Media Roundtable: Industry Edition - August 10

Media Roundtable’s “Industry Edition” returns to discuss the hot topics of the day, including a quick recap of the latest from PodNews, the industry’s latest solutions for brand safety, the loss of HBO Max, and much more.

This week, Dan Granger returns as host alongside other members of the Oxford Road team, Kristen Duenas, Spencer Semonson, and Stew Redwine, as they discuss the most critical topics in the world of marketing from those of us working in the media and audio industries.

Dan begins the episode chatting about the latest release from PodNews, which highlighted the craziness of Apple’s rating system, a new Podcast growth agency for creators called Bumper, Audio Earning Reports that show how legacy media channels are changing with the growth of their podcast involvement, and the monetary cost of misinformation as demonstrated by the Alex Jones civil trial.

For readers short on time, a recap of each topic is shared below, but to hear the team’s whole hot take, listen to the entire episode by clicking the link below.

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The Podcast Industry Gets Serious About Brand Safety

Inside Radio shared the news about the new brand safety tool, Sounder. Backed by iHeart Media, its founders believe that their tool will help Podcast grow by offering brands an automated way to ensure the content they’re supporting aligns with their values, with the addition of offering contextual targeting at scale in the future. We love the momentum we’re seeing with the industry as a whole demanding more insight into content and welcome new solutions to solve  this problem. However, we’d be remiss if we didn’t give a quick plug to our partners at Barometer, who’s automated solution for brand safety is already up and running. From what we can tell it offers everything Sounder is promising – perhaps more. If you’d like to give Barometer a test drive – shoot us an electronic mail message.

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Sacrificing Short-Term Sales For Long-Term Growth

This week in “Recession Talk”, we share a story from Media Post that urges marketers to shift focus from short-term goals to long-term goals during the economic downturn. History has many stories recounting companies that maintained or doubled down advertising efforts during an economic crisis and came out of it stronger than before, but is this realistic for most marketers? The panel discusses the pros and cons of this strategy and ultimately lands on the truth that it’s a gutsy move that ultimately depends on how long you can sustain a drop in sales to focus on the long-term. But for marketers simply doing the best they can with the resources available. In uncertain times, adjusting your creative strategy can be the most valuable move in your playbook.

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Are You Ready for Some Football?

The Athletic has announced the launch of 17 local football podcasts for the upcoming NFL season, giving fans new content to choose from when the season begins this Fall. Sports programming consistently performs well for many advertisers, and at Oxford Road, we’ve found that content with a local and regional focus has excelled, presumably due to their rabidly loyal fanbases. This localization could signify things to come as more regional podcast content outside of the sports world is made available now that consumption and engagement is high enough regionally (as prognosticated by The Influencer for years). For now, go sports!

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HBO Max Dissolves

It appears that HBO Max is going away and will be merging with Discovery Plus next year. While from a consumer perspective, we’re saddened to see our beloved streaming platform go the way of the dodo bird, as marketers, it presents a ton of opportunity. We already know that Netflix will be moving to an ad-supported model in 2023. Now it appears we may have the ability to advertise on the premium HBO content we all know and love. Expect more consolidation and more monetization in the streaming space as things progress which may be good for everyone.

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Podcast Payola?

Broke by our friend Ashley Carmen on Bloomberg earlier this week, podcast guests are paying up to $50,000 to appear on popular shows. While this may seem astonishing to the general public, for our panel, it was common knowledge and becoming increasingly prevalent. But should podcasts receiving money for interviews disclose it to their listeners? The panel says yes, and it harkens back to the old days in radio where payola and plugola scandals erupted back in the 60’s and 70’s. What do you think? Should podcasts have to disclose which interviews are paid and which are genuine as they do in traditional broadcast? Let us know your thoughts by emailing us.

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More Players in the Podcast Sandbox

As reported by the Podcast Business Journal, Lionsgate has entered the podcasting space with a new division called Lionsgate Sound, which will operate as a full-service podcast production company, handling podcast production for the studio’s film & television businesses while also overseeing all elements of podcast production for third party clients. Audio is hot, and everyone wants a piece of the podcast pie. Large production companies have a wide breadth of sources to pull from, plus talented production teams to produce high-quality content, and we expect to see more of this in the future. As an agency that works heavily in the podcast space, we say keep the original content coming.

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