Considering Ad Servicing

Even if podcasting is a medium that only has about 2% of all audio entertainment listeners, as Edison Research says, it still has a pretty mature ecosystem.

This is evident in the existence of companies that perform functions like distributing advertising, handling both the business and technical aspects of placing ads on podcasts. A couple of the more notable newer players in these spaces are Art19 and Performance Bridge, the former combining business support with technology to measure audiences, and the latter providing technology for advertising affiliates to support podcasts.

The closest analog to the advertising support functions these companies are taking on for podcasting is “ad insertion” in the TV broadcasting industry, which is a decades-old sub-industry within television. Yet this industry is itself trying to innovate, and seeing introductions of new technology such as “dynamic ad insertion,” according to a Wall Street Journal story from July 2015, which reports that this new wrinkle on TV advertising is a response to dropping ratings, but has yet to take off. 

Google is said to be working on its own dynamic ad insertion capability for TV or video programming, in partnership with DoubleClick. In “conventional” TV, Black Arrow was established in 2005 and AdGorilla, which specializes in cable TV, in 2011. The structural similarities that ad insertion as a piece of TV operations and business has with podcasting are not the only area where comparing the two industries can be instructive (a la carte bundling, or the lack thereof, is of interest, as written in this April 13 post).

The ways that podcasting does or can serve advertisers, and can best present their programming, are likely to play out in a manner similar to what is happening in television, and they can cross-pollinate. That podcasting already has the foundations for a mature advertising services industry in place is remarkable. It’s even more remarkable that a much more mature industry, television, is still striving to innovate and improve upon this function in its own operations. It’s unlikely podcasting could support companies like Art19 and Performance Bridge if it was only reaching 2% of the audio programming audience. If companies like these are succeeding and growing, that shows the strength of the medium.

Podcasts of the week:

The Bill Simmons Podcast episode 113, July 22, 2016, (38:30 mark) – a truly hilarious moment where Ringer writer and comedian Brendan Lynch discusses how his obsession with true crime and in particular the “Serial” podcast led him to go way out of his way to see the non-descript Best Buy parking lot, near Baltimore, that figured in the Adnan Syed case covered on that show.

“True North Story” episode 2 – Bruce Bavitt, the co-founder of Subpop, the independent label record label that released Nirvana’s first album and singles, discusses 8Stem, his new venture that aspires to bring an innovative approach to consumption and distribution of music. 

Real Crime Profile – “Making a Murderer” has become like the Bible, with a raft of podcasts and podcast episodes serving as its Talmud, dissecting every fact from the case as depicted in the Netflix series, as well as how the makers of the documentary series may or may not have distorted the picture they presented by omitting certain information. The best and most level-headed of these, however, might just be this series, which devoted its first six episodes to Steven Avery’s case (and has since gone on to dissect the murder cases of O.J. Simpson and Oscar Pistorius).