The Media Roundtable: Industry Edition - November 2

This week, on the Media Roundtable: Industry Edition, the agents of influence are tackling free speech and brand safety. Let’s dig in.

Returning to host is Oxford Road’s founder and CEO Dan Granger, along with fellow Oxford Road experts Kristen Duenas, Neal Lucey, and Steven Abraham.

At the top of everyone’s mind:

• Letting that Sink In – What Elon’s shakeup will mean for Twitter advertisers.
• A Head’s Up Would’ve Been Nice – Should Lex Fridman have warned his sponsors about Kanye West?
• Candy Crush Always Crushes – Gaming: a recession-proof channel for marketers?

Short on time? A recap of each topic is shared below, but for industry insights, you won’t get anywhere else, hear the full episode by clicking the link below.

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Chief Twit’s First Week

From a dad joke that fell flat to a mass lay-off of employees to charging $8 for the coveted blue checkmark, Elon’s first week as Twitter’s new owner has been eventful. While the panel shared concerns about the viability of Twitter as an advertising platform in its current state, the consensus is that love him or hate him; Musk knows how to disrupt and innovate. So while truly making Twitter a safe place to exchange ideas regardless of point of view is a lofty goal (one also shared by Media Roundtable), we anxiously hope for the best and wish Elon the best.

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The 100% Brand Safe Podcast Doesn’t Exist

Ye has gone off the rails (again), and his storm recently landed on the Lex Fridman Podcast, a show that we’ve worked with for years and one that is generally extremely low on the controversy spectrum. While Lex held his own with Ye and pushed back appropriately when the rapper went off the rails, it stirred some controversy about brand safety. In this case, the brand safety tools we use, like Ad Fontes and Barometer, which look at past show content to determine if it’s safe for a brand, couldn’t help. How do we navigate from a brand safety perspective? Our panel’s consensus is that networks need to give advertisers a heads-up when potentially polarizing guests are booked to ensure they’re not advertising on the content they don’t want to be on. The silver lining to all this is that we’re getting some networks to agree to share potentially controversial guests in advance so we can do that!

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Recession-Proof Industries?

A Microsoft exec recently said that gaming is “somewhat resilient’ to economic weakness.” It makes sense, given that once you have the hardware, gaming is essentially free, and consumption will rise as a form of entertainment in periods of economic downturn. The panel discusses the pros and cons of gaming for marketers and agrees that it will work for many advertisers, but proceed with caution.

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Podcast In Its Hay Day

Oxford Road’s resident data junkie Neal Lucey shared findings from NPR and Edison Research’s recent Spoken Word Report. According to the report, Podcast is the preferred platform (by just a hair) over terrestrial for personalities. We’ve seen this shift happening for years, and there is no looking back – Podcast is in its hay day.

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TikTok Podcast App?

Springboarding off of the previous article, everyone seems to want to join in on the podcast boom, and the latest may be TikTok. According to our friends at Podnews, podcast hosting company Audiomeans spotted a new bot scraping their feeds, and tracked it back to TikTok. Moreover, Podnews shared that TikTok “recently registered a trademark for TikTok Music which includes the provision for podcast content; and the company is already talking to record companies.” All signs point towards a podcast attempt from the social media platform. Most of our panel is excited about the prospect of short-form audio and extended reach this platform could provide for podcasts, but Dan shared a word of caution about privacy concerns on the platform as a whole.

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