It’s IAB Day
… which means that, as usual, there’s a slight bump in trade coverage about podcast advertising is hot shit, presumably as a result of various audio/radio companies making press pushes to get attention conventional advertisers.
One such press push that’s driving a collection of headlines: a study by Westwood One and the IAB, which you can find here. (Headlines: “Women are driving podcast growth, a new study says” via Ad Age, “Advertisers Eye Spending More on Podcasts” via RadioInk.)
Another such effort: Panoply’s Andy Bowers, my old taller-than-God employer, who put together a Medium company blog post that was essentially put together to do two things: (1) display the geographic targeting might of its Megaphone platform, nowadays combined with Nielsen’s audience segmentation tool, and (2) introduce a new generation of people to Virginia’s “Old Dominion” nickname, which I haven’t heard before, and which honestly sounds a little scary. It’s the wave of the future and all that, and also, here’s your requisite reminder that there remains considerable chunks of the podcast community that feel a little uneasy and strange over the whole podcast targeting thing. Yours truly, for what it’s worth, remains agnostic, even nihilistic, about the situation.
Anyway, if you’re wondering what is up with upfronts, here’s a sort of primer I wrote in 2016, but essentially, it’s supposed to be one big fat event marketplace to expedite bigger and newer buys, among other things. You can view the schedule for the day’s festivities here.
Bites
- Comedy Central has signed comedian Anthony Jeselnik to a multi-platform development deal, which will include new episodes of his podcast The Jeselnik and Rosenthal Vanity Project. (Vulture)
- Quick throwback to the earlier story mentioning Spotify: the Turner Podcast Network can now be found on that music streaming platform.
- Brian Landau, a former executive at Cadence13 née Dgital Media, has returned to on-demand audio with a new venture: Vennly, an “audio-focused spiritual health app.” (Website)
- Cool profile on the Wine & Crime pod: “Why women are fueling the popularity of true crime podcasts.” (CBS)
- Descript, the next-generation audio editing tool by Andrew Mason, is running a pretty interesting series of blog posts on the technology behind automatic speech transcription. (Part one, Part two)
- Speaking of which: Headspace acqui-hires Alpine.ai to launch new meditation coaching experiences. (VentureBeat)
- A throwback to Tuesday’s piece about the My Dad Wrote a Porno HBO special, sort of: there’s an erotic, adult podcast boom going on, apparently. (Guardian)
- Reese Witherspoon is launching a women-centric podcast network to be called The Beam, via her production company Hello Sunshine. They already make the How It Is podcast, which features first-person stories of women’s lived experiences. (Hollywood Reporter)