Ad industry wisdom says everyone listens to podcasts. But digital audio still struggles to attract investment from advertisers.
That’s because audio lacks measurement tools that have been standard in other digital media channels for at least a decade, said Craig Stein, SVP of media planning at Ad Results Media, an audio- and creator-focused ad agency.
Take viewability, for example. Viewability measurement enables advertisers to prove whether people can actually see their online display ads. As a result, viewability minimums have quickly become table stakes for bidding decisions.
But advertisers lack a data signal that can prove whether people are listening to their podcast ads, Stein said. This lack of data makes it hard for agencies to convince brands to reorient spend from other channels to audio. And it also makes it difficult to use programmatic tech to optimize toward premium inventory, he added.
“We know the impression gets served,” Stein said. “We certainly see fantastic ROI, be it direct or indirect. But what I don’t have akin to standard viewability is some sort of statistic that says, ‘This was heard.’”
To fill digital audio’s viewability gap – or audibility gap – audio-focused DSP Audiohook is launching a new podcast measurement panel. The main purpose of the panel is to determine how much of a podcast episode listeners tend to complete, including whether they listen to or skip past the ads.
Ad Results Media, which uses Audiohook as a buying platform, has yet to test the solution. But Stein believes it could help agencies be smarter about how they bid on podcast ad inventory and avoid less desirable placements.
Can you hear me now?
Through partnerships and API integrations with a half dozen podcast platforms, Audiohook has assembled a pool of 250,000 US-based podcast listeners across iOS, Android and online that it can tap into for data on audience listening habits, the company said.
Any user who has opted into sharing data with any of the partner podcast platforms could be included in the data set, said Jordan Bentley, founder of Audiohook.
Bentley declined to name any of the platforms Audiohook has partnered with on the record. But he did specify that Spotify and Apple Podcasts are not included in the data set.
The data accrued by Audiohook is not tied to users’ personally identifiable information, Bentley said. It’s just aggregated data on the average length of time users tend to listen to the podcast and how likely they are to skip certain parts of the episode, including the ad breaks.
Audiohook only considers an ad to be listened to if the entirety of the ad was played without skips, Bentley said. If it’s a 30-second ad spot, the listener has to complete the entire 30 seconds for it to count.
However, Audiohook doesn’t have insight into whether the ad is being played back with the volume on. If the ad is being played through without being skipped, Bentley said, then Audiohook assumes the volume was at an audible level.
While Audiohook does offer breakdowns of listening habits by geographic region, it doesn’t break down the data by demographic.
Advertisers can request data on specific podcasts and even specific episodes. But Audiohook is also proactively gathering data on the full slate of podcast programming available to it, Bentley said.
Audiohook is building a repository of this listening data to aid in benchmarking. It will also serve as a source of genre-based data in the event an advertiser wants insights on a podcast that isn’t hosted by any of the platforms Audiohook has partnered with. If data on that specific podcast isn’t available, Audiohook can instead surface insights from similar podcasts in the same genre or from podcasts that put their ad breaks in the same spots.
Audiohook plans to release reports compiling insights from the data set in the future, Bentley said, including answers to common advertiser questions, like which genres have higher engagement or how engagement differs on daily podcasts versus podcasts that are weekly or monthly.
Hearing is believing
Having this data at their disposal should enable agencies to get smarter about how they’re spending budgets and give them plenty of ammunition for pricing negotiations with platforms, said Ad Results Media’s Stein.
Once Ad Results Media has a good sense of which ad placements offer “stickiness” or high levels of engagement, “I’d be very eager to plan against that,” Stein said.
He envisions Audiohook’s data eventually being used to create new pricing models similar to how viewable cost per mille (vCPM) has been applied in the display market. Plus, as a DSP, Audiohook could eventually give buyers the ability to bid based on its own audibility scoring.
Stein would also prefer for this type of audibility assessment to happen instantaneously and pre-bid, rather than relying on historical data and delayed feedback from a panel. “The panel methodology is not perfect,” he said. “I would love it to be in real time, and my hope is that – whether it’s Audiohook or another company – someone is finding ways to do that, because that would be the holy grail for us.”
Stein is also enthusiastic about using Audiohook’s data to push back against a growing trend among certain podcast platforms: the tendency to overload ad slots with an overwhelming amount of ad creatives. For example, some platforms will try to cram a podcast’s pre-roll and mid-roll ad slots with as many ads as they feel they can get away with, Stein said.
“I imagine once we start getting to the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth ad, customers are skipping,” he said. “Having that data in our hands can help us understand where we should be buying.”
