Podcast networks may be calling an audible at the line of scrimmage when it comes to growing advertising revenue in the second half of this year.
According to a report by Digiday, podcast executives are now vying for an increasing share of marketers’ influencer budgets instead of simply competing for money earmarked for audio, which is often a smaller pool of money. The executives say the logic behind the strategy is that many podcast hosts have social media footprints that rival those of more traditional social media influencers.
“We should be vying for those creator influencer budgets … [and while] the focus has been performance agencies and holding [companies] like WPP, Publicis, etc. … [what] we’re seeing now is the line of budgets from audio to influencer budgets are blurring,” Ross Adams, CEO of podcast network Acast, tells Digiday.
iHeartMedia, one of the biggest players in the global podcast space, said second-quarter podcasting revenue rose 8% on a year-over-year basis. Conal Byrne, CEO of the iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group, said that increase is at least partially attributable to the decision to pitch podcast hosts as social media influencers in hopes of siphoning off money from social marketing budgets.
That effort, however, involves a key challenge — convincing agency executives who control influencer marketing budgets. That means integrating influencer marketing terminology into the pitch. “These podcast influencers just look and feel a little different,” Byrne told Digiday. “They’re college professors, they’re best-selling authors, they’re Malcolm Gladwell.”
Part of the changing dynamic surrounding podcasting is that it’s still evolving as an artform, and beyond the simple categorization of “audio.” Video podcasts, for example, are on the rise, and social media has emerged as a key distribution platform. According to a recent study by Edison Research and SXM Media, 76% of Gen Z audiences say they find podcasts via clips on social media — more than any other form of media. (Another study, this one by Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights, found that 36% of podcast audiences 18-34 use YouTube the most to access podcast content.)
According to Scott Walker, Senior VP of ad platform at SiriusXM, multichannel brand campaigns — which take podcasts into the realms of video and social media — is an “area of opportunity and growth” in the second half of 2024.
But like Byrne, Walker said getting beyond the limitations of traditional audio budgets presents challenges: brand CMOs and social media marketers aren’t always as responsive to pitches, and making inroads requires a serious effort at building relationships.
Podcast sellers, Walker said, need to develop brand campaigns “that gets [influencer marketers] excited, and it can be manifested not just on the podcast, but on camera with video distributed to YouTube … and pushed to social [media] in the form of sponsored posts. That opens up the aperture in terms of the budget available,” Walker said.
Comments