Podcasts may be a quickly-growing medium, but is podcast advertising actually a good fit for every brand?
Podsights, a marketing attribution platform for podcast advertising, has launched a product that is supposed to help advertisers with this question.
IAB UK described podcast advertising as “one of the fastest growing areas of digital advertising” with ad spend on the medium increasing from £23m to £33m between 2019 and 2020.
Podcasting audiences have also been shown to be more positively inclined towards ads as Kantar Media Reactions 2021 report highlighted the medium as the number-one online channel for “advertising equity”.
Kristy Mei, product marketing manager at Podsights told Mediatel News this tool, called Advisor, will allow brands to browse podcast data to determine whether a podcast is fit for what they’re looking for in a campaign.
This tool will be particularly useful for brands new to the podcast advertising space, Mei added.
Mei explained that within the new Advisor dashboard, there is a new metric called “Affinity Score”, which takes into account three different metrics derived from pixel-based events rather than third-party cookies.
The metrics report whether people who visited the brand’s site listened to a particular podcast before; whether website visitors listen to this podcast genre; and a “look-alike score” based on audience segment data of the cross-over between the website visitors and the podcast listeners.
Once these three factors are aggregated, the “Affinity Score” will be calculated between 0 and 100 and the brand will see a dashboard with the podcasts ordered from highest-ranking or most compatible to lowest-ranking or least compatible.
Within this view, advertisers can see the podcasts with the “highest potential for a successful podcasting campaign” as well as an additional metric for what their new reach could be by advertising in each podcast.
Once the advertiser has this curated list, they can get in touch with the publisher directly as Podsights are a “facilitator” rather than a media seller or owner.
Mei said: “In the Podsights dashboard, we will have a piece where advertisers could add podcasts to their media plan, and then come up with what they want to buy and then contact publishers directly.”
Podfront and Acast both announced partnerships with Podsights to offer insight to their creators and advertisers at the IAB UK Podcast Upfronts earlier this month.