What are podcasters talking about? Brands want to know. And so the media monitoring service Talkwalker has become the latest to add podcasts to the list of sources it covers. It says it will monitor a catalog of 35,000 podcasts from a variety of platforms using its new Speech Analytics technology to give brands and advertising agencies the ability to analyze conversations on podcasts. Speech Analytics says with access to the realm of podcasts, brands can gather insights that were previously inaccessible to them to “protect” their brand and drive greater revenue.
"Given the rise in popularity of podcasts and other audio-based channels, Speech Analytics was the logical next step," said Talkwalker CEO Robert Glaesener in the announcement. "As a major source of news and entertainment, podcasts hold an extensive amount of information that brands cannot ignore when looking to capture the voice of the customer."
Talkwalker’s Speech Analytics relies on speech-to-text recognition technology. Pierre Detry, Chief Product Officer at Talkwalker, said that will allow brand managers and ad agencies to find actionable insights from a variety of podcasts in a few seconds, rather than manually sift through hundreds of hours of audio.
Talkwalker is the latest media monitoring service to keep an ear on podcasts. TVEyes announced in October 2019 that it would start analyzing thousands of podcasts to help its clients keep tabs on what’s being said about them. Rival Meltwater did the same in February 2020.
It is not just spoken word, either. Since November 2019 the music monitoring service Pex tracks all podcasts in the Apple Podcast database to ensure no songs are being used without the proper license. Pex said its fingerprinting technology requires only a half-second of material to identify content.