On Air Fest Adds New Speakers; Expands Program
The February 2025 edition of On Air Fest is set to take place over six locations and feature over 80 live performances, exhibitions, and industry sessions. New speaker announcements include a keynote with journalist Taylor Lorenz and a creator session hosted by SubwayTakes’ Kareem Rahma. Live podcast tapings will include shows from Wondery, Slate, SiriusXM, NPR, TED, and Pushkin.
Tunein tunes out of podcasting amid mass layoffs by James Cridland
While TuneIn has been the defacto radio database for platforms like Apple Music and Siri for years, the company has never run at a profit. Cridland tracks the timeline of layoffs over the past four years that have shrunk the company, as well as cost-cutting measures. In February of this year the form to submit podcasts to their database was removed with a claim it would return soon, but never has.
Creative Best Practices in Podcasting
To demonstrate the effectiveness of advertising in podcasting, the IAB has compiled a collection of examples of ways podcast advertising has been deployed, with examples of host-read ad breaks, endorsements, midrolls, post-rolls, run-of-network host read, branded segments, live appearances, themed episodes, and more. In an effort to keep the gallery fresh and include the latest trends as they develop, the IAB is openly taking submissions of ad creatives to their media-center email.
Tired & Wired Trends – From AdExchanger’s Optimizing the News
Along with popular trends throughout the year, AdExchanger notes the trends that have grown stale throughout the year. Celebrity endorsements have lost their vigor, along with influencer marketing strategies that favor big names over authentic spokespeople with smaller audiences. Brands say experiential marketing has been underrated, and are enthusiastic about multicultural messaging and long-form storytelling to break through the noise of advertising in general. All of which are things podcasting excels at, putting the medium at an advantage to offer refreshing possibilities to brands in the new year.
Principal-based buying, the process of a media agency buying media and selling it back to clients at a markup, is not a new practice but has raised a new round of discussion regarding transparency. An ANA study published in May of this year found only half of advertisers surveyed were “very familiar” with the practice. IPG CEO Philippe Kakowsky said during their Q3 earnings call they are looking to expand principal-based media business and have found clients are more agreeable to the previously controversial practice. Critics point to a lack of transparency, allowing for agencies to potentially run them as “black-box media models.”
As for the rest of the news…
- Today’s episode of The Media Roundtable, hosted by Oxford Road and Veritone One CEO Dan Granger, gathers Amplifi Media CEO Steven Goldstein, Podscribe CEO Pete Birsinger, and Sounds Profitable’s Tom Webster to discuss what’s in store for podcasting in 2025.
- The Nomono Sound Capsule saw field use at the Nasdaq stock exchange for an episode of In Good Company.
- Podscribe has launched their own podcast ranker, aiming to fill common gaps that give false impressions of the industry, as well as bring YouTube information to give further context to podcast performance beyond RSS in a vacuum.
- JAR Audio CCO Jen Moss has published an overview of Spotify’s push into video podcasting and how both video and audio are shaping the course of podcasting as and industry.
- Twice a year Acast hosts in-house Hackathons, and a new piece covers the process following the most recent edition focused entirely on data.
- Wondercraft.ai launches PodcastGPT, an interface intended to be used for first drafts of podcast episodes created within ChatGPT.
- Say What You Mean has joined the fwd. network.
