Today in the Business of Podcasting
First-Ever Auto Brand “Share Of Ear” Reveals Listening Among Car Owners By Pierre Bouvard
New analysis from Westwood One and Cumulus Media focuses on the automotive data in Edison Research’s Share of Ear study. Since 2014 the Share of Ear has asked respondents the make and year of their primary vehicle. AM/FM radio takes the lion’s share of ad-supported audio time in cars at 85%. Podcasts come in second at 7%. Ford drivers greatly prefer AM/FM radio. Drivers of luxury German brands like Mercedes still prefer AM/FM but less so, and partake of YouTube music videos, owned music, and SiriusXM more than podcasts. [Source]
Spotify to Cut Back Promotional Spending on White Noise Podcasts by Ashley Carman
In addition to disqualifying ambient sound podcasts from certain ads, Spotify has raised the listener threshold for creators to access the Ambassador Ads, a program that pays podcasters to do host-read promo spots for Spotify. The move, intending to stem the tide of ad money being paid to podcast impressions from listeners who are asleep for most of the episode, also cuts off smaller traditional podcasts from being able to make Ambassador Ads. It is becoming a trend in the industry that, despite part of the appeal of podcasting being niche content created for specific audiences, smaller creators are continually walled off from easily accessing paid host-read ad deals that would benefit from exposure to small, tight-knit audiences. [Source]
Parents are spending less on back-to-school shopping this year: report by Alyssa Meyers
A new survey from Deloitte interviewed over 1,000 parents of children aged from kindergarten to 12th grade. 51% of parents are spending less because they have less money, while 75% of those who are spending more say they’re spending more because prices are higher. More than half of parents surveyed said their children could talk them into splurging on clothing, accessories, or tech items. Consider Nielsen’s recent Podcasting Today report, which found co-listening is on the rise, especially with parents and their kids. Those podcasts parents are co-listening to would be especially effective at leveraging back-to-school promotions. [Source]
Why Some Content Distributors Have Too Many Ads by Alyssa Boyle
Philo, a multichannel video programming distributor co-owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount, and A&E, reportedly has an ad volume comparable to cable TV. Over five hour-long episodes of content spread across two shows, Boyle reports an average of 12 minutes of ads per hour of content. For comparison, Hulu has a cap of 7 minutes of ads per hour. Ad pods on Philo are largely built by the programmer licensing their content to the service, with the remaining portion of ad space being sold by Philo programmatically. This leads to both long ad breaks and frequency issues. Podcasting doesn’t have an ad frequency problem, and we’ve done a solid job as an industry keeping it that way through standards, tech innovation, and collaboration. [Source]
Programmatic CTV Still Has A Lot Of Growing Up To Do by Alyssa Boyle
Boyle interviews Paul Verna, Principal Analyst and Head of Advertising and Media Practice at Insider Intelligence. The good news is connected TV (CTV) is predicted to sell about 87% of its inventory programmatically this year. The bad news, according to Verna, is CTV still has fragmentation issues and likely won’t fix them anytime soon. Small pain points like frequency capping persist, but Verna cites measurement as the biggest issue currently. Without widely-adopted industry standards for measurement, cross-platform measurement remains difficult at best. A reminder to podcasting of what can happen without the standards and collaboration mentioned in the previous story. [Source]
…as for the rest of the news: Spotify’s Rak Patel pitches why brands need to be thinking about digital audio advertising, ad spend is returning to levels seen in the 2010s now that recession fears are alleviating, and a MarketingBrew breakdown of “everything advertisers should know” about CTV.
