Molly Schultz, svp of integrated investment at UM, said she’s recently had more discussions with publishers about video podcast opportunities. These types of conversations started picking up in the fourth quarter of last year, according to Adam Arnegger, managing partner and executive investment director at Wavemaker US.

With the recent fervor around video podcasts, ad buyers discussed the advertising opportunities for brands in video podcasts and how they are organizing their investment teams to manage the crossover from audio to video.

Audio teams handling video ads

Despite the fact that technically ads in video podcasts are in digital video, audio investment teams at ad agencies are continuing to handle the media plans. That’s because video podcast ads are typically tied to audio podcast ad deals, agency execs said.

“If you have a show that has 100,000 impressions and 50,000 are on YouTube and 50,000 are audio, we’ll take the 100,000 impressions that include that video because we’re going to see that [see and say] effect have a larger impact on ad response. So the units are valuable and we don’t need to artificially limit ourselves on the definition of a podcast,” Granger said. “It probably should be a both-and model.”

At Wavemaker, pitches are going to the audio investment team and then brought over to the video team.

“We’re still in the process of figuring out where this lives,” Arnegger said. “We’re handling it from the core, which is audio and then we’ll start to evolve that as … part of our video buying consumption.”

However, this won’t happen until video podcasts become “more mainstream” and more of their podcast partners start to produce them, he said. “It is something that we are looking at and considering for each and every one of our clients now,” Arnegger said.

UM has integrated investment teams that oversee all channels, so there’s no delineation there, Schultz said.

Video podcasts can also help advertisers that are “still hesitant when it comes to believing audio can be enough on its own” to “feel more comfortable that they’re able to get the full sight, sound and motion,” she said.

However, cross-device attribution is not possible through a platform like YouTube, Maria Tullin, vp and managing director of advanced and digital audio at Horizon Media, noted in an email — meaning it’s difficult to track a podcast listener on a mobile device to a desktop viewer on the platform.

“For clients that are measuring success across upper funnel KPIs, I think it’s a great …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron