Katz Digital Taps NumberEight’s Tech To Help Marketers Make ‘Lookalike’ Podcast Buys.

Want to buy the podcast “SmartLess” but don’t have the budget, or the show is sold out? The audience intelligence company NumberEight says its Podcast Lookalikes technology will help brands find other shows with similar audience profiles and content signals. The London-based company has formed a strategic partnership with Katz Digital in the U.S., which will use NumberEight’s Podcast Lookalikes tech to help marketers buy across its network of more than 300,000 podcasts.

“With the integration of NumberEight’s Podcast Lookalikes technology, that global scale becomes even more valuable, enabling buyers to dynamically surface shows that mirror their target audiences and deliver performance across borders, without relying on personal identifiers,” the company said in a release. More than a targeting tool, the company says Podcast Lookalikes enables a new type of curation, empowering advertisers to discover untapped shows that resonate with their ideal audience.

It works by first analyzing what it calls the “seed podcast” to determine the podcast’s demographic characteristics using AI models trained on anonymized first-party publisher data and content metadata. Advanced natural language processing models also analyze content themes across the podcast’s episodes. Then the matchmaking occurs, as Podcast Lookalikes finds other shows that are ranked based on audience and content similarities, surfacing the closest matches to the seed podcast. Whether reaching listeners in New York, London, or São Paulo, it says advertisers can now tap into Katz’s vast supply with the precision and flexibility today’s campaigns demand.

"We’re excited to partner with Katz Digital to help advertisers better navigate and activate across all publishers," said Abhishek Sen, CEO and co-founder at NumberEight. "Together, we’re combining Katz’s unmatched inventory and scale with smart audience curation to drive better outcomes across one of the fastest-growing channels in audio—and this is just the beginning."

While podcast advertising has traditionally relied on IP-based or authenticated traffic data, which has led to privacy challenges and limitations in demographic accuracy, some companies have instead turned to IP addresses, which can match household-level data. However, NumberEight uses an ID-less model using anonymized contextual data and machine learning to provide precise demographic insights without compromising personal privacy.

NumberEight’s solution relies on anonymized publisher data and contextual information from RSS feeds, predicting audience demographics without relying on IP-based methods. The approach leverages machine learning to safeguard user privacy while providing the kinds of insights that advertisers need to reach the right audiences at scale without geographical constraints.

The partnership with Katz Digital is the latest of several alliances that NumberEight has formed over the past year. It earlier inked similar deals with SiriusXM’s AdsWizz, Barometer, and AdTonos.