Michael is VP Adtech Solutions at Acast — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
Michael Bayston: Acast’s Talent-Voiced Ads is an ad format that is executed by programmatic. It’s a 30-second ad spot where the ads are voiced by one of our wonderful podcasters, by the talent themselves. So, it’s different to our sponsorship format, which is a 60 second long host read from that host, specifically demonstrating a product or service sponsoring their show. Instead, Talent-Voiced Ads is an ad spot, but the brands are licensing the voice of a much loved podcaster.
Sam Sethi: Now give me some names, that might be available within the talent pool in future.
MB: The way we try and do things at Acast is that we’ll dream up an idea, and then we’ll do strong due diligence and then a testing period. So we’ve already gone live with Talent-Voiced Ads in a number of our test markets in the US, Australia, a few others as well. The talent that’s already got involved with talent-voiced ads includes podcasters like Couples Therapy, We Mean Well and Equity Mates and many others as well. We’ve gone very quickly from a test period into a live approach with lots of different talent being approached by our teams on behalf of brands.
SS: Now, is this an AI cloned voice? Is it a clone of Katherine Ryan, or is this actually Katherine Ryan doing each ad?
MB: No, to be absolutely clear, talent-voiced ads is only the voice of the hosts themselves - podcasters who are exclusively signed to the Acast marketplace. So the way it works is that brands will brief us on their products or services, and then our wonderful in-house account management and planning teams will figure out which would be the best talent, and then they will approach our talent via the proprietary internal tools that we’ve created for the purpose. And then they would record fresh ad reads for each different campaign.
SS: Again, being that they are talent, they’re not going to be cheap. So how are you pricing this against a normal host read ad or a programmatic CPM rate? What’s the difference going to be?
MB: In terms of our sponsorship which, as I mentioned before, is a much longer piece, in the UK they come in at a price of around £40 ($55) CPM. Now, your standard advertising spot, which is like a brand spot run by programmatic with limited targeting, that might be anywhere in the region of £10 to £13 ($13-$17). But talent-voiced ads exist in the middle ground, and we’re going out to market in the UK, for example, at £25 ($33) CPM, and it’s very similar in other markets around the world - of course, this is a global solution, so this is now available globally.
Now there is one other element to this, which is that we do ask for a minimum spend, and that’s also relevant because the way we execute this is via programmatic guarantee. We need to ensure, with something this premium that there is a specific amount of budget running against it. Now what that means is that, in terms of our internal financials, we’re able to ensure that the hosts get a really good fee, because the way we calculate that is that’s taken from part of the revenue and then the rest of the revenue goes on all of the shows that this ad will run across.
SS: Now look, we all are in the market of making money. We all sell ads, we all make podcasts, again hoping to get some return. Maybe I’m the sceptic in the room, but one of the things that I do with many things right now is I skip ads or, being fortunate enough, I pay to not have ads. So do you think that the relationship with the talent voice is going to lead to a higher engagement of listening with these ads?
MB: People do talk about ads being skipped quite a lot, but inevitably, what you find with virtually all digital advertising is that, beyond the metrics campaigns, they deliver a certain amount of return on investment, and that is something that we see with podcasting. In fact, it’s something that we see particularly with any podcast ads that use the talent.
One of the key benefits of using talent within your advertising is that you get a huge amount of loyalty from the listeners. So the listeners don’t want to skip these ads, because they want to hear from their much loved and much treasured hosts, with whom they have this incredible parasocial relationship.
With talent-voiced ads, it’s a shorter period of time that the talent is speaking to the audience, but that’s made up for by an enormous amount of scale that can be achieved for the advertiser, so we tend not to worry too much about skipping. We instead focus back on trusted third-party measurement solutions that we use in terms of things like brand lift, attribution and, of course, seeing brands rebooking, and the great news is that one of the very first brands that tested out talent-voiced ads with us came back within two weeks and rebooked for the rest of the year, so I think that’s a great example of a brand enjoying a new format that clearly delivers results.
SS: If I want a campaign just in the UK, or if I want to roll it out more globally, what’s the difference? Is there an increase in that minimum cost?
MB: I can give you a straight up answer to that. In the UK we’ve decided that the minimum spend for this should be £25,000 ($33,000). Whereas in the US we’ve decided on a minimum spend of $50,000. Every single market will have their own minimum for this. Minimums with programmatic guarantees is not a rare thing, it’s just a little bit more for this because of course, it’s the talent who are speaking. It’s that much more premium and influential.
SS: Is this the advent of TV advertising brought to podcasting? Quality advertising from a branded name that lends itself to the podcast, as opposed to someone just reading out within their own podcast?
MB: I think that’s a fantastic take.
I think the thing I would add to this, though, is that it’s also the dawn of talent being aligned with the efficiency of programmatic technology as well. We’re bringing the opportunity for a hugely influential element of talent within advertising to be available to programmatic buyers and, crucially, for them to be able to run it in omni-channel campaigns alongside the display advertising they’re doing on web and mobile, the video advertising they’re doing across various different platforms, the stuff they’re doing on digital out of home, the connected TV.
Podcasting, really is a big part of omni-channel for those programmatic buyers now, so it made sense that we could also bring them the power of talent voice. But then the other piece to it as well is that there are undoubtedly some budgets out there that are controlled by programmatic buyers that may not have been able to come to some of these creators in quite the same way. We’ve had clear evidence that programmatic buyers are bringing incremental budgets to us because of this new format, which means new budgets going to our podcasters so that they can create new shows and then bring in new and diverse audiences for our advertisers. So hopefully this is a really nice and very positive addition to our open ecosystem offering.
SS: Congratulations on the launch of this new programmatic ad platform, and I look forward to speaking to you to find out the success of what this program has done.
MB: Fantastic, we can’t wait for it.