You’re an advertiser. You have a product—let’s say it’s a meal kit delivery service. You want people to buy it. But how do you reach them? Do you shotgun-blast your ad across an entire podcast network, hoping someone, somewhere, might be hungry enough to care? Or do you surgically insert it into one specific podcast, where the audience is already primed to purchase things at 2 AM?
According to the latest PodScribe Q4 2024 Performance Benchmarks report, one of those strategies is objectively more efficient per impression. And the other? Well, it’s basically the advertising equivalent of setting your money on fire and counting on the smoke to spell out your target URL.
Pete Wright and Andy Nelson explain why tiny, niche podcasts are somehow more powerful than the big, flashy ones. They’ll debate whether YouTube’s slow takeover of podcasting is a game-changer or just another doomed experiment (looking at you, Google Podcasts). And they’ll take us deep into the shadowy world of ad tracking pixels—which, if you don’t know, are those little bits of code that follow you around the internet like a puppy.
And here’s the kicker: podcast ads actually work. Really well. So well, in fact, that brands are now scrambling to figure out how to track listener behavior without resorting to outright surveillance. Because—and this is genuinely shocking—sometimes people hear an ad, don’t immediately click a link, but still remember the brand and buy the thing later. Wild concept, right?
So, what does all this mean for the future of podcast advertising? Will brands finally stop panicking about promo codes? Will YouTube actually become a podcasting powerhouse? And most importantly—will Pete and Andy ever get tired of talking about incrementality?
Spoiler alert: No. No, they will not.
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