Index of podcast advertising

Podcasting pioneer and author Michael W. Geoghegan has a great post today on his site that looks at making money with podcasts.

Geoghegan has written several books on podcasting, has been involved since the early days of podcasting, he helped Disney create their podcast and has run a podcasting network. And while many podcasters have been waiting for the podcast dollars to roll in, Geoghegan has been cutting deals with American Airlines and others.

He thinks it’s time for podcasters that want to make money with their podcasts to start treating their podcast as a business:

People often ask how we consistently sell out our inventory on GrapeRadio.

Easy, we have a kick-ass media kit, a proven track record, a book of business with many repeat advertisers and four entrepreneurs as owners - folks who aren’t scared to ask for the deal. While the amounts aren’t huge, $1,300 per weekly episode, we can command those prices because we have nailed our niche.

A comparative CPM deal would have to be close to net $100 to make sense. No ad network has ever offered us anything close to that. We have also built a great business in white label production, i.e. non-GrapeRadio branded content specific to individual wineries for their sites.

We decided from day one not to do wine reviews so as to avoid any editorial conflicts. Our figures are not awe inspiring but they buy nice equipment, pay for the trips to Napa and leave plenty leftover for shareholder distributions. Given that we all run other businesses full time, it has worked out quite nicely.

The whole article is a must-read, if you’re interested in commercial podcasting.

Podcasting network Wizzard Media has announced that it is is working with European lottery site PlayUKinternet.com on what they are calling the first international geo-targeted audio podcast advertising campaign.The three month campaign is aimed at audiences around the globe in Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Italy, encompassing over half a million ad impressions delivered across a select group of audio podcasts on the network.

“We believe their state-of-the-art geo-targeting capabilities will allow us to raise awareness of our products and services to highly-targeted audiences around the world through an innovative new media,” said Tasneem Domingo, Marketing Manager, PlayUKinternet.

The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM), an organization focused on creating advertising standards podcasts and Internet media, announced today the creation of a special advertising agency liaison to the organization, along with the confirmation of a fourteen-member Ad Council, made up of media professionals from leading interactive advertising agencies.

The council will act as a sounding board for the ADM committees, which are creating downloadable media advertising standards and guidelines. David Herscott, President of San Diego-based interactive agency MEA Digital, has been appointed the liaison between the Ad Council of media strategists and the ADM committee chairs.

The Association for Downloadable Media will be releasing initial ad unit standards and audience measurement guidelines for public consideration at the ADM Forum at ad:tech San Francisco April 16th from 9:00 am - 11:45 am at Moscone Center.

“People have been talking for years about the need for podcasting ad standards,” said ADM Chairman Chris MacDonald. “We’re taking the first big leap on standards-setting and are working proactively to verify that the ad formats and audience measurement processes we set will work for both the buyer and seller.”

There’s been a lot of discussion lately in the world of new media about the future of podcasting - people wondering what the current state of podcasting is and where it’s going.

eMarketer forecasts that the audience for podcast consumption will double in the next two years, but even that relatively rosy forecast is disappointing to some.

We recently talked to Chris Spencer, CEO of podcasting hosting mega-network Wizzard Media, to get his perspective on podcasting and its future.

In the last year, Wizzard has acquired podcast hosting services Switchpod, Libsyn, and Blast Podcast. Wizzard made headlines in January when it announced that it had delivered over one billion podcast downloads in 2007. Earlier this week, Wizzard announced that it was now trading on the American Stock Exchange (”AMEX”) under the ticker symbol “WZE.”

In our interview, Chris shared his thoughts on what a billion podcast downloads per year means, what he expects that number to be in 2008, and his predictions on what will happen with podcast advertising.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Tell me about this whole billion downloads number. What does that mean for you in particular, and for downloadable media industry in general?

Chris Spencer: It’s a big number, isn’t it?

For us in particular, it means our servers are running well. Let’s face it: some people wonder whether this accomplishment gets credited to Wizzard, or to our content creators. We feel strongly that it’s 95% our content creators - they create the quality content, and they go out and market their show, and grow their audience. We get 5% credit for being proficient and productive enough to offer a stable inexpensive hosting solution, and that takes a lot of work.

But it comes down to the podcast producers. It’s a big accomplishment for the podcasters we host. It’s a big enough milestone for them and for us, and we publicized it so much.

In reality, what we’re trying to do is raise awareness for podcasting, specifically with the advertisers and the sponsors. It’s a number that’s going to attract a lot of the bigger brands that didn’t realize how big the potential here is. If there’s going to be big audience for podcasts, then that’s going to draw advertisers. That’s why we publicize it, not just for us, but for the whole industry.

Let’s look at the whole podcast industry: Right now, the industry is too small to worry if it’s us, or PodShow, or Podomatic. Right now it’s all about getting the advertisers and sponsors to know more about and be more interested in podcasting. Period.

I could talk about this for hours: it comes down to trying to demonstrate that this is a viable alternative to reach target audiences. More importantly, it is a product that people are consuming, and they’re loving it.

The Association of Downloadable Media’s (ADM) Susan Bratton has announced that the organization will present its Advertising and Sponsorship Standards and Guidelines for Traffic Measurement at the upcoming ad:tech Expo, being held in San Francisco, April 15-17.

The ADM will present the latest numbers in podcasting/vidcasting and downloadable media, case studies of successful programs, new ad units around which our industry can standardize and guidelines for audience traffic measurement. Bratton is also looking for speakers for the event:

“We currently seek panelists for these sessions. If you are an extraordinary speaker who can talk about numbers, case studies, ad standards and audience measurement, please send an email to susan at personal life media.

If you are a brand marketer or agency person or are working with someone on the “client side” whom you think would be a speaker on one or more of our sessions, please email Susan. This is our top speaker priority.”

ADM members are entitled to a 50% discount on a full conference pass to ad:tech. The Early Bird rate is $1395, so you pay $697.50 if you register before March 14th. You can attend the ADM sessions free, as well as attend ad:tech’s exhibit hall and keynote sessions free, if you pre-register. You must be registered to attend this event.

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Mark Hopkins at Mashable has penned an new variation on the podcasting doom and gloom story, in response to the recent news that Wizzard Media served up 1 billion podcasts in 2007.

Hopkins acknowledges that “people do indeed love to download podcasts, and that it is a sharply growing medium.” But Hopkins goes on to argue that the problem with podcasting isn’t getting people to download them, it’s getting advertisers to advertise on them.

He discusses his personal trial and tribulations trying to monetize his podcast, and his inability to find a sponsor for his idea for a new Mashable podcast.

His bottom line is that he thinks it’s just too hard for podcasters to get advertisers:

The problem that we cannot make reliable money from monetizing these downloads is the issue that keeps cropping up and preventing the rest of the world from taking it seriously.

Podcasters Need To Take Responsibility For Making Their Podcasts Marketable

We understand Hopkins’ frustration with trying to line up sponsors for his podcast concept. There are a lot of podcasters that have the same frustrations.

But Hopkins appears to be making a lot of the same mistakes that keep other podcasters from making money.

Let’s take a look at what Hopkins is doing wrong, and what he could be doing to make a successful Mashable podcast.

A new podcasting and new media industry group, the Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) generated a great deal of discussion in the podcasting community when it was announced in July.

I caught up with two of the ADM’s founders earlier this week to get an update, and what I found out may surprise you. Susan Bratton, the acting chair of ADM, is the CEO of Personal Life Media and the host of the Dishy Mix. Mark McCreary is CEO of podcasting advertising and metrics firm Podtrac, and is shepherding the nominations and elections process.

I asked for some background about what the group has done so far, and about how the nomination and election process is going……

Wizzard Media has made several announcements in conjunction with the Podcast and New Media Expo, September 28-30 in Ontario, California.

Wizzard announced that the latest version of the LibsynPRO enterprise publishing service has been opened up to a small group of beta users. LibsynPRO is a media publishing solution for podcast networks, media companies and other businesses that need to manage multiple podcast shows under a single account.

Features:

• Detailed statistics and time-sensitive reporting available in three formats - a web interface, a downloadable spreadsheet or a customizable layout.
• An easy-to-operate interface for LibsynPRO’s advertising system - tasks like content insertion and removal can be handled quickly and easily, with the ability to schedule customized campaigns in real-time. Wizzard Media’s partnership with Nielsen//NetRatings has extended into the LibsynPRO system to ensure accurate reporting for users, agencies and advertisers.
• For non-technical content creators, LibsynPRO is designed to act as an easy publishing tool. Users can customize the system to suit their business needs allowing for the creation of custom levels of administration for multiple users. Clients can take advantage of the built-in quality control process that guarantees content receives approval before it is released to the public. Automatic creation of iTunes-compliant RSS feeds assures that content is ready for the web.
• For the developer, the LibsynPRO platform offers support for the building of custom publishing applications through a rich application programming interface (API). Advanced features for Power users include a set of tools to schedule the release and expiration of media, precise placement of dynamic advertisements, and controls over the feeds created by the platform.

Wizzard also announced that over 500 more podcasts, representing more than 22 million monthly downloads as certified by Nielsen//NetRatings, have joined Wizzard’s advertising network. These podcasts have agreed to allow Wizzard Media’s national ad sales team to represent them to agencies and media buyers.

Information Week’s Alexander Wolfe today offered his DRM Scorecard, summarizing it Hackers Batting 1000, Industry Zero.

“Every single significant attempt at consumer-music DRM has been cracked,” writes Wolfe. He supports this by noting that CSS (older DVD encryption), Fairplay (Apple’s encryption technology), AACS (new DVD encryption technology) and Windows Media DRM have all been cracked.

The sorry state of media DRM is significant to podcasters and other Internet media publishers because it points out that there is a constant resistance to proprietary media solutions that limit what people can do with Internet content. Limiting what people can do with your media effectively limits the number of people that will do anything with your media.

With the growth of the idea of the “attention economy”, an economic approach that treats people’s attention as a limited commodity, it’s becoming clear that putting up barriers to people’s attention can kill your product. Proprietary media players, like the recently introduced BBC iPlayer, create barriers to people’s attention, which ends up marginalizing the DRM’d content.