All-Star Oxford Road Team Joins Media Roundtable; Halloween is Over, But Spooky Podcasts Prevail; James Ingrassia Shares Podcast Trade Secrets

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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The Classifieds

Paranormal Podcast Takes Us to Haunted Locales

While Monday saw the end of our spooky merriment, fear not! (Or fear so). We have two freakishly horrifying podcasts for you, so sit back, relax, and enjoy the spine-tingling madness! Our first ghoulish selection comes from the spectors at Spreaker. Our intrepid narrator spends each episode touring us through ghostly haunts around the United States, some as infamous as the colony at Roanoke and the home of the Villisca axe murders, while others get unveiled for the very first time. This smaller opportunity is a look-a-like for many high performers across our agency, generally best suited for a female skew audience interested in literature. If you still want to monster some mash, more gruesome details await you below.

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A Laugh with a Dose of Lunacy

The lighter choice of these devilish delights, Ghosted! It’s a comedy podcast from comedian and drag performer Roz Hernandez. Produced by Starburns, and distributed through Advertisecast, this titan of terror spends every episode interviewing famous faces who have made contact with the great beyond. Exorcists, psychics, comedians, and writers have sat down to terrorize an adoring audience. Guests often repeat appearances, inside jokes develop and play across multiple episodes, and the banter is light yet eye-opening, creating a loyal fanbase of frightened listeners. Many clients have seen success testing on this podcast, especially those looking for a paranormal or crime-focused comedy option. Please see below for more information if you want a good chuckle after all the scares.

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In Case You Missed It

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Jade + X.D. + TUSHY

It’s been said that podcasting allows hosts to get more intimate than they would in other formats. Yet not every host can boldly speak about the sordid details of their toilet habits. For Jade and X.D., bold is an understatement, and when it comes to a product they fully stand by—or in this case, sit over—it really comes down to believing in it. That’s what you’ll hear in Jade + X.D.’s read for the TUSHY bidet, the cleaner and more efficient alternative to toilet paper. Aside from learning Jade’s many creative euphemisms for our darkest of tunnels—be prepared to laugh and grimace at the same time—you’ll learn how much of a diehard Tushy fan she is. Spoiler: it’s so much that she won’t go anywhere without her TUSHY travel bidet. “I can’t live my life without this anymore” are her exact words, and there are no sweeter sounds to our ears, even if they might conjure up sounds of a flushing toilet. If she can make a read about a product that washes away your unmentionable messes sound this good, just imagine what she can do for your brand.

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OXFORd In The News

James Ingrassia Shares Podcast Trade Secrets

Oxford Road’s own James Ingrassia joined The Podcast Advertising Playbook to talk a little bit about the secret sauce in planning successful podcast campaigns. James and Host Heather Osgood discuss:

Look-a-like audiences and how they can influence your campaigns.
The similarities between old-school radio ads and newer podcast ads
Why you should implement a “how’d you hear about us” survey even in 2022
How podcast hosts as influencers impact ad campaign performance
Why podcast advertising is not as easy as you might think

Whether you’re a podcast advertising veteran or looking into it for the first time, getting a peek inside James’ Podcast Playbook is time well spent.

If you’ve read this far, thank you!

The Influencer is a production from the team at Oxford Road.
If you like our sometimes sassy, mostly informed POVs on the wonderful world of audio advertising, you should see what we do for our clients.

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Contact us at influencer@oxfordroad.com!