What are the podcast trends that advertisers should be watching out for?
I think you’re going to see an increased acceleration towards the blended approach. You are no longer going to see podcasting as just a host-read medium. It is one that has tremendous reach. It is one where the audiences have grown and matured to the point where you can find the incremental reach that you want and where you can find really deep connections to particular audiences.
A big trend you will continue to see is people looking from an advertiser standpoint to buy those audiences and not necessarily just to buy those shows. In the time that I’ve been at IAB, one of the big topics of conversation—how do we convince advertisers to look at our full slate of content as something they want to invest in writ large instead of only cherry-picking what they think are the most effective shows because they happen to be the big ones that they’ve all heard of?
Don’t just buy the shows you know or that you assume are going to give you a great performance because you’ve heard of them. Look at podcasting as a medium in which you have these incredibly engaged, highly attentive people who are consuming an enormously varied amount of content. Don’t just buy the shows, buy the audiences.