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Use podcast advertising to meet an engaged audience

Platform: Internet | Author: Susan Bratton, CEO, Personal Life Media and Vice-chair, Association for Downloadable Media | Source: NMA magazine | Published: 08.05.08

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Internet video is white hot and advertisers are finding ways to incorporate their messages into the streams. Podcasting - untethered audio and video content on portable devices such as iPods, iPhones and MP3 players - also continues to grow exponentially.

While there are many mainstream media publishers that are making their content available on-demand and portable through aggregators like Apple iTunes, there's a crop of new media companies creating fresh mid- and long-tail content that appeals...

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... to passionate niche audiences.

Advertisers are creating innovative programmes where their brand story is told in this content, sometimes as a sponsor, sometimes via a pre-, mid- or post-roll commercial, and sometimes integrated directly into a show.

The opportunity to run an audio, video or online campaign to target these passion groups is available to smart marketers who want to get into new online markets early to exploit the 'greenfield', clutter-free environment.

But as a marketer, how do you effectively scale a campaign and get accurate, measurable results in the podcasting channel? Enter the Association for Downloadable Media, an international collection of more than 200 companies and independent content producers in the audio and video podcast space. They have banded together to create ad standards and audience measurement guidelines. The charter of the ADM is to monetise downloadable content. If you're on the buying side, you might be interested in joining the ADM's Ad Council, a collection of digital media pioneers involved in helping set the standards for the industry. If you're a producer or publisher of portable content and you want to monetise it, you should join the organisation and perhaps one of the five working committees.

At the ADM Forum at ad:tech in San Francisco last month, the advertising standards committee unveiled its first round of ad units. Now advertisers can produce a campaign that runs across multiple shows, multiple networks and with many publishers all using the same creative.

Audience measurement guidelines were released so that buyers will have an understanding of how the traffic and listener/viewer numbers are calculated, so that there can be comparability across shows, networks and publishers. We encourage industry comment on these standards and guidelines, and you can find further details, together with information on how to get involved with the ADM, at downloadablemedia.org.

Podcasting continues to grow - as of 2008, one in five US consumers has downloaded a podcast or vidcast, according to Edison Media Research, which released 'The Podcast Consumer Revealed III: The Evolving Podcast Market and its Implications for Advertisers and Media Planners' at the ADM Forum. As well as finding that 20% of Americans have tried downloadable media, Edison reported that three in ten regular internet users have downloaded a podcast and that most downloadable media is consumed at the desktop.

If you're looking for a fresh place to connect with your target audience doing something in which they're truly engaged, then you should definitely consider podcast advertising.

Susan Bratton is CEO of Personal Life Media and vice-chair of the Association for Downloadable Media