Not All Podcast Ads are Created Equal. Here's Why.

Summary:

• Big Game ad spots can be cost-prohibitive for most brands, driving brands to get creative.
• Veritone One brought two of our legacy clients together for a strategic brand play that capitalizes on the Big Game and Valentine’s Day—without the Big Game price tag.

The Huddle

For those of us in the industry, the Big Game means one thing above all else: prime advertising real estate. And that doesn’t come cheap: a 30-second spot during the 2023 telecast cost advertisers an average of $7M.

To be a part of the conversation this week while maximizing ROI, a brand has to get creative with their strategy. Or, they can partner with an agency like ours.

“With Valentine’s Day taking place just three days after the Big Game, it was crucial for us to find creative ways to capture the attention of consumers across the country, which is why we approached Veritone One,” said Abhay Patel, Brand President of 1-800-Flowers.com.

So Veritone One put together a game plan to play matchmaker for two of our biggest brands, teaming up 1-800-Flowers.com and DraftKings to tackle both the Big Game and Valentine’s Day messaging with ultimate efficiency. The result? Our innovative “Don’t Forget the Flowers” campaign.

The Big Matchup

The “Don’t Forget the Flowers” campaign is the first of its kind, stemming from previous conversations to develop potential cross-promotions between the two advertising giants. Both the Big Game and Valentine’s Day are huge marketing opportunities in general, but for these two brands and their demographics, they are especially resonant.

“With so much hype around the Big Game, it’s a challenge to cut through the noise,” said Jason Danahy, Head of Revenue, DraftKings Media & Sponsorship of DraftKings. “When Veritone One approached us with the idea to collaborate with 1-800-Flowers, we were immediately intrigued. This unique collaboration allowed us to attract new customers to DraftKings by thinking beyond traditional advertising and forging a partnership that no one saw coming with a brand that shares our audiences, especially this time of year.”

Between the campaign’s launch on January 22 and May 12, for every “Don’t Forget the Flowers” eligible bouquet purchased, customers received a $10-$50 DraftKings gift card to be used for online and fantasy sports gaming. For sports fans hoping to celebrate their loved ones this holiday, it’s a win-win.

Everyone Wins

“This campaign allowed Veritone One to do what we do best: develop a winning advertising strategy based on creativity, extensive audio and video advertising experience, and intuitive matchmaking skills,” said Richard Varalla, our VP of Account Management. “The Big Game set the stage for 1-800-Flowers to drive visibility and sales in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, creating a dynamic opportunity for our team to develop a creative and comprehensive strategy apart from purchasing a big ad spot.”

Patel agrees. “By matching us up with DraftKings and helping conceptualize the promotional offer to develop a first-of-its-kind campaign, Veritone One was able to help us get in front of football fans outside of the traditional thirty-second ad.”

With conversions as their end game, both brands are poised for victory. Veritone One couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this winning team.

See how Veritone One is implementing DEI values into our media plans.

Summary:

• Despite growing listenership and demand for Black-hosted podcasts, only 14% of podcasters identify as Black.
• Veritone One has led a thought leadership initiative to combat the lack of diversity in podcasting, including an 15-20% increase of ad spend on minority-owned podcasts.
• By retooling internal processes to produce quantitative data that informs more diverse media buys, we are helping clients and networks value underserved voices in the podcast ecosystem.

An Industry-Wide Problem

Let’s set the scene: it’s Podcast Movement 2022 in Dallas, Texas, and the Veritone One team is excited, as always, to connect with and learn from our peers in the industry. Among the usual encouraging insights, however, was one disconcerting takeaway: the lack of diversity in podcast advertising and namely, the lack of Black podcasts in the space. According to that year’s The Creators, a study by Edison Research in collaboration with Sounds Profitable, just 14% of podcasters identify as Black and/or African American.

While we appreciated the industry-wide visibility Podcast Movement brought to this issue, we knew that bringing attention to it was just the first step. So, in response, our SVP of Growth Bart Roselli, Account Strategist Kedric Walls, and Senior Podcast Buyer Morganne “Mo” Cameron led the thought leadership initiative for our agency to support underserved voices in the podcast ecosystem.

Speaking to Black Listeners

2023’s edition of Infinite Dial, a long-running annual study by Edison Research, reports that 45% of Black Americans ages 12 and up listen to podcasts each month, while 28% are weekly listeners. The study broke down the top ten podcasts Black Americans listen to as a whole and found that over half feature Black hosts, illustrating the demand for Black voices in the space. The Breakfast Club, Drink Champs, and The Joe Budden Podcast are among the shows topping the list for Black podcast listeners.

People want to hear Black perspectives, to learn from them and in some cases, see their experiences reflected. Another report from Edison Research, in collaboration with SXM Media and Mindshare, the Black Podcast Listener Report, revealed that 75% of Black monthly podcast listeners frequently or occasionally follow or seek out podcast content that focuses on Black narratives and features Black voices, with 63% considering it “crucial” for podcasts to do so.

Furthermore, of special interest to our clients is the fact that Black weekly podcast listeners are more likely to engage with podcast advertisers than the overall U.S. weekly podcast listener. After hearing an ad spot on one of their favorite podcasts, for example, 52% of Black weekly podcast listeners (compared with 44% of U.S. weekly podcast listeners) purchased a product or service.

Currently, Veritone One is focused on guiding the creation of new content that speaks to listeners’ wants and needs, with the understanding that an increase in resonant content for listeners will lead to a demand for advertising inventory from our clients. This then becomes a positive feedback loop: if our network partners continue to see a push for these types of placements, media plans, and advertising opportunities, they will continue to push for these shows to be created and supported.

Our Impact So Far

Anyone can “talk the talk” when it comes to wanting to see diverse creators in podcasting, but at Veritone One, we’re fortunate enough to have the infrastructure and leverage in the space to walk the walk. This means, for example, focusing on growing discoverability for DEI-centered content across our media plans and overall buy strategy.

Over the last few years, our teams have forged deeper relationships with key vendor partners that stand behind amplifying a range of voices—Slate/ForeverDog, Studio71, SXM/Midroll, iHeart – Black Effect Network and Outspoken Network, Lemonada Media, Acast LGBTQ+ Voices, and Urban One Podcast Network to name a few—for our client brands.

So far, Veritone One has seen an estimated 15-20%—and growing—increase of ad dollars into minority-voiced podcasts. These ever-evolving long-term partnerships serve as a test-and-learn tool for our clients to understand, connect, and broadcast to wider audiences.

As we look ahead, we intend to expand our advocacy and amplify the influence of diverse voices in a meaningful way to drive results for our clients. In addition to thoughtful media rationale and strong recommendations on our media plans, we are building naming conventions into our tech and internal processes to support our strategy with quantitative data.

This is where Veritone One’s proprietary data comes in; with years of historical spend under our belts, we are uniquely positioned to make a compelling argument for diversity that’s motivated by our values, but proven out by dollars and cents.

Beyond internal processes, we are dedicated to remaining educated on the state of the industry through participation in engagement research and webinars, such as “Understanding Black Audiences & Their Connection to Audio,” powered by SiriusXM Media. Per the Black Podcast Listener Report, 48% of Black monthly podcast listeners have been listening to podcasts less than a year. We know listenership in this demographic is only growing, and on behalf of both our agency and our clients, we strive to meet listeners where they are.

Diversity teaches us to acknowledge. Inclusion teaches us to learn, connect, and build. And at Veritone One, we are just getting started.

Edited by Rubi Mora

Veritone One provides some top takeaways from the 2023 Podcast Movement.

Summary:

• More and more partners are becoming educated on, and interested in, Simulcast buys.
• Clean, accurate third-party performance data is imperative to future ad spend allocation.
• The podcast advertising industry is seeing a return to form, with dynamic ad insertion buys deprioritized in favor of host-read embedded ads that drive proven performance.
• Our relationship with network partners only gets stronger year after year.

Simulcast is still all the buzz.

As you might have heard in our recent post on the matter, Simulcast is a mutually beneficial solution for advertisers and networks looking to make the most impact across today’s fragmented media landscape.

One major takeaway from this year’s Podcast Movement? Simulcast shows no signs of slowing down, as we saw more and more partners not just broaching the topic, but also asking the right questions so that they can start implementing visual components alongside their podcast buys in the most effective way.

Veritone One has been ahead of the curve by several years. As industry leaders, we are uniquely situated to educate our partners on best practices that will help them make the most of a Simulcast buy—and to continue to define industry standards.

Dollars need to follow the data.

When it comes to shaping a performance strategy, we can’t overstate the importance of starting with honest, clean data. We’re longtime proponents of using data-driven insights to optimize our campaigns, and we have the tech stack to prove it.

This year, the conversation kept coming back to the need for uncompromised translation of data from third-party tracking tools to our internal analytics platform. Making sure our metrics are aligned and our partners are accountable is imperative; it provides us with the most accurate performance data and allows our media team to allocate future spend with confidence.

Buyers’ advice to networks: get back to basics.

Speaking of future spend: sometimes to figure out where the industry is going, we need to look back at what’s worked in the past. This year, we saw trends for podcast advertising harken back to the embedded host-read ads that built this ecosystem in the first place.

During the peak of the pandemic, Podcast, and consequently podcast advertising, grew substantially, and the flood of demand led to the adoption of ad tech solutions meant to maximize inventory. Proponents of dynamic ad insertion extolled the virtues of its flexibility: whereas an embedded ad read would ostensibly live in a podcast episode in perpetuity, DAI allowed for real-time decision making in which a listener would be served an ad during any given podcast download. From an impression fulfillment standpoint, this was especially advantageous to networks, and the high demand meant they had no trouble selling inventory at increased CPMs—even if that filled inventory didn’t perform as well for brands as an embedded host-read ad.

But this year, we’ve noticed the tides shifting again. Networks are taking heed of buyers’ advice to prioritize the ROI of the DR brands that built the podcast advertising space. That means focusing more than ever on embedded ad reads, host-read endorsements, and ensuring impression delivery is fulfilled when audiences are most engaged.

Leveraging proprietary data and our position in the podcast ecosystem, we have been able to educate our network partners on what has worked historically and what will deliver sustained growth to all parties moving forward.

Our partner relationships really do get better with time.

We are heartened by the positive feedback we continue to receive about our team every year. Hearing our partners tell us we are truly the best at what we do is always nice, but looking back at what we’ve accomplished together is all the more gratifying.

Because if you ask us, one of the things we do best is build and maintain deep, constructive partnerships with our vendors. These relationships aren’t just long-standing; they evolve to meet the moment, which is why we have something new and exciting to discuss every Podcast Movement. Our commitment to expanding our offerings and collaborating with partners to get creative with campaigns is unwavering, even—especially—after a year of uncertainty.

Connecting with the people who have helped us do such great work is an incredible experience and one that makes us look forward to this event every year.

Edited by Rubi Mora