Future Of Online Advertising

Our Director of Marketing Rob Safuto will be attending the Future of Online Advertising conference next week in New York City. If you are going to be there definitely stop him and say, ‘Hi!” We love to talk about podcasts and advertising.

The industry is moving quickly and we are doing our best to stay on top of it. We hope to find out the latest from the advertising and media communities then put it to work here at RawVoice.

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NYC Podcast Media Buyers Meetings Re-Cap

I have a pile of notes from the various meetings I had in NYC with a significant number of media buyers. I am not going to share all of them, but let me cover a couple of things.

• Podcast Reporting Statistics are going to be held to a higher standard
• Verification – Verification – Verification
• Media Buyers do not understand the levels of Audience Engagement
• All were worried about Ads run on shows with Explicit Content
• Some buyers finally understood the power of host read endorsements

I am not going to discuss my presentation as it is a company proprietary secret, but I was told a significant number of times that our approach was applaudable and unlike anything they had ever seen.

I would like to think it is because I don’t pull any punches, or I don’t over hype the space. What it boils down to is that my team understand the new media space and we have 24 months of podcast advertising data to backup our assertions on how we have delivered ROI to those companies we represent.

I will leave you with this. You can have the best technology in the world but if it is not effective in generating ROI they don’t care if the technology slices and dices, or is hyped by a talking head or even exaggerated in a press release, if you can’t deliver measurable ROI then you might as well go home. 

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The Reality Of Podcast Advertising

I’m not sure if there’s a hotter topic to touch on in podcasting then advertising. We’ve gotten a number of emails from podcasters over the past few months with tones ranging from innocent newbie questions to strong demands for higher CPM rates.

I wanted to start this thread to make some common sense statements on podcast advertising and provide a place for discussion on the topic.

• In spite of what some mainstream outlets are saying, the market for podcast advertising continues to grow. We’ve seen a number of reports out there that point to the stagnation of the flow of money into podcasting. Here on Blubrry we’ve launched our biggest deals over the last few months. So we’re seeing much more interest along with actual revenue growth in 2007.

• The dollars for most podcasters are small, but they’re much more than any blogger was making two years into the medium. Dave Winer started blogging in 1997. How much money were bloggers making in 1999? Podcasters are earning a lot more now than bloggers were then.

• Large companies are approaching podcast advertising tentatively. Of course they are. Companies with large ad budgets have a lot to lose. It’s very easy for an ad exec to go to TV, radio or mainstream web outlets with a campaign. Those are established channels that are considered low risk. Podcasting on the other hand is a higher risk investment. Even still, dollars are flowing into the space. The early days (and it is still the early days of podcasting) of all media movements see tentative investment by the major players.

• Podcasters have the power to influence sponsors at all levels. Every time a sponsor has a good experience (and by ‘good experience’ I mean one that produces results) they will be more confident about increasing their investment and they will probably tell others. So podcasters who have sponsors go a long way to improving the bottom line of the whole industry by working hard to get positive results for their sponsors.

• Those who take the time to build a loyal audience and work on selling will be the most successful podcasters financially. How much influence do you have over your audience? Your sponsors will know when you run a campaign. Campaigns that result in low return for the advertiser are usually a factor of a combination of low audience influence and low sales effort. If you have influence over your audience and work on selling for your sponsors then you’ll probably have good results.

• Building a substantial, highly influenced audience base takes time and effort. We’re in a very ‘now’ society. Word spreads fast and people can gain a modicum of fame relatively quickly if all the right forces are in play. This leads us to thinking that this is what success is all about. The fact is that the podcasters earning the most money via podcast sponsorships are the ones who have continually produced shows on a regular basis for two years or more.

  Shows like Rocketboom, Keith and the Girl and Geek News Central have been incredibly consistent over the last couple of years. They have hundreds of episodes and many thousands of loyal audience members. They’ve worked very hard to get there. You’ve worked hard too, but it may take more time and effort to pay off the way you want it to.

Our goals here are to help build a community of passionate podcasters while providing real opportunities to earn some money from your podcasts. We don’t promise the world but we do hold ourselves to a high standard. You can help us to land bigger deals by creating great value for the current sponsors who’ve been intrepid enough to make an early investment in this new medium. What do you think?

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CEO Todd Cochrane on Panel at Podcast and New Media Expo

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RawVoice Welcomes GotoMyPC as a new Sponsor

RawVoice is Proud to announce the largest podcast advertising deal ever executed! With 3 combined advertising deals and the addition of GotoMyPC as a new sponsor have resulted in the largest continuous number of Podcast participating in ad campaigns that we are aware of. All independent podcasters are participants on the RawVoice family of websites.

We are proud to have the Grammar Girl Podcast and several shows from the QDNow Network participating in this new campaign along with Podcasts from both the Blubrry.com and PodcasterNews.com communities.

RawVoice has been able to guarantee multiple of millions listener impressions each month for GotoMyPC through these Podcast which we negotiated the advertising deals for. We are excited to add GotoMyPc to our list of long term subscribers.

You can get a free trial of GotoMyPc at gotomypc.com/podcast

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