True crime podcasts are incredibly popular with listeners. But they’re a hard sell with advertisers.
Roughly one quarter of the most-listened-to podcasts in the US are in the true crime genre – the most of any genre, according to a 2023 study by Pew Research. And 34% of American podcast listeners say they regularly tune in to true crime shows, including 44% of women, per another Pew Research study from 2022.
Yet brands are hesitant to spend on true crime podcasts, said Emily Rasekh, SVP of global business development and operations at Sony Music Entertainment, which has a network of true crime podcast series called “The Binge.”
Sony Music, like most digital audio publishers, sells most of its inventory directly, and has consistently faced an uphill battle in its outreach to brands and agencies.
“You can walk in with impressive numbers in the most popular category, and yet buyers are pushing back,” Rasekh said. “We’ll get RFPs that specify a certain demo: female, age 30 and up, describing a perfect audience segment for our true crime shows. But the categories they’re asking for are comedy, lifestyle, health and wellness.”
And it’s often even harder to sell against true crime podcasts programmatically, because many brands use automated tools to block the genre by default, she added.
Real talk on true crime
Over the summer, Sony Music began working with Seekr Technologies, which offers sentiment analysis and brand safety measurement, including a “civility score.”
The idea is to prove that although podcast hosts on “The Binge” may discuss sensitive and potentially controversial topics, there’s nothing to fear from a brand safety perspective.
Yet brand bias against true crime content persists, said Miranda Romano, SVP of media operations at Oxford Road, which claims to be the world’s largest podcast specialist ad agency following its merger with Veritone One in October.
“Advertisers just won’t advertise in certain genres,” she said, “and it can be incredibly limiting.”
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In many cases, brands are avoiding certain podcast genres because they’re overzealously adhering to brand safety guidelines promoted by organizations like the now-defunct Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), said Pat LaCroix, Seekr’s EVP of marketing and strategic partnerships.
For example, GARM’s Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework lists certain content categories as “not appropriate for any advertising support.” These include “graphic promotion, advocacy and depiction of willful harm and actual unlawful criminal activity” as well as “graphic depictions of willful harm to others.”
Placing restrictions on any “depiction” of these activities could easily apply to a podcast discussion of a murder or other horrific crimes.
While Seekr does still use GARM’s framework in its solution, LaCroix said, its civility scoring goes deeper than simply determining whether a podcast discusses a crime to examine whether that discussion crosses into more obviously objectionable areas like the promotion or advocacy of criminal activity. The score also considers whether there are any outright threats against or disparagement of groups or individuals.
In other words, discussing a murder committed in a low-income neighborhood is fine, but suggesting that people from low-income neighborhoods are inherently predisposed to committing murder – not so fine.
Breaking biases
Brand safety and suitability concerns have been such an impediment to podcast advertising that, starting in 2020, addressing the issue became a passion project for Oxford Road’s founder and CEO, Daniel Granger, Romano said.
Granger began striking partnerships with brand safety vendors, including Seekr and Barometer, and even launched a podcast dedicated to brand safety in digital audio.
Through its collaboration with Seekr, Oxford Road began implementing civility scoring in “every single media plan,” she said. The score is a useful card to play when brands raise objections about true crime podcasts.
“We do quite a bit of vetting upfront before we make a recommendation to any of our clients to run on a show,” Romano said. “We’re weeding out all of the uncivil content so that they can trust what they’re looking at is safe.”
Oxford Road can also apply Seekr’s civility metrics within DSPs to filter content from programmatic buys, she added.
Sony Music, meanwhile, has worked with Seekr to measure the civility of discourse across its entire slate of podcasts on The Binge and can provide these metrics to buyers.
According to Seekr’s measurement, 81% of The Binge podcasts are categorized as “High Civility,” the platform’s most brand-safe classification. That beats the true crime genre’s High Civility average of 78% and eclipses the average scores for political and comedy podcasts, which tend to be more popular with buyers, LaCroix said.
In fact, political podcasts are often ranked in Seekr’s lowest civility tier, especially when hosts and guests make disparaging comments about people of opposing political views, he said.
It’s too soon to say what impact adding Seekr’s scoring will have on Sony Music’s ad revenue, but regardless, it’s an effective tool for fighting back against the true crime genre’s unearned bad reputation with advertisers, Rasekh said.
“There’s a stigma where true crime is often holistically taken off the table,” she said. “But we can peel back the layers of that brand safety stigma with this tool.”
