The Spanish word for podcasting? It’s podcasting. Despite that common linguistic thread, Latinos lag the overall U.S. market when it comes to being familiar with the medium. Edison Research says its forthcoming Latino Podcast Listener Report shows 61% of U.S. Latinos aged 18 and older are familiar with the term podcasting. That is compared to three-quarters (75%) of the total U.S. 18+ population. The data comes from an online survey of about 2,500 Americans conducted last month.
“Listening has increased to podcasts since COVID-19. It has also increased within the past year,” Edison Manager of Research Gabriel Soto said Thursday during an Edison webinar. He said the data shows variances within different populations of the U.S. Latino demographic, including among those born outside the U.S. and those born here, and among the various age groups.
The Latino Podcast Listener Report was commissioned by Adonde Media, Lantigua Williams & Co., Libsyn, NPR and Pandora. Edison plans to release the full data on June 30 during a webinar.
During a wide-ranging virtual question-and-answer session on Thursday, several other podcast topics came up. One was what podcasters and radio broadcasters could teach one another. Edison Senior VP Tom Webster, who has worked with several large market and nationally syndicated shows, said one of his biggest takeaways was the amount of work hosts did to prepare for each show is something podcasters would be advised to emulate. “It’s something any podcaster should look at as a serious commitment to actually producing quality and engaging entertainment on a repeated basis,” he said.
As far as what radio could learn from podcasters, Edison VP Megan Lazovick said she thinks broadcasters need to address the industry’s “amazingly long” commercial breaks to be more like digital audio. “I think radio would be better served if they were a little bit more creative with their sponsorships and didn’t take their listeners for granted,” she said.
Edison President Larry Rosin said that he thinks the radio industry needs to understand podcasting is a different medium. “It’s not just radio that’s pre-recorded,” he said. Rosin said if the vision is to make podcasts sound like broadcast radio, he thinks the digital medium won’t reach its full potential.
In terms of advertising, Webster also said he thinks dynamic ad insertion is one of the keys to successfully monetizing podcasts and streaming. “We are still in the early days of it,” he said, acknowledging among some sales reps there is still some reluctance to embrace programmatic selling. “As people get more savvy about not treating it like it’s remnants and bottom of the barrel advertising and realize it’s a place for your talent to work and for relevant messages that can be targeted to the relevant audience, gradually those differences will fade away,” he said.
Webster also said that he believes podcasting is being unfairly “attacked” for having a lack of attribution metrics while ad buyers often overlook the same challenge when buying television, radio or print spots. “Podcasting metrics are better than all three of those frankly,” he said, noting Edison does a lot of brand-lift studies for marketers. “Attribution is something that’s been sold to us by the five large tech platforms – but if I hear about something on a podcast and I Google that product to find the website, Google got the last touch attribution for that,” said Webster. He said their research has found that the most effective podcast ads are those that were the most relevant to the type of show the ads ran in.
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