Today in the Business of Podcasting
Sirius XM Creates a Podcasting Brand Safety and Suitability Tool for Advertisers by Antoinette Siu
The new feature developed in partnership with brand safety company Barometer and marketing automation platform ArtsAI, enables agencies and brands to run an ArtsAI pixel on their campaign and then use Barometer’s contextual targeting to measure suitability and safety. The system aims to solve the problem of marketers only being able to evaluate a majority of brand metrics after a campaign has ended. With the new tool, advertisers can check and tweak campaigns in real time. [Source]
When Data Misleads by Brian Morrissey
Continuing from a previous issue discussing editorial scorecards and the impact they can have on content, Morrissey touches on the potential damage to unique content analytics can cause. When content is built specifically to take analytics into account, and advertisers prioritize cost over value, homogenized content with good SEO is valued over distinct, valued content. As Tom Webster said in Actually, We Love Ads, audiences love content about the things they love. To the point they’d love podcasts about their favorite brands. Morrissey ends with a quote from podcaster Alex Schleifer, who uses analytics not to chase the widest audience possible, but to understand who the core audience is and how to “super-serve our super-users.” [Source]
YouTube is Experimenting With Longer but less Frequent Ad Breaks on TV by Emma Roth
The connected TV experience for YouTube is going to change soon as Google tweaks the ad experience to be less like watching YouTube in a browser. The new CTV YouTube experience for users without YouTube Premium emulates CTV ad pods, choosing to collect ads into larger clusters that appear less frequently than the previous system. CTV YouTube’s user interface will also update, replacing an existing overlay with a timer and count displaying how many ads are left in a pod with a simple timer until the viewer can either skip the ad or when an unskippable ad will finish. The new update brings the YouTube smart TV experience closer to the ad break experience podcast listeners are largely familiar with, though how dense those ad breaks will be in comparison to podcast breaks remains to be seen. [Source]
Digital CPMs Plummet, 2H Rebound Expected by Karlene Lukovitz
According to AdRoll data collected from 2,000 online businesses in North America, digital advertising CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) have dropped 49% year-over-year. Online conversions are up 13% year over year as of Q2, with companies relating to career, entertainment, and hobbies taking the biggest gains. Automotive and real-estate had the lowest rates, suggesting consumers are less bullish on big-ticket items this year and focusing more on items enriching their daily lives and careers. In podcasting the numbers have fared better. AdvertiseCast’s network of 2,900 shows reports the average CPM for a 60 second ad spot last month was $22.14, a 5% year-over-year decrease and only six cents lower than last month. And this is just with AdvertiseCast’s data. Were more companies to follow their lead, we’d have an even better understanding of the average podcast CPM. [Source]
Why Advertisers Aren’t Moving to Streaming TV as Quickly as Viewers by Parker Herren
One media agency tells AdAge that during this year’s upfront clients allocated 60% of their TV spend on linear and 40% to connected TV, with the bigger slice going to linear largely because linear TV still has the lion’s share of sports content. Another reason for the slow adoption of CTV is the large amount of consumers avoiding ad-supported tiers on streaming services. An anonymous buyer cited the fragmented nature of CTV buying making it difficult to tap into its sizeable audience. Meanwhile, in podcasting, the majority of audiences are accepting of ad-supported content, support brands that sponsor their favorite content, and we have a robust ad infrastructure. [Source]
…as for the rest of the news: Nielsen is laying off 9% of its global workforce, The ANA and the 4As have released 11 new guidelines to promote investors working with diverse media companies, AdWeek covers a prediction the US ad industry will grow 5% this year, and Eric Nuzum pulls podcasting wisdom from The Bear’s season two episode “Forks.”
