MARCO ISLAND, FL – Podcasts can expand the time people spend with media, giving listeners a way to hear a broad range of spoken-word content while they’re doing other things such as commuting, doing chores or working out. The audio format also gives marketers a way to reach engaged audiences with a data-driven advertising strategy.
“Audio is so much more than it used to be,” Jen Soch, executive director of channel solutions at WPP’s GroupM, said in this interview at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We used to just talk about terrestrial, and we’ve morphed into this new area with streaming and podcasting.”
During the early days of pandemic lockdowns, many celebrities who were stuck at home started podcasting to entertain fans. Their efforts helped to grow the audience among consumers who were hungry for fresh content.
“When people were home came this very personal experience of putting in your iPods and going for walks — and you felt like you had this one-in-one connection with celebrities,” Soch said.
As podcasting evolved into a streaming format instead of downloadable “pods” of audio, the possibility for more dynamic ad insertion emerged. With streamed content, brands also could use ad pixels, the snippets of code that help to collect data about user activity in digital media.
“With that, I can get that to be much more trackable. I pixel it,” Soch said. “I can see how long they’ve stayed with it. And I can get much deeper into the engagement factors of where we were before.”
Combining Local TV With CTV Is Promising for Media Buyers: GroupM’s Jen Soch
You’re watching ‘Digital Media in Transition’, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at IAB ALM 2024 presented by Sharethrough. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
