How Taylor Swift’s Podcast Appearance Impacts Ad Industry
The podcast industry has struggled to aggregate and sell its audiences. The impact from Swift’s appearance no doubt will drive more advertisers to the platform and help create streamlined sales strategies.
Brands need an audience to buy their products.
Audiences follow content.
The greater the demand for content, the more money brands will pay to reach that audience.
It’s no secret that brands pay a premium for evening drive radio spots, morning talk shows, prime time TV, and of course the Super Bowl.
Newcomer media platform podcasts continue to grow in popularity, with some attracting audiences rivaling those of long-running TV shows. It is estimated that The Joe Rogan Experience commands 11MM listeners per episode while the The Daily (produced by The New York Times) gets 1.1MM downloads each weekday.
I personally love listening to audio podcasts like Sistas Who Kill for fun and entertainment, and The Playbook by David Meltzer for entrepreneurship inspiration and direction. Yet, I can’t help but love the video and interactive chat components on Spotify platform for newer podcasts like IMO by Michelle & Craig Robinson.
Such video-centric podcasts present advertisers with product placement and celebrity-adjacent content in a more authentic, less Hollywood manner that television & film. Advertisers now can feature their products on the sets of podcasts right next to stars, and the whole world can view that. Think Coke cups on the sets of American Idol.
Taylor Swift’s August 13th appearance on the Jason and Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast broke viewership records getting 10MM views in 24 hours, one of the most-watched podcast episodes in a one-day period of all time. It was a win-win for the show (I’m certain increasing their subscribers), Swift (showing off her new album cover and releasing the track list ahead of the Oct 3 release date), and I believe the advertising industry. When you compare New Height’s 10MM one-day views to iconic morning show Good Morning America’s average 2.625 MM viewers (live-plus same day), this helps you understand why I believe this one episode is cataclysmic to the industry — in a good way.
Podcasts are distributed on a bevy of platforms including YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music, to name a few. Expansive podcast distribution has made the aggregation of listenership and download data reporting cumbersome and riddled with accuracy. The advertising industry has been and continues to be vigilant on streamlining processes to figure it out, to do what? You guessed it, sell the audiences.
Such industry leaders such as iHeart, Podbean, Midroll, Spotify for Creators, have made significant headway in audience reporting, undergirded by research companies like Edison Research & Nielsen. And we feel that the Swift/Kelce episode will bring new advertisers in search of “audience” to the platform, thus driving even more diligence in measuring episode performance across platforms.
We look forward to seeing how this platform continues to grow and how and if TV ad rates will be impacted further because of this new medium’s growth. Big shout out to Swift for this contribution to the advertising industry.
*We will review in our next blog post. But, video, audio and print platforms each have unique benefits and should be utilized differently by each brand.
Sources:
Joe Rogan Stats, link; The Daily, link; GMA, link
Olivia is a C-Suite Marketing Exec, Author of 51 Brand Marketing Tips for Creators & Founder of Omerge Alliances & Freedom at The Mat. An NYU & Loyola Professor, she has led mktg at influential organizations such as Carol’s Daughter, VIBE, Live Nation, Ogilvy & more for 25+ years. A Native Memphian, now based in New Orleans, is a forever Harlemite (NYC) who travels extensively and blooms where she is planted.
