Innovative Ad Strategies for Podcasters: A Deep Dive - PCI 397

Speaker 0 00:00:00 Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist here at Blueberry.

Speaker 1 00:00:02 And I'm Mike Dell, the VP of Customer Relations here at Blueberry. And today we're gonna be talking about ad insertion technology, what types are available, and how you can put 'em to use.

Speaker 0 00:00:14 You're listening to Podcast Insider, a weekly podcast, bringing insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow and thrive through podcasting. With the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting, welcome. Let's dive in. There are two main types of ad insertion, and the first one that we're gonna talk about and is probably the most popular is dynamic ad insertion, otherwise known as DAI. So this allows podcasters to insert the ads into their episodes dynamically so that different listeners hear different ads depending on factors. We're pretty used to this, to getting this on our phones. Like yeah, when you're in a certain state, you get ads about restaurants only in that state location listening platform, whether you're on Spotify or an Android listening device, something like that, or even the time of day. So there's a lot of flexibility that comes with this. It's very good at what it does to an annoying point sometimes. So it can be very relevant and very timely. It is good at what it does.

Speaker 1 00:01:17 Yep. And that's the programmatic way of monetizing. Mm-Hmm. where most of the time, whatever service you're using for that takes care of the ad sales and all that, and they just cut you a check every month or whatever, or cut you a check. Is that a thing anymore? Probably send you a PayPal anyway. also, there's content insertion, that's what I call it. It's probably not called that in whatever system you're in at blueberry, we just call it ad insertion. But, uh, that's where you manually set up to insert ads or promos, intros, outros, any sort of content that you wanna be able to change in your back episodes and going forward, that may change later. So this is more of a manual way of doing DAI, but it doesn't change per listener. Insertion technology offers podcasters a variety of ways to enhance podcasts, monetize our content effectively. And some of the key uses for ad insertion technology in podcasting are as the first subject you're gonna talk about here,

Speaker 0 00:02:23 . It's the time sensitive advertising. Yes. So these are, these are ads that go out only at relevant times for perhaps a week. Could be even just a day, could be months. These are promotions for an upcoming event or a sale that's about to end, or a flash sale, whatever. After that thing is over , um, it is replaced with something else. . Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:02:48 Just think of the mattress ads on President's Day or Mm-Hmm. Christmas related stuff around the holiday season, that kind of thing. Another cool way you can use this is doing AB testing. You could say, in our system, we'll say you can create two campaigns. One runs every other episode and one runs the opposite episodes, and you can see which of these ads deliver better. So then you can decide, okay, the next campaign we're just gonna use all add A or add B.

Speaker 0 00:03:21 Yeah. It's, it's definitely useful when you're trying to decide which thing to go with full-time. You can do this at the start, so,

Speaker 1 00:03:28 Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's

Speaker 0 00:03:30 Good. Another way is improved listener experience. So this ad insertion podcasters, complacent ads within natural breaks, it makes the listening experience just less disruptive and more enjoyable. Overall. Strategic placement helps maintain listener engagement. They're not just gonna skip, go back, anything like that. And it reduces the likelihood that people are just gonna leave the show in general.

Speaker 1 00:03:58 Yeah. Last week we talked about premium content and the one show I'm thinking of that I subscribed to, the reason I subscribed to their ad free version is their ad insertion sucks

Speaker 0 00:04:10 Not good.

Speaker 1 00:04:11 And I mean, it's like they're in the middle of a sentence and then in a Geico ad appears and it's like, come on, that's lousy with some, with the DAI systems that, uh, we have in place or our manual ad insertions, you can put it right down to the hundredths of a second so you could have a natural break and that's where the ad goes.

Speaker 0 00:04:30 Yeah. I think something we would kind of wanna distinguish for people who are trying to figure out how this works is with the cont with what, what you just explained of like there is a way that it is just the ad is part of the file.

Speaker 1 00:04:44 Yeah.

Speaker 0 00:04:45 And dynamic ad insertion, the ad is not, is not part of the file overall. It changes, it is inserted in there to be played. Mm-Hmm. like breaking it up. But with the content it's just,

Speaker 1 00:05:01 In some systems it works really well. YouTube's another example, if you're watching a YouTube show and they'll just immediately just cut to an ad and it, it's not in a good spot. And again, talking about premium content, I pay for YouTube premium because I hate that .

Speaker 0 00:05:20 Yeah. I, I get like free movies to watch from my LGTV and like I can start and stop 'em whenever I want, but it will be in the middle of a sentence and it will go to an ad. Mm-Hmm. . And at first I was like, this is a terrible experience, why would I do this? And then I was like, oh, because I'm paying $0 for this

Speaker 1 00:05:41 . Yeah. And that's, that's why that is what dynamic ad insertion or DAI is. Yeah. But it can be done in a better way. Mm-Hmm. , like I said, the system that we use for our programmatic ads, which is da, if you opt into that, you can set the points where the ads go. And that's something that not all systems do.

Speaker 0 00:06:03 Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:06:03 Or you know what, what's more than likely is they bought a crap ton of content to give it to you for free on that TV service that you have. Mm-Hmm. . And they don't wanna take the time to go through and pick the ad points, so they just Yeah. Throw 'em in wherever. Yeah,

Speaker 0 00:06:18 They do. They don't care. And also like the available movies that I can watch for totally free on my tv, like change every month too. Yeah. So they're not gonna spend the time to figure that out.

Speaker 1 00:06:28 Yeah, of course. And why should they? Yeah,

Speaker 0 00:06:30 I get it.

Speaker 1 00:06:31 It's free. It's free. Yeah. Another thing you can do with a dynamic ad insertion or regular old manual ad insertion or content insertion is you can monetize your back catalog. Now a lot of podcasters think that they have a long tail podcast, but not very many podcasters have long tail. What I mean by long tail is people going back and listening to your back episodes. But a lot of podcasts do have some of that, so why not monetize that? And you can, you can do that with the, with these systems, neither the programmatic or the ad insertion. And it's kind of free money

Speaker 0 00:07:10 . I mean, I, I personally enjoy it as a listener because I don't wanna hear about an ad or a sale for something that no longer exists. So if I'm watching the episode like a year later, I don't wanna hear about something that is already passed. So I, I appreciate it when it is updated correctly like that, but

Speaker 1 00:07:30 Oh yeah, for sure. And then, like I said, it, it makes the ads relevant even five years an episode five years ago, but you have an ad that's relevant today. Yeah. And that's certainly better than a baked in ad from way back when there's a place for baked in ads and we'll probably be talking about that in a future episode. But anyway,

Speaker 0 00:07:52 Something else is the tiered subscription models. So if you're doing an ad free version of your podcast to your subscribers while using ad insertion to monetize the freedom version as well, this can encourage more subscriptions while also still generating revenue from your non-subscribers. So it's kind of the best of both worlds.

Speaker 1 00:08:12 Yeah. And it, and it, and it annoys it, it annoys the free listeners to sign up. So

Speaker 0 00:08:18 Yeah, I was gonna say hopefully annoys them in a good way to just sign up for .

Speaker 1 00:08:23 Yeah. It's all good free podcasts. They, some, some of them need a little support, so if they have to throw an ad in there, that's okay. Mm-Hmm. . But if you wanna pay them, get rid of the ads. That's

Speaker 0 00:08:35 Nice. I mean, in, in my life, I listened to Spotify on like the free version or whatever it was for about a month until I just po it up and started paying for it because I could not listen to more McDonald's commercials every half hour or whatever it was. I just couldn't do it. And I was like, this is worth it.

Speaker 1 00:08:55 So it must be in a different place. 'cause every time I get an ad on Spotify, it's for better help or uh, some, something like that. So there you go with that dynamic stuff, it tells you it knows where I'm at versus where McKenzie's at. Yes,

Speaker 0 00:09:09 It does. And

Speaker 1 00:09:09 It probably knows more about me than I care to, to let them know. But

Speaker 0 00:09:14 Yeah, I, I like to say Google knows me better than any of my friends and family ever will .

Speaker 1 00:09:19 There you go. Another thing is flexibility with sponsors. Ad insertion makes it easier for podcasters to manage sponsorships. They can switch sponsors across a section of episodes or all the episodes, uh, without having to really rerecord the episodes back in the day, I remember people that would have a sponsorship for a month and then the next month they'd have a different sponsor. They'd have to go back in and re-upload all those old episodes with a new sponsor message.

Speaker 0 00:09:47 Is that even worth the money that you're getting out of it? ?

Speaker 1 00:09:50 Yeah. Well they were probably getting paid pretty good. I

Speaker 0 00:09:52 Would, yeah, depending, but

Speaker 1 00:09:54 Mm-Hmm. . But what's really cool with that is you can throw the sponsorship message in a spot and then just dynamically change that using the system. And a lot of people do get confused between the systems we offer. We'll talk about that here in a bit. But anyway, I think flexibility is the key.

Speaker 0 00:10:13 Yeah. So another thing is that this makes it easy to track your performance, which absolutely your advertisers need that information as well. So you can track how the different ads are performing in terms of listener engagement and interaction. So this helps you improve your ad strategies as well as demonstrating the value that you are actually bringing to set advertisers and campaigns that you're participating in.

Speaker 1 00:10:40 Yeah. And in our system, the non programmatic system, each file in the stat or each in the stats, you'll see each version. So every time you rebuild the file, there's a new version. So you can say, okay, that that version was the Geico ad and this a, this version over here was the McDonald's ad, and you can report to Geico or McDonald's how good their particular ad did in that particular episode.

Speaker 0 00:11:08 Yeah. It goes back to that AB testing that we were talking about earlier.

Speaker 1 00:11:11 Right? Right. For sure. And one of the cool ways I see people using this has nothing to do with ads. They have say an intro that they replace on a regular basis and the intro plays on all the episodes, not just the current one. And then later on they can switch that out. Or if you have an outro that you're, where you're promoting something current, you could throw an outro on the back end of each of the episodes. That changes whenever you, your message changes. And, and that has nothing to do with ads at all. It's just content.

Speaker 0 00:11:48 I mean, it kind of makes sense though, because it reminds me of how like TV shows when they were played in the early two thousands, they had this song, but then when it came out on DVD, it had a different song because they couldn't get the licensing rights to have it play in that type of way. This is, this is kind of the same. And it's like, yeah, we can do a campaign and use this content for this, but then we're gonna replace it at some other point in time. Right. It's not exactly the same thing, but it can be used like that.

Speaker 1 00:12:17 Yeah. So here at Blueberry we offer, I guess it'd be two and a half , what I said here, three in the notes, different types of ad insertion, our manual ad insertion, that's pre-roll only. That's available for hosting customers that have the Thrive Bundle and also is included with prohost. And then we have the manual ad insertion that is both pre-roll, post-roll and mid-roll. So you could put insertion points in where you want it. And that's called full insertion and it's an additional fee on Prohost, but to that also covers all the way across the, the entire network. So if you have 10 shows, you pay that one fee for those 10 shows, it's not too bad. And then we have the programmatic ad insertion where that's pure DAI, and we sell the ads for you, or our partner more accurately sells the ads for you, and we share the revenue with you, and that's available to all blueberry customers.

Speaker 0 00:13:22 So we know that this was quite a bit of explanation of how Blueberry does advertising and how that you as the podcast creator can do it. But we hope that by using these ideas, you can increase your revenue and the quality of your content and the satisfaction of your listeners. And that's all for today on Podcast Insider. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 00:13:45 Thanks for joining us. Come back next week and in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. To check out the latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease because we can't afford them.