Irish Podcast Advertising in 2021 – Stats and Approaches
Explored by the Honey+Buzz Digital Team
Not to sound like hipsters… but we've been keeping a close eye on podcast activity from an advertising perspective long before it was 'cool', back when Blindboy was still just reading short stories to sell his book and the best technology you could hope for in an app was a sleep-timer.
Podcasts offer long-form content that retains audience attention – a recent survey from PodcastHost.com found the 69.9% of people stated they don’t care if an episode is longer than one hour once the topic is of interest to them. Acast Ireland has reported over 7.5m podcast listens every month in Ireland. This is an increase of 39% increase on the previous year. But for whatever reason, Irish brands were quite late to the party. From a recent article in Adworld.ie Micheal Scully, sales director of Acast Ireland suggested that podcasts are now “beyond the point where any serious marketeer can ignore them”.
“Irish brand investment did somewhat catch up with the growth in consumption in 2020 with Acast Ireland seeing a 3X increase in the advertisers who chose to invest in podcast advertising.” says Scully.
The point I'm making is that I look at the level of attention Irish advertisers were giving to podcasts only 4 short years ago vs now and; in terms of budget, saturation, and brand presence it's similar to how YouTube looked in 2010 vs today. A piece of research called Listen Up Ireland, conducted by IAB Ireland, showed that digital audio usage has expanded to critical mass with over 2.53 million people in Ireland listening every week. For advertisers this medium provides the power of audio advertising, coupled with the technology and logic of digital media buying, so you get to communicate with a voice in an intimate one-to-one environment but with all the tracking, data and transparency you get from your digital display or video ad buys.
In the latest Digital Ireland report published by Hootsuite for 2021, it's reported that our time spent listening to streaming services and podcasts is now at 2 hours per day combined.
To compare that with our radio listenership time, and remember that Ireland still tops all JNLR charts as the largest consumers of broadcast media, we now spend 49 minutes per day MORE listening to digital audio.
So, what do you need to understand about this space before you jump in? Not to ruin my 'digital marketing' persona, but I have put some time on the radio side of things for clients in the past and depending on your objectives it's not too dissimilar. You may ask yourself a lot of the same initial questions at the start but it would be wrong to approach it all the same way.
2 Core Concepts
How are ads consumed there?
Podcasts offer two real routes to the ears of your target audience. You can find a show you really want to get involved with and advertise solely with them - either by inserting an ad or by sponsoring the show. This is a bit of radio-logic in terms of an approach. If there's a show that you feel really resonates with your audience then go for it, but I always feel wastage can be high as many of our excellent storytellers have audiences outside of the island, and many of us listen to podcasts from abroad. The latest Irish charts show 3 of the top 5 podcasts consumed in Ireland are from overseas.
With that in mind, the other route is to pair with a technology provider like Acast and have your ads inserted dynamically into the shows your ideal audience listens to. Brand safety can be pretty much guaranteed and this is bought almost identically to display or social media ads. It's a broad approach compared to the first option but you can be very confident in your relevance to the audience.
We’ll prepare an article soon discussing the benefits of each of these approaches for the Honey+Buzz LinkedIn page because it's a much larger topic of debate in our eyes. Neither is right or wrong and budget-willing, a mix can often work very well.
For now, my best advice is - don’t sponsor a show, sponsor the creativity of the host.
Is a podcaster an influencer?
Yes, no, kind of, it depends. One of the biggest shifts to the podcast ecosystem was brought on by COVID- when entertainers who typically had their work on stage, out and about, and in traditional comedy circuits suddenly had to entertain from home. Podcasts globally have risen from 550,000 registered podcasts on iTunes in 2018 to 2,000,000 as of April 2021. In 2020 people who had established social media or other sources of fame jumped in and quickly grew out a strong following, the content was almost secondary for many of them. Many of the new podcasts skipped the growth phase entirely and went straight into the charts.
The reason it's important to understand this is because when you join up with a podcaster at the moment there's a strong chance that their reach goes into other areas, and again if you have the budget - an integrated campaign is suddenly very achievable from a single brief.
Much like previous articles explaining the best approaches for influencer marketing, you must remember that you're working with a creative person who has built a name and a following with their content. Your message must either align with this or at the very least not detract from it.
If you want to read more opinion pieces like this then be sure to visit our blog. While you're over there be sure to check out some of our other posts and feel free to drop me a line at adam.monks@honeyandbuzz.com if you have any questions or want to chat more about projects like this.