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Bartlett Founds Flight Studio, New Podcast Ad Research, & More
Essential news for today in the business of podcasting.
Amid the True Crime Boom, Legacy Franchise ’48 Hours’ Sees a Burst in Popularity by Natalie Korach
The CBS true crime series 48 Hours, a mainstay of the field that has been on air since 1988, has spent recent years branching out into other fields like streaming, social media, and podcasting. Similar to NBC’s Dateline podcasting debut, 48 Hours has rocketed up True Crime charts by adapting episodes of the original show into audio podcasts, bolstered by promotion on the ‘parent’ version of the program still airing on broadcast TV. The success of both podcasts demonstrates the power of podcasts if they get promotion to the wider world of true crime fans outside of podcasts. [Source]
Alternative Identity Provider ID5 Nabs $20 Million In Series B Funding by Allison Schiff
ID5’s continued growth is a opportunity for podcast inventory to be highly augmented by opt-in audience data. As shown by the recent partnership between Triton Digital and ID5. In the announcement release it was reported that ARN’s proof-of-concept experiment phase with ID5 data allowed them to convert 60% of un-addressable audience to addressable. As the headline says, this Tuesday ID5 a secured $20 million in Series B funding, bringing their total to roughly $27 raised since 2021. [Source]
Driving Podcast Ad Innovation with Thought Leadership: Testing the Power of Talent Reads by Paul Riismandel
Signal Hill Insights ran a study in collaboration with advertising marketplace Gumball and hosting platform Art19 to test a hypothesis: a host-read podcast ad might remain effective if run on another podcast as ‘talent-read’. The results found host-read performed the best with strong lift metrics for familiarity, affinity, and purchase intent. Talent-read came second overall, but announcer-read still performed strongly in top-funnel metrics. As Tom Webster noted during his Evolutions keynote speech, studies like 2022’s After These Messages show host-read and announcer-read need not be in competition. They each have unique strengths at different parts of the marketing funnel. [Source]
Steven Bartlett and ex-Acast duo launch global podcast startup by Ella Sagar
Entrepreneur and The Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett has teamed up with Georgie Holt and Christiana Brenton, formerly of Acast and co-founders of Telling Media, to launch podcast media and tech company Flight Studio. Bartlett operates as founder and chairman, with Holt as CEO and Brenton as CCO. According to their press release, Flight Studio will focus on scaling video-first podcast brands in their platform with proprietary data and experimentation. [Source]
…as for the rest of the news:
PodCo has stealthily announced Pretty Little Podcast, a Pretty Little Liars rewatch podcast, featuring actors from the show both as hosts and guest stars.
How The "Pretty Lonesome" Podcast Host Earned 7-Figures And Inked A Deal With Alex Cooper, a Forbes interview with Madeline Argy
The Semafor covers Soros Fund Management’s movement into the audio world, including becoming the biggest investor in Audacy.
The Verge covers a report on how OpenAI transcribed a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4, as AI creators quickly run out of public domain data to train new models with.
Research Database Snapshot
What it says: More podcast listeners say they “watch or listen to all of the ads” on podcasts than observed with other platforms
What it means: We know ads work…but only if people pay attention. This data shows that podcast listeners do indeed give their attention to ads
Why it’s cool: Asking people if they skip ads will always generate an inflated false positive - asking the inverse, however, shows the real truth about podcast advertising.
Made possible by Spreaker