Media Buying Briefing: Brand safety in digital audio (especially podcasting) gets ‘more surgical’

By Michael Bürgi

News headlines about brand safety tend to focus on the video side of the content business, what with continued challenges to keep advertisers away from content they don’t want to be associated with, but also an overreliance on exclusion lists to the detriment of better engagement.

Media buyers and sellers in the world of digital audio are taking preventative steps to ensure they don’t suffer similar challenges, particularly as the podcast subset explodes with new content and ad revenue plays.

Jen Soch, executive director of speciality channels solutions at GroupM, offered up a stat that crystallizes that explosion: GroupM estimated that a new podcast was created every 30 seconds in 2020, amounting to 885,000 in total.

“As video dollars take off and supply goes down, audio is a natural place for the money to go,” said Soch. “I’m bullish on the ability for podcasts to continue to grow. It’s a very active conversation with clients, but it’s still in the innovation stage, so there are still a lot of things we need to do. We do have inclusion and exclusion lists that we use when it comes to these areas.”

Audio platform Spotify, which has bet big on podcasting as a source of growth, went so far as to become the first (and only, so far) pure-play digital audio service to sign up to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a move that was news to the media buyers contacted for this story.

Khurrum Malik, Spotify’s head of advertising business marketing, explained the impetus behind working with GARM. “We saw a really good partner to to help meet that need [to stay ahead of brand safety issues],” he said. “It’s a community composed not only of our customers from a marketer perspective [or] from an agency perspective, but also a fellow platform that ensures we’re not just meeting industry standards, but we’re working together to continually improve.”

Malik said work with GARM has already had an effect on how Spotify is putting safeguards in place, notably in podcasting. The platform recently launched a product area called Sensitive Topics for Podcasts, which allows brands to exclude certain podcast content. A CPG brand, for example, trying to reach moms in California, can use AI-boosted transcription tech to exclude adult content, crime and violence content and/or mentions of weapons.

“It’s early days, but GARM is already impacting our product roadmap,” said Malik.

“There’s not enough transparency and control in all of digital,” which includes audio, said Robert Rakowitz, the initiative lead for GARM. “The more we can create that level of transparency and consistency, the better we can all control and monetize” the immense amount of content being created.

Though he said he believes the podcasting space is generally a more brand-safe environment thanks to transcription technology, Rakowitz wants to see exclusion lists become “more surgical.”

GroupM’s Soch (who oversees Specialty Channels that centralized all audio, digital and terrestrial, into one unit, but also houses advanced TV, publishing, direct response …read more

Source:: Digiday