The Interactive Advertising Bureau says podcasting is on course to have $2.6 billion in total ad revenue by 2026. As the ad dollars grow, buyers say how the medium is being bought is also evolving as brands get a better understanding of how audio works for them. It’s a move that promises to deliver more advertising to a wider variety of shows.
Figuring out where podcasting fits into not only audio budgets, but advertising overall, has opened new opportunities for the medium, according to Brittany Clevenger, Senior Director of Marketing at BetterHelp — which month after month remains the biggest spender in podcasting. Although podcasts began filled with direct response brands, she says as BetterHelp examined how it works they see it’s not as much a “siloed performance channel” as first thought, as a lot of brands move from last click to multi-touch using media mix modeling.
“Everyone is starting to realize that podcast can serve both upper and lower funnel functions for a brand and we’re all getting good at measuring its place in the consumers’ paths to purchase,” Clevenger said during an IAB webinar Tuesday. “It’s cool to see certain brands are starting to take more of a campaign-first focus, instead of such a channel-first focus, because that’s just not how this channel was originally bought.”
For BetterHelp, that has meant they have moved beyond buying specific shows to looking more at audience-based buying across a larger number of podcasts.
Ad Results Media CRO Teresa Elliott said other performance-based advertisers are also moving to more branding campaigns, growing audio spend. She said that is also opening conversations about other tie-ins, such as with social media and live events.
Since Horizon Media buys across many channels, Senior VP Maria Tullin said they have long focused on attribution of the various media, including podcasting, and that’s helped them understand what role audio plays.
“It’s important that we don’t try to make podcasts be held as something that other channels aren’t being held to,” Tullin said. But she said they are seeing some interesting results when they compare the reach of huge versus niche podcasts and compare the siloed results against the deduplicated results. That also means embracing a show and its hosts on social media or YouTube.
“We are seeing great results when we take advantage of the full piece,” Tullin said. “There’s some logic to it too, because you’re reaching the audience in other ways. It’s going to be hard to measure, but it’s going to work, and one plus one is going to equal more than two.”
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