The digital audio adtech company AMA will start the new year with a new CEO. Nine-year company veteran Paul Kelly has spent the past four years as its Global Chief Revenue Officer. Kelly brings experience as a media sales executive to his new role leading AMA. The U.S. makes up about 60% of AMA’s business, but it also operates in Canada and the UK. Podcast News Daily caught up with Kelly to talk about his new job and where audio is heading in 2025.
PND: As you take this new job, you say you’re more of an operator than an entrepreneur. Can you explain what you mean?
Paul Kelly: We have a product with a market fit. And so I see kind of my role now is to maximize and capture that opportunity that’s before us. I have a reasonably good grasp of marketing and advertising from a client’s perspective, as distinct from a media owner, who’s very aware of what we have, what we have to sell. I guess I’ve always been a little bit envious of marketers and the diligence, training, and academic rigor that goes into being a high-level marketer for a large-scale national brand. So in a way, as I reflect, I’ve always tried to make sure that I can at least know enough to be useful on a call or with an interaction with the marketer. I have a lot of respect for what they do and how they’ve gotten there.
PND: AMA says it’s focused on making creative smarter. So are we ending the year with creative actually being smarter in audio than it was at the start of the year?
Paul Kelly: I think we are, but it’s a natural byproduct of the digitization of audio writ large. So you’ve got a higher level of addressability, you’ve got improvements in measurement and attribution. You have new formats, podcasting, etc., and then new ad formats that come along. And so, you add all of that up, and, yeah, advertising will almost inevitably get smarter. Shame on us if as an industry if it doesn’t.
PND: With you taking on a new role, are we going to see AMA going in the new year?
Paul Kelly: We’re completely focused on both the challenges and the desires of our clients. On the challenges side, our clients need tools that are simple and that remove some of that complexity. We’ve worked hard over the last two years to tailor the platform to those large repeat clients, many of whom are retailers who have a natural cadence of high-volume offers, promotions, limited-time sale windows which is distinct from an advertiser like Geico, whose “save 15% or more on your car insurance” is a pretty reliable message. But in many other cases, the message will change from week to week, based on inventory, based on priorities, based on a whole load of other factors. And so it’s been really important for us to understand those cadences that are unique to different categories of advertisers, and then configure our solution that it addresses those very specific constraints and opportunities.
PND: Do you see any areas you would you want to focus more on, or maybe the market is moving in that direction?
Paul Kelly: Podcasting as an area is really important. I do strongly believe in, for the health of audio as a whole, major publishers need to be able to aggregate inventory across radio, podcasting, and digital streaming. We tremendously value making that inventory available both direct and programmatic. It’s easy to say, it’s not easy to do. There’s a lot that goes into that, but we believe we have a role in healthy publishers maximizing the yield from that aggregation, such that one advertiser can buy inventory across all of those different channels and formats, but the creative be appropriately versioned. You don’t necessarily want to run the same ad on national radio that you do in a podcast. We can do better than that. So a platform like ours conceivably can not only make that happen, but make it happen in a way that’s very simple.
PND: How so?
Paul Kelly: We can remove a lot of complexity that used to happen with radio versioning, for example, with podcasting when you want to run multiple host-reads across a broad slate of titles giving advertisers a bit more flexibility. So maybe there’s a hybrid unit — you want to do your host reads for your top shows, but the broader slate, the mid or long tail, is still valuable. There might be an easier solution than just running a static audio or radio spot into that space. So we’re working closely with publishers and agencies on that. That particularly is one of our focuses in terms of unearthing category-specific use cases, pain points, and challenges that we can help ameliorate.
PND: Are you seeing advertisers more willing to invest and spend money on audio and audio creative?
Paul Kelly: I’d say the growth is being driven, as is the case with most channels, by the audience consumption. That obviously means that it’s increasingly become unignorable. We’ve had the podcast election, which, of course, is a unique event. But it was very powerful for anyone who needed convincing just how influential that that medium is; it’s playing to see for all at this point.
PND: What does that mean for AMA’s business?
Paul Kelly: We’re able to help shepherd and almost steward some of the new advertisers that maybe previously haven’t considered audio, many of whom are more focused on mid- and lower-funnel advertising. That’s what we’ve seen certainly in the last 12 months. We’re really pleased to have played a valuable role in that, because one way to use personalization is to make creative much more actionable, to drive foot traffic to a particular store, to stimulate bookings because you’ve provided a destination that is in close proximity to that particular listener, as opposed to a broader message. We’ve been able to help audio publishers compete for budgets that they might not otherwise have been considered for, based on what we’re able to kind of create.
PND: Is that a result of more money shifting to audio? Or is that just audio money moving around?
Paul Kelly: It’s absolutely a result of money shifting into audio. A big part of what we do is to help them visualize how they can execute a similar strategy, and audio for many of these new clients wasn’t necessarily clear to them because it has been considered, aside from podcasting, a brand-building awareness channel. We’ve been able to show a way that personalization can be used, and often is used by other digital channels, as a way to actually stimulate behavioral outcomes, whether that’s clicks, leads, bookings, or driving to the store. This is a lexicon that traditional audio might not have spoken that frequently, but now it’s really core to how we talk to our clients, and how we kind of configure and construct campaigns.
PND: How was business in 2024 at AMA?
Paul Kelly: We are up 60% this year from last year, which was our biggest year, last year.
PND: What would you attribute that to?
Paul Kelly: The transition of some clients from broadcast radio into digital audio. One thing that broadcast radio has done for a long time, and done very well, is a kind of versioning. There’s a localization component to a lot of radio advertising. That has been less of a thing in streaming audio. We’ve been able to solve that for clients. If they’re used to having versions created for hundreds of different markets across the U.S., they can now execute that in digital audio with a higher level of localization, but without any of the complexity when it comes to producing and trafficking hundreds of different assets, because our platform is built to house all potential creative variations within one asset. There’s 20,000 ZIP codes in the U.S. We can create a version for all 20,000 that’s all completely automated. That’s been a big inflection point for us in terms of our growth over the last few years.
PND: Could AMA see another 60% growth rate in 2025?
Paul Kelly: We are out-pacing digital, but we’re a small company. We’re fortunate that we retain a lot of clients that come on and work with us. There’s definitely a lot of growth ahead of us, based on that strong base that we’ve built in typical audio categories like retail, CPG, travel, telco, and wireless. But plenty of growth ahead as the channel itself grows, new formats come around, and there’s an increasing prevalence of data-driven advertising writ large.
PND: As you think about the new year, you’ve said that you think audio measurement and attribution will finally catch up to consumption in 2025. Is that a prediction?
Paul Kelly: I’d say it’s a priority. We work with all kinds of measurement companies. We don’t have a measurement solution ourselves. We don’t check our own homework. Of course, we report on delivery and all the different creative versions that get played out. But a lot of clients use us in a performance context. So we’re used to appending pixels to our tag, and we work with Flower, Foursquare, Cubic and Nielsen, so we’re being measured against foot traffic, sales lift, and all of that stuff. As their products have become more advanced each year, it will remain a really important challenge for the industry because of the head start social and display media have, as well as the superior signal you can get from them. It’s very compelling from a marketer’s perspective for someone to show you can give them $1 and they will give you $1.50 back. We’re not there for audio, but great strides have been made, and will continue, which will benefit the whole, the whole industry.
PND: What’s your sense of what advertisers are thinking? Are they frustrated with audio? Are they happy with what they’ve seen? Or is what has developed during the past year or so given some of them what they need?
Paul Kelly: In our experience, the investment that’s been committed to audio has performed. We’re fortunate that we’ve had a number of clients come to us and start with a test budget. The opportunity is for now for audio to compete for budgets that aren’t traditionally allocated or considered for audio. Podcasting is as much of an influencer channel as what’s considered influencer marketing. It shares many of the same attributes. And digital audio can now compete.
PND: AI has been sort of the buzzword of the year, and that is going to continue into the new year. How will it make audio smarter?
Paul Kelly: In terms of addressability and optimization, the machine learning models have already advanced. For certain advertisers, the improvement and ease with which you can execute a highly addressable campaign is largely attributable to some of the advancements in ML (machine learning) and AI. It’s been tremendously helpful. From a production and creative perspective, it has helped with concepting and the rapid production targeting 20,000 ZIP codes.
PND: Are any commercials 100% AI-generated at this point?
Paul Kelly: There’s no ads currently 100% AI-produced at this point. We’ve done a number of synth voice campaigns, but there’s still a substantial human component in terms of what we want to say to the person in Chattanooga on the seventh of December, when there’s 10 days left to have your presents delivered before Christmas. But the recording has been done with synth voice for a few advertisers.
PND: We’ve heard some people on the creative side complain they don’t think AI is to the level yet of producing entire podcasts because something doesn’t sound right. Do you hear the same thing from advertisers?
Paul Kelly: There’s certainly a quality assurance process that needs to occur. So no, you don’t punch in a script, press go and then immediately traffic. But the rate of iteration and development is astonishing. So, yes, as some of our clients have done, I would execute a simple voice campaign. It can be done with imperceptible difference, but with a certain level of human input and follow-up to ensure that is the case.
PND: The coming year also promises to bring more changes to how people are consuming audio in cars. Because a lot of it’s becoming digitized and data-driven, do you see that as an opportunity?
Paul Kelly: The data is there. The question is, can we make it useful? While it might be before the innovation that’s occurring both in connected home and connected car is truly at scale, we’re super excited about those larger, broader shifts that are coming towards us, as opposed to the reverse.
PND: It also seems like it has the opportunity to shift more money into audio, especially as traditional television ad dollars are increasingly up for grabs.
Paul Kelly: One hundred percent, and in some cases, even some money from email marketing. We’ve also run a lot of campaigns that are very tightly integrated with digital out of home. But it’s not necessarily a zero sum. I still think we can grow by being more closely aligned with other channels. Audio isn’t necessarily as siloed as it has been in the past. You might run a social campaign and with a cross-channel effort, and audio can now be part of that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Comments