Mattress Firm’s Branded Podcast Drives In-Store Sales With iHeartMedia

Data from Mattress Firm’s podcast campaign with iHeartMedia, which ran in 2022, shows that the medium is driving sales.

The retailer ran a branded podcast called “Chasing Sleep” with iHeartMedia’s Ruby content studio, which talked to experts and everyday people with unusual schedules, like ER doctors and ultramarathoners, about how to achieve good sleep.

The campaign, which Mattress Firm designed with agency Spark Foundry, also included ad placements across iHeartMedia’s network, the number one podcast publisher by U.S. unique monthly audience and global downloads and streams, according to Podtrac.

“It’s something that we would continue to invest in, even if it just connected at the brand level,” said Sam Bennett, SVP of marketing at Mattress Firm. “But of course, it becomes even more compelling for an organization if you’re both able to connect at this thought level and head and the heart level, as well as getting people into your shops to buy your products.”

Typically, podcast ads have included voucher codes as a way to signal attribution. “Podcasts came onto the scene and very quickly got adopted by folks who were doing direct response marketing,” said iHeart chief data officer Brian Kaminsky. “It worked very nicely, but that business doesn’t scale well. There’s this myth out there that you can’t measure podcasts,” he added. “It’s just patently not true.”

Mattress Firm worked with measurement firm Affinity Solutions to link podcast listenership to purchases. It found the campaign drove four times return on ad spend and a 45% lift in incremental sales, meaning customers who were exposed to the campaign spent 45% more than customers that were not. It couldn’t share more specific details, like how much revenue this drove. The typical incremental sales lift Affinity sees for a given campaign using this sales measurement tool, called Consumer Purchase Lift, is 5%-10%.

Mattress Firm is focused on being an authority on sleep, from having their sleep experts, or salespeople, conduct hours of training, to a website, sleep.com, which has information on sleep topics. An informative podcast was a logical addition to this mission, Bennett said.

The campaign was measured during the fourth quarter of 2022, which coincided with the show’s first season—a second season premiered in May 2023. The campaign was the first iHeartMedia campaign that measured in-depth purchase behavior metrics, said Kaminsky.

Americans will spend about 23 minutes a day listening to podcasts in 2023, according to Insider Intelligence. Americans only spend around 3.5 times more minutes a day on social networks, yet social networks command 34 times more ad spend. Podcasting will attract $2 billion of U.S. ad spend this year, compared to $68 billion for social networks, according to Insider Intelligence data. In this discrepancy lies an opportunity for savvy advertisers.

“You’re asking a buyer to do something net new, and it could fail on them,” said Bryan Barletta, partner at podcast industry resource Sounds Profitable. “There’s not enough of these case studies to [justify] the risk, but having the opportunity to do that means you succeed before the space becomes too crowded.”

Attribution isn’t new but investment is low

Affinity was able to attribute the impact of podcasts by linking listener information with transaction data using user agents and IP addresses.

Barletta said the attribution technology is itself not new but is infrequently used because of the lack of brand investment in the space. He noted that iHeartMedia’s offering, which gives brands that spend over a certain threshold access to its Ruby content studio to create podcasts, is rare among media companies and powerful. This media buy and branded content effort can complement one another.

“The ad does double the work. It drives people to the podcast. You have multiple attribution points,” Barletta said. “It’s a model I’d love to see more [media companies] explore.”