Reports indicate the latest round of Paramount layoffs have impacted the audio division. If you or anyone you know is looking for top-tier podcast strategy, sales, marketing, and operations, please let us know and we will gladly make connections.
Future of TV Briefing: How publishers are turning podcasts into video talk shows by Tim Peterson
YouTube has become the most-used platform for podcast consumption and discovery, as research from companies like Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights has found. Spotify attests over 170 million users have watched a video podcast on their platform. As video podcasting grows in popularity, so does the visual language and delivery. The intimate nature of audio podcasting manifested in presentation and set decoration, such as A Touch More’s Vox Media set being constructed to emulate a living room. Production teams who used to pull archival audio now are tasked with finding good b-roll stock footage to keep things visually engaging. As the medium grows, so does the need for production pipelines.
Ad buyers estimate major losses from Meta ad platform bugs by Ryan Barwick
MarketingBrew interviews several buyers who have experienced issues with Meta’s automated marketing tools. One recounts a campaign meant to target younger audiences on Instagram automatically switched itself to target 65+ demographics on Facebook. Meta’s site tracking issues with Facebook Ads Manager has logged at least 12 disruptions since Memorial Day, with four labeled “major” disruptions. Several buyers spoken to for the story say they’re actively avoiding using any AI-based Meta tools for fear of bugs/unexpected pivots to campaigns that waste budget on unwanted impressions.
Channel Surfing – AdExchanger Optimizing the News
As referral traffic from social platforms and Google diminish over time, news publishers are finding success in WhatsApp traffic thanks to the Channels feature debuted last year. WhatsApp users can subscribe to a Channel to get direct messages from a given publisher. Despite Meta distancing itself from any news content, it considers Channels to be more like an opt-in newsletter and intends on supporting it further with paid subscription-only channel options in future. The opt-in nature echoes a strength of podcasting: hard news content that might be seen as brand-unsafe in advertising contexts is openly welcomed by audiences, as that’s the content they self-selected by subscribing and regularly consuming it.
YouTube Unveils 9 New Features At Made On YouTube 2024 Greg Jarboe
Last week, YouTube announced a series of new additions to both the viewer side of YouTube, as well as backend updates for creators. The new auto-dubbing feature that will allow creators to add audio tracks in different languages is set to be rolled out to more than the select group of creators testing it. Creators will also soon be able to provide more of a “big screen experience” to their content by structuring it into television-style seasons and episodes for better viewability on TVs. A change that will be a boon for video podcasts, especially those with multiple shows inside one feed, or multiple miniseries on different topics.
As for the rest of the news…
- Spanish-language podcast network Pitaya Entertainment and Mexican entertainment company TVNotas have joined forces to produce and distribute podcasts.
- The podcast “All Ears English”, designed to help listeners learn the language through audio, is now available as in-flight entertainment on Lufthansa Airlines
- Realm has announced key leadership hires, including Carly Migliori as Production Partnerships Lead and Sarah Bentley as Head of Network
- Lower Street has announced the 2025 edition of the Brand Podcast Summit, a virtual event slated for January 14th and 15th.
- Headliner’s AI-powered Disco product was selected for use by Newsweek, which recommends relevant podcast episodes next to articles
- editaudio has announced Be Well, Sis has joined their network.
