Situation:
Client was going to shut off their linear TV efforts, which was a huge driver of awareness in their marketing strategy. We needed to figure out how to maintain our reach, and brainstormed options outside of our standard video pattern. Our plan: test audio ads.
Objective:
Utilize midroll ads in podcasts to achieve comparable reach and cost/visit.
Methodology:
Our midroll podcast ads ran across premium audio content on specific shows that reached our target audiences in an organic and native environment.
And we mean native. The hosts of the podcasts themselves read the advertisements about Client themselves, for a more fluid and natural user experience. (For Client, we tested Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Office Ladies, and Freakonomics Radio podcasts). While this format of midroll is more expensive, it builds off of the trust established between the content creator and listener. Each of the podcasts hosts talked about BM themselves.
However, because the listener could not click on any banner ad in the podcast, we once again had to create our own custom metric to best measure effectiveness. Enter: Download Influenced Visit, or DiVs. Since our ad “lives” in any single episode of a podcast, we tracked a visit whenever someone had downloaded that episode and later visited Client’s website. Since we buy the midroll ads on an impression-based contract from the vendor, our ad can run on multiple episodes (until the impression cap is met).
Results:
Our flight achieved 5.1million impressions and 17.3k total site visits, but we ultimately measured performance on Cost/DiV.
- Conan $5.31
- Oprah $17.42.
- Office $8.48
- Freakonomics $6.49
Although slightly more expensive than CTV as an awareness channel, we’re excited about the future of audio ads. We expect the channel to continue to grow, and will look to test podcasts out for other clients.
