Podcast Ad Frequency Study, Forbes x Walmart Creator Upfront, & More

Ad Nauseam: Frequency, Repetition, and Consumer Perceptions of Podcast Advertising

Sounds Profitable’s latest study, conducted with Signal Hill Insights, surveyed 1,011 weekly podcast listeners to gauge how they react to podcast ads. When asked how they reacted to ads in the last podcast episode they listened to, 68% of respondents listened to at least some of them. 51% find hearing the same ad more than once in a single episode annoying or strongly dislike it. Listeners don’t find interesting, funny, or novel ads fatiguing. They do find a lack of variety in form and repetition of the same brand/message tiresome. In the words of Tom Webster during the study’s debut webinar: “Podcast listeners don’t skip ads, they skip crap.” [Source]

Advertisers Are Misinformed About The Ad Industry’s Misinformation Problem by Anthony Vargas

In the past five years, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University have sought to determine how often ads are served to sites that publish misleading stories, propaganda, or conspiracy theories. In addition, they sought to find out whether advertisers accurately understand the issue. Only 20% of surveyed advertising executives whose company had run ads on sites previously marked as false/misleading (by industry watchdogs like NewsGuard and Global Disinformation) believed their company had done so. The researchers dubbed the disconnect a sense of “false uniqueness,” where advertisers tend to presume monetizing misinformation is an issue because other companies are buying the ad space, not them. [Source]

Forbes Launches First Creator Upfront in Partnership With Walmart by Mark Stenberg

The new two-day event emulates traditional TV upfronts, with a content creator twist. Instead of television executives debuting upcoming content to attract advertiser attention, the Creator Upfront will feature 20 to 25 content creators pitching marketers and agency executives on their value as potential brand partners. Effectively bridging the gap between the IAB’s Podcast Upfront and legacy media upfronts. [Source]

Instagram’s new unskippable ads may frustrate users by Ashley Regan

As previously covered, Meta has been running tests of a version of its image-based social media app Instagram that locks users out of the ability to continue scrolling for 3 to 5 seconds while watching an ad. Currently the pace is one unskippable ad every three posts seen in a feed or three stories viewed. Adding unskippable moments to an already ad-heavy feed is proving controversial, with an informal Android Authority poll of 530 people finding 87% of respondents will use Instagram less if the Ad Breaks become a permanent addition. Podcasting, in large part has had native ad skipping built in since the beginning. And as Ad Nauseam above found, audiences in large part tend to skip ads only when they’re poor quality or repeated. [Source]

…as for the rest of the news: