Pod Chat Returns Next Week

After an extended summer break (and apologies, it was only meant to be a month but life got in the way), Pod Chat returns next week on Friday, September 9. If you're a premium subscriber to my newsletter, you'll get the ad-free version before everyone else as well as other benefits. You can check out what these are at podchat.ca/bonus. My first guest is Tom Webster of Sounds Profitable, and former SVP at Edison Research. We spoke about data in podcasting, the recent After These Messages report that premiered at Podcast Movement, the opportunity for podcasters and advertising, including programmatic and more. Here's a snippet.

There are some disconnects in podcasting. There are disconnects with advertisers, there are disconnects with podcasters. One of the disconnects with advertising agencies and things like that is that they see podcasting as a digital medium. And yeah, it is, right? But they want it to behave like display ads and it doesn't behave like display ads, right? First of all, it converts a heck of a lot better than display ads does. But that's a world of impressions. And if you look at the number of impressions you might get from a podcast compared to some run of website thing you might do through Google or something like that, it might look fairly small, but that's not the sole power of a podcast ad. The power of a podcast ad is that transferred relationship, that support of the show, so many things that a banner ad will never be able to do. So that's one disconnect. And I think another disconnect, and we just touched on it a little bit, is with podcasters who kind of fear advertising on their shows. They fear the inability to control what the ad might be, or they fear having terrible ads and programmatic advertising, which most people don't really understand what it is. It just sounds like the devil. But the reality is you think about, I'll go back to YouTube here. You and I have probably both skipped our fair share of ads on YouTube, right? It is incredibly annoying to sit through content on YouTube and have to continually flick away annoying ads. We don't take it out on the content, we keep watching it. If the show is good, you're not going to lose people. If people really get off of your show because of a bad ad, the ad was not your problem, right? That doesn't happen in other media. We shouldn't assume it happens in podcasting. Those are the things that Brian and I are really focused on, are kind of blowing up some of those assumptions and received wisdom and things that may be worked ten years ago but don't work now, and we always want to keep up on that.

I can't wait to share the full episode soon. Until then, have a great weekend and stay safe.