect clients to shift budgets away from safer, easier channels– even when we believe, as I do, that a six-figure podcast campaign could outperform a six-figure spend elsewhere. 

I shouldn’t have to pay third (or fourth) parties just to buy podcast ads. I shouldn’t have to search the bowels of the internet to find a contact to email about buying ads. And once I do find the correct contact, I should get a prompt and reasonable response from them. 

The AMP Accords were established because podcasting has a reputation amongst advertisers for poor or inaccurate measurement. I knew that was a problem we had to overcome. But I had no idea there was an even bigger problem to overcome: letting advertisers spend their money on podcasts in the first place.