What If Brand Suitability Was Actually Suitable For Podcasting?

Brand suitability, safety and contextual targeting is an opportunity knocking on the doors of all podcast buyers and sellers right now. Certainly, since integrating Sounder into the Triton Digital tech stack, our metaphorical knuckles and door bells have been busy. 

That's why we attended the Brand Safety Summit in New York at the end of last month. It was a great event, filled with the best and brightest of the industry. I walked away with two key takeaways:

1. Audio, in general, and podcasting specifically, is underrepresented in these conversations. And by "underrepresented", I mean that I heard neither mentioned on stage during the two days ... at all.
2. Brand safety is broken in the wider digital industry ... but it doesn't have to be for podcasting.
   
   

The first takeaway should be no surprise to those of us in the podcast industry - we've fought for budget and space on media plans for years now. And we'll continue to do that by highlighting the unique nature of the medium and value of the audience to advertisers. 

The second takeaway sounds grim until you realise this is podcasting's opportunity. 

Traditional methods of implementing brand suitability are broken

Ok, to be fair "broken" is a big word. I know I've used it twice now. Probably "rife with challenges" is a nicer way to phrase how other digital mediums (CTV, display, etc.) are faring in a world where buyers want ads to be correctly placed contextually and alongside content that aligns with their values. 

None of this is news to anyone in the industry. Digiday wrote an article just recently talking about these same issues (admittedly a publication with a little more notoriety than my own LinkedIn Articles ... but we all live in hope of cracking the big time). All of this was especially striking to me during the conference, as presentation after presentation revolved around the problems they need to solve, with each speaker calling out pretty significant challenges including:

• Variations in scoring from different vendors - one system says content is High risk, another says Low.
• Reliance on keyword targeting giving false positives and negatives - without catering to the context of the content, results are misleading. The example given was the Time article featuring Taylor Swift where she spoke about feminism being important. The systems classified it as sexism because they looked for keywords only.
• Advertisements running on content that doesn't align with brands - we've all seen examples of travel ads running on news websites because there was an article about a tragedy in that location.
• Difficulty and workload related to campaign reporting - the big one, and more on this below.

Again, nothing new. The above are all things I touched on in an earlier article I wrote after we first acquired Sounder, about how we planned to take the system to market to solve these problems. So, whilst they weren't shocking when voiced by people on stage, it was surprising to hear the scale/depth of the issues and how these older/larger mediums are still grappling with them, hunting for solutions. 

Enter, the solution. Not to give away the ending, but one word in that Digiday article talking about solutions to all these problems resonated with our approach: pre-bid. Technically, it's two words, hyphenated ... but let's stay focused, friends.

The brand suitability solution for podcasting

Below is an exaggerated retelling of an actual conversation I witnessed recently, between a publisher, an advertiser and a brand safety vendor (sounds like the start of a bad joke, but they were not walking into a bar).

-Advertiser: here is a list of requirements I have for where my ads should run, in terms of brand suitability and contextual targeting.

-Brand safety vendor: ok, great. If you run ads on the content, the publisher will send us logs for the impressions and we'll spend human time and a decent amount of your money analysing the episodes it ran on. If we find that the episodes didn't match what you wanted, we'll let you know and you can then spend your own time to negotiate a make-good or just be unhappy that the ad ran where you didn't want it to.

-Publisher: *confused noises*

-Me: this sounds terrible. Wouldn't you just target the content you want and be sure that it doesn't run anywhere else, without having to rely on monitoring new episodes published or spend human time with emails and spreadsheets?

-Everyone else: well, this is just the way the industry does it for other mediums. So let's carry it across to podcasting also.

What if, instead of evaluating podcast episodes at show level to determine where ads should run and then hoping that the next week an episode doesn't publish that alters the evaluation set, you could guarantee that your ad only runs on episodes that align?

What if, instead of log exports and spreadsheets and manual monitoring and emails and make-goods, you could just sell and traffic podcast ads with contextual targeting suitable to your brand?

What if I told you, you can have this today? It's what we've been building at Triton using Sounder, and it's ready for podcast buyers and sellers to use.

How? Great question, I would love to tell you. 

Because Sounder is integrated into the CMS and ad stack, it means episodes across shows and networks are analysed and tagged before content is published. This is essential, so you don't miss out on any advertising opportunities. The tagging is vital, so the ad server knows what to target and only targets what is tagged. Both are only possible if you control the CMS and ad stack. 

Once the ads start running, campaign reporting is automated - no more spreadsheets, post-campaign analysis, or make-goods. No need to monitor a dashboard to see if a show moves from Low to Medium risk because a new episode is published, and then having to adjust the buy. 

Why does all of this matter? In July WARC shared findings that brand safety and suitability was the number one concern for audio advertising, in part due to low-quality impressions, holding back billions from entering the space. A buyers need for this is only going to increase in podcasting, as it has in other mediums. This probably explains why at the start of this year, Double Verify reported that their brand safety and suitability products grew 31% YOY to $328.9 million. 

The need is real. The concern that these systems are going to be rolled out to podcasting where they aren't fit for purpose, is also real. Maybe not so much of a problem in the world of digital advertising where they are generating over $740 billion a year. But in that same world, where podcasting makes up only $2 billion, we just don't have the inventory to spare for wastage and errors. 

That's it from me. If you're a brand or publisher looking for help navigating this space, I hope you found this useful. Make sure to reach out to solutions@tritondigital.com to keep the conversation going.

Happy (and brand suitable) podcasting!