While video podcasting is exploding in popularity, advertisers say they’re still holding back ad dollars due to the lack of clear measurement across the different mediums.
According to a survey from podcast advertising agency Oxford Road, 76 percent of brands said they would increase their podcast spend if YouTube attribution were standardized with audio, and close to a quarter would increase spend by 50 percent or more. In total, this could amount to an additional $1 billion in ad spend, as calculated by the agency.
For the survey, Oxford Road polled 75 marketers on the buy side, including six of the top 10 spenders in podcasting.
The frustration comes as the advertising landscape for the growing medium has shifted. In the early days, direct-to-consumer brands were more likely to use promo codes on podcasts, which could then be easily tracked. Measurement improved more in the past several years, as advertisers could use pixels, or a URL embedded in the podcast’s RSS feed, to identify listeners and see whether they made a purchase. But as YouTube became the dominant platform for podcasting and as some platforms moved away from pixels, advertisers found they could not standardize how they measure ads across Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
“Now you’ve got one show on three different players that are all doing different ways of measurement, and some of those are not compatible with pixels, and so there’s a lot of chaos, and advertisers are trying to catch up with that and triangulate,” Oxford Road CEO Dan Granger said.
Fifty-percent of respondents cited limitations in performance data as the main constraint on their advertising spending.
Platforms have been listening to advertiser concerns, Granger said, but the hope is to have Apple, Spotify and YouTube move to more of a standard, as advertisers look to see how an ad performs across all mediums.
“I think that what’s going to be necessary is for the players to move toward each other and agree on standards and practices, so that the data that I get out of the RSS distribution, fundamentally, is the same and looks the same as what I get from Spotify and from YouTube,” Granger said.
As part of the survey, 55 percent of marketers also said having a consistent definition of the term “podcast,” is important, as the increasing use of video in podcasts has blurred the lines between audio, video, influencer content and more.
“We’ve seen advertisers actually say ‘We’re not going to buy any simulcasted podcasts because there’s too much internal politics about whose budget that’s coming out of,” Granger said.
Granger’s team has done their surveys with industry experts, in association with Edison Research, which conducted consumer research, on the definition of a podcast. The consensus: “A podcast is an on-demand, audio-driven program featuring episodic content across wide-ranging themes and formats, traditionally delivered via open RSS in convention, and conversational in nature, it can include platform-based distribution and is commonly supplemented by video.”
