NPR

Social media companies are cutting the junk from their diet; Trump is trying to reshape American media; and selling ads is always the last resort.

AI-generated mystery pages are appearing on brand sites; Amazon Prime Video doubles its ad load; and bipartisan efforts to protect kids online get a new partisan focus under the Trump admin.

Fiat is taking luxury car-branded apartment complexes to the next level. Plus, the new FCC Chair is launching an investigation into NPR and PBS.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Email Spreads Its Feathers Ultra-trendy CTV networks are turning to an old-school method for retaining users: email marketing. NBCU’s Peacock is using good-old-fashioned email blasts to reduce churn and increase viewership, Marketing Brew reports. Free and paid subscribers receive three to five emails […]

Podcasting is still growing at a fast clip – two times faster than digital advertising overall. But it’s in the midst of a slowdown. In a sign of the podcasting pullback, Thursday’s IAB Podcast Upfront took place over one day, versus last year’s three-day event.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Green Means Go Privacy and sustainability are critical topics for the future of humanity, and both are top priorities for many high earners in the US and the UK. So, of course, they’re used for cynical marketing purposes and anti-competition skullduggery. With an […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Marvelous Marketing Disney and Target are a bellwether case study for how deeply interwoven major enterprise marketing partnerships can be nowadays. In 2019, Target and Disney announced an advertising attribution product based on the Google Cloud Platform to attribute retail sales to TV […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. For Pod’s Sake Bloomberg points out that, despite the hype, there hasn’t been a hit podcast in many years. No newcomer has usurped Joe Rogan or NPR or broken through the general noise like Serial.  But is that actually so bad? Podcasting is […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Hard Of Hearing Podcasters are rushing to add programmatic to their bag of monetization tricks. But they’re confronting familiar issues for publishers when software decides what ads to run and where, The Verge reports. An ad for HBO’s “The Sex Lives of College […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Upselling Ad arbitrage – buying web traffic and then selling that inventory on a website for more than it was originally paid for – is universally decried but is also still a lucrative strategy. The enterprise data software company DeepSee published a report showing […]

If you missed the first day of AdExchanger’s Programmatic.IO digital event, here’s a little taste of what happened. The COVID-afflicted investment environment, and why the big platforms are immune Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer – who’s also managing partner of early-stage VC firm Lerer Hippeau – kicked off the show by sharing his views on […]

Michael Smith joined NPR as chief marketing officer in April in the midst of COVID-19 and on the cusp of a racial justice revolution. Both are massive trends that all companies are grappling with right now. But media companies are also contending with a third giant trend: the shift in how people consume media as […]

Audio remained an exciting area for programmatic advertisers in 2018 as the medium moved further toward automation. The podcast industry began to mature this year as growing audiences garnered attention from radio broadcasters, streaming audio giants and big brands. But a lack of available audience data still hinders programmatic and measurement. Meanwhile, streaming audio and […]

The IAB Tech Lab said Tuesday it has launched a compliance program for publishers and platforms that adhere to its podcast measurement guidelines. Podcast hosting service RawVoice/Blubrry and NPR are the first companies to be certified. The program is based on the IAB’s Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines, which were released in December 2017 to provide […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. No More Safety Net Netflix shares are down more than a third over the past six months as investors worry about its debt and high costs. Netflix built its position in OTT with few competitors (HBO and Amazon Prime were pretty much it) – but […]

The podcast industry is growing, and audio giants want a piece of it. Twenty-six percent of Americans listen to podcasts every month. These people are young and well-educated and have higher-than average household incomes, according to Edison Research. They’re also loyal and engaged, on average consuming seven podcasts per week. Ad dollars are following. Last […]

The lack of a standard measurement protocol has been an issue for the podcast industry for years. When podcasts are streamed, only the owner of a podcast player app knows how long a person listened to an episode, where they skipped and stopped in that episode or whether they heard an ad. That makes it […]

The podcast industry is about to take a bite out of a formerly forbidden fruit when Apple shares its podcast listener data with publishers this fall, and it’s sure to be a hot topic at the IAB’s annual podcast upfront in New York City on Thursday. In June, Apple said it would share aggregated online […]

Podcast advertising is getting a bit more measurable. The IAB Tech Lab updated its Podcast Measurement Guidelines on Wednesday to include definitions and best practices for measuring audience reach and downloads. The original guidelines, released in September, focused on defining ad delivery and how to count it consistently. “But podcast measurement is for more than […]

The podcast universe is developing fast, and NPR is shaping it. NPR, which began making podcasts over a decade ago, has a US audience of 11.4 million listeners and 80 million downloads monthly across 36 podcast shows. It’s been ranked consecutively for 13 months as the top podcast publisher by measurement firm Podtrac. “Even before […]

Advertisers are waking up to the popularity of podcasts among their consumers. PodWave, the first programmatic marketplace created exclusively for podcast advertisers, was launched Wednesday by digital audio vendor AdsWizz and National Public Media (NPM), National Public Radio’s sponsorship sales arm. Despite the growing popularity of podcasts in recent years (Edison Research said in January […]

Few people think of National Public Radio as an advertising forum. Certainly that’s still the case with terrestrial radio – where NPR, as a nonprofit, adheres to FCC regulations that allow for the identification of corporate sponsors but not the promotion of their products. But the less-restrictive digital environment and the consistent growth of podcasting […]

DC-based XAPPmedia builds voice-activated mobile ads, and the company wants to use these units to bridge traditional and digital broadcasting. To advance that goal, XAPPmedia on Wednesday debuted a mobile audience ad service called JAX in partnership with mobile app developer jacAPPS. JAX is designed to let commercial and public radio stations monetize their mobile […]

WBEZ’s “This American Life” spinoff, “Serial,” shattered the iTunes record for the fastest podcast to reach 5 million downloads. From its October premiere through Jan. 1, the episodes were downloaded 31 million times. But for “Serial,” the sleeper winner was email marketing solutions provider MailChimp, the podcast’s sponsor whose brand went viral thanks to the […]

National Public Radio (NPR) faces a common audio app-publisher predicament – capturing the time and attention of ultra-mobile listeners. About 78% of ads and content promos are served while an app is running in the background and the screen is dark, which makes it challenging for advertisers to know if their ads were seen, said […]

Audio advertisements have been largely one-sided: The advertiser speaks and consumers listen. Startup Xapp Media wants to change that with interactive audio ads. Through an SDK, Xapp Media enables brands to create voice-activated ads that mobile users can respond to with commands like “call now” or “send coupon.” NPR was the first publisher to try […]