Today in the Business of Podcasting
July 2023: Top spenders, movers and shakers in podcast advertising
Magellan AI’s monthly analysis of advertising data from the top 3,000 podcasts in the US on Apple Podcasts has arrived. HelloFresh, Amazon, and BetterHelp continue to hold the top three spots of Top Spenders from last month. In the top Movers & Shakers category, Hewlett-Packard rockets to the top, reportedly spending just $1,226 on podcasts in June before rocketing to $802,531 in July.
Can the Benefits of Digital be a Rising Tide for All Audio? By Jeff Vidler
Dentsu’s Global Ad Spend Forecast from May of this year shows the difference between the growth of digital advertising overall, racing 55.8% of global ad spend last year, and the share Dentsu assigns to audio (just 5%, down from 5.2% last year). Audio has the audience, but it needs the advertiser investment to match its share of time. If podcasting, or audio in general, is to grow on pace with digital advertising overall, it’ll take an industry-wide effort to position digital audio in the same competitive set as other forms of digital advertising.
CTV ad sellers are pushing more content-related signals into the programmatic bidstream by Tim Peterson
Connected TV (CTV) ad buyers are beginning to ask CTV sellers to pass program-level information in the programmatic bid stream, such as which specific show an ad would run on during the campaign. Sellers are reluctant, preferring to hold onto that information as a value-add for direct deals. Still, buyers are not satisfied with current compromises like signals telling them what genre of content their impression ran on. Podcasting, on the other hand, was held to the standard of providing show-level data from the beginning, with major programmatic platforms pushing against inventory sources who did not initially share what podcast their ads ran on.
TV’s Nielsen complaints get louder by John Ourand
Football season is upon us and TV networks are steamed at Nielsen’s plan for measuring Amazon Prime’s “Thursday Night Football” streaming block. The current plan is to allow Amazon to use first-party data to supplement reporting its viewership for the programming block. A move that could set a precedent for other streamers to do the same and further undermine Nielsen’s position as an objective, impartial ratings data aggregator. The Video Advertising Bureau has objected to the Nielsen change and the Media Rating Council is expected to rule on the decision sometime today. Yet another reminder that impartial measurement options are a critical component of any media industry.
…as for the rest of the news: Five late-night talk show hosts have launched a Spotify podcast which will use all proceeds to pay staff of their respective shows who are affected by the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, Australians 10 and up are now listening to an average of 13 hour of commercial radio per week, and children’s financial literacy podcast Million Bazillion is launching an educational live show visiting middle schools across the US.
