Media Roundtable: Industry Edition - September 21

This week’s Media Roundtable: Industry Edition tackles the news marketers like you need to hear, including Industry layoffs, Spotify’s podcast dominance, and why marketers need to take a deeper dive into your influencers before agreeing to anything.

This week, Kyle Jelinek hosts the episode alongside returning Oxford Road team members Dan Granger, Spencer Semonson, and Kristen Duenas. Listen as these “Agents of Influence” put their years of industry experience to work, helping you make sense of the latest podcast news while occasionally taking a short detour into the inane with fake ad reads and just enough nonsense to keep it interesting.

At the top of everyone’s mind:

• New brand safety measures account for what podcasters do outside of their shows
• Balancing subscription and ad-supported models
• Spotify turning web novels into podcasts
• Navigating the ad slowdown and content overload
• In 2023 Alexa’s best answer will be… an ad?

Short on time? A recap of each topic is shared below, but for the team’s whole hot take, catch the full episode by clicking the link below.

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Creator Economy Not Immune to Economic Downturn

We’ve seen layoffs and cutbacks across the tech industry sector during this economic downturn, but creator economy companies have generally been immune. Not so anymore. Last week, premium content producer Patreon announced that it will lay off 17% of its workforce (80 employees) to “make sure Patreon continues to be a reliable monetization tool for creators.”That said, Patreon is a service for premium content behind a paywall. Our roundtable believes that ad-supported content creation will weather this storm far better than anything people have to pay for. Time will tell; keep reading…

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Influencer Remains a Strong Channel in Current Climate

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again — influencer marketing is the key to continually reaching your audience during this recession. Find endorsers who authentically align with your brand voice (we can help you with that), and the impact will remain strong. With consumers looking for areas to cut expenses, free content platforms like podcasts, streaming audio, and radio will maintain the largest reach. That reach, combined with implicit trust generated by influencer marketing, should help you weather this storm.

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The Rise of Andrew Tate

Former kickboxing champion, and minor UK reality star, Andrew Tate created an empire of toxic masculinity through mass messaging on TikTok. Recently the infamous misogynist was working within the podcast space, specifically on Spotify, where he hadn’t yet been banned (vs. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Discord etc.). The meteoritic rise of this extremely polarizing figure can teach us a lot about brand safety in this age:

#1 Reach and influence isn’t always the clearest indicator of success

#2. Brand safety involves both monitoring existing content as well as what the hosts do outside of their programs (something our work with Barometer is currently addressing)

#3. Spotify podcast charts are much more volatile than Apple charts, and their reliance on video content and fringe internet celebs will always keep it from being a reliable source

#4. As lookalikes emerge, including Fresh and Fit, and are being legitimized in the podcast and YouTube space, we need to be hyper-vigilant not to validate dangerous ideologies that end up on the far ends of the political spectrum.

Influencer marketing can be tricky. Simulcast and TikTok are especially useful for reach, but can also be a weapon in the wrong hands. Brand safety needs to be a concern for all clients, regardless of performance. We can help.

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Podcast/YouTube Lines Increasingly Blurred

Video podcasts are booming, giving creators access to new audiences. But does this risk ruining what made the emerging audio format so satisfying to begin with? While podcast purists may scoff at the notion of a video podcast (isn’t that essentially just a documentary?), from an advertiser’s perspective, there is no downside. Some of the largest interviewer creators are already working heavily with video simulcast (Logan Paul,h3h3, Call Her Daddy, Joe Rogan).he continuing trend will only help advertisers grow their visibility while ensuring we’re able to gauge performance through our attribution practices. So let the industry keep blurring the lines between podcasts and YouTube while the ad-supported content we buy gets shared with more and more users.

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Watt’s Up?

Wattpad, the global entertainment company and leading web novel platform, will launch a series of podcasts created by popular Wattpad authors exclusively on Spotify. Realm is getting bigger, Disney is putting out Marvel fiction podcasts, and so this trend towards audio fiction is becoming a new, underserved audience for marketers. What’s old is new again. Fictional audio stories have been around since the advent of radio (soap operas, radio dramas, radio plays, and film adaptations via audio). So while fiction podcasts don’t have the host read we very much want, we already buy a ton of announcer and producer reads on news content which always performs, so we see this channel as a growing and untapped subset of podcasts for DR advertisers. More info to come.

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Alexa’s Sponsored Responses

Think SEM for voice. We’ve been talking about the future of smart speakers for years, and so far, advertising opportunities have been limited. But that’s about to change. Next year, Amazon will incorporate ads into Alexa’s answers with its new Customers Ask Alexa feature. Companies will soon be able to essentially sponsor the voice assistant’s responses to questions relevant to their products, linking an advertisement for a cleaning spray to a query about how to remove stains, for instance. The feature brings commerce to the otherwise crowd-sourced Alexa Answers feature set up by Amazon a few years ago.

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Patagonia Founder Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is

This week in feel-good news. We see a lot of companies align themselves with causes. Some are true to the brand values; some are subject to scrutiny. But rarely does a brand truly put everything on the line for what they believe. Enter Patagonia. Last week the company announced that 100% of the company’s voting stock (2% of the total) had been transferred to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, created to protect the company’s values (its mission statement is “We’re in business to save our home planet”). At the same time, 100% of the non-voting stock (98% of the total) has been given to the Holdfast Collective, a non-profit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature; funding for Holdfast will come from Patagonia in the form of a dividend – expected to be in the region of $100m this year. While some on the panel feel this move was entirely philanthropic, others believe there are untold benefits to the move, but we all agree that both truths can coexist.

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