SXM Media’s Lizzie Widhelm on the challenges advertisers face with podcast ad buying

By Sara Guaglione

Podcasts are a booming space for publishers and advertisers alike: podcast ad revenue is expected to reach over $1 billion this year, and about 80 million Americans are now weekly podcast listeners, a 17% increase over 2020, according to Edison Research. Popular shows like The New York Times’ “The Daily” get more than four million downloads per day. But the ad market is still being developed, and as a result advertisers are dealing with challenges around measurement, targeting and programmatic ad insertion.

Digiday spoke to Lizzie Widhelm, svp of ad innovation and B2B marketing at SXM Media, to find out how SiriusXM Holdings’ combined ad sales organization is approaching these issues, what solutions are to come in the future, and where she sees the industry going in 2022.

Widhelm oversees the SiriusXM, Pandora and Stitcher platforms at SXM Media, a role she took on in May after nearly 16 years at Pandora, which SXM Media acquired in 2019. SXM Media’s programmatic ad solution lets advertisers buy inventory from Pandora, Stitcher and SiriusXM, as well as podcasts from outside publishers such as NBC. SXM Media’s podcast network reaches 45 million U.S. listeners, according to the company.

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

While podcast advertising revenue is expected to be over $1 billion this year, programmatic buying represents less than 5% of that revenue. Why do you think that’s the case?

Let’s say there’s 100 million impressions out there — there’s way more, but just for easy math. Most of those impressions in many of these shows are hearing a host-read ad. Either the creator feels like it keeps the show authentic or they want control over every single ad that runs.

We have to go to every single show and talk to them about dynamic insertion, about what programmatic is, which is not the ability to approve every single ad — a machine takes over to assume the role of the approver to put an ad in your show. This brings up so many questions: What are the rules for how creative can sound? Can it have music or not? I have an exclusive with this mattress provider so no other mattress provider can run?

We have to monetize the technical process around how ads show up in shows. We have been doing that for over a year now, with over 5,000 shows under our umbrella, and many of them have moved over to allow for programmatic ads to be delivered in their show. The CPMs are strong, the demand of brands that want to buy programmatically are great brands, creators are excited about the brands we show them — and they can be excited about their show [having] a programmatic transaction model. It takes some time to modernize the ecosystem, but there is so much potential to grow the total pie.

What are some of the measurement hurdles that still exist with podcasts?

One of the things the industry is going to really …read more

Source:: Digiday