Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and Edison Research today are releasing new stats on how consumers listen to podcasts and respond to audio-based advertisements.

The new report gives marketers a peek at sentiment about podcast advertising from a poll of roughly 1,000 listeners. More brands and media companies than ever are investing in podcasts, but they're not getting the same types of metrics about audio advertising that other types of digital ads provide—like clickthrough or view rates. While advertisers can see how many people download a podcast, they don't know how long people spend listening or whether they skip over the ads.

Per the report, 65 percent of listeners said podcast ads increase purchase intent while another 45 percent said that they're likely to visit an advertiser's website after hearing an audio promo. Another 42 percent of listeners said they would consider a new product or service after hearing a plug for a brand, while 37 percent use podcast ads to help research brands.

When it comes to how consumers listen to audio programs, 70 percent said that being able to listen to them on-demand is "very important," and 58 percent said they like being able to listen to exclusive content they can't get elsewhere....

The Top Thirty Global Media Owners report is a unique ranking of the world’s largest media companies by media revenue, as estimated by Zenith. The report was launched in 2007 and was last published by Zenith in 2015. Zenith defines media revenue as all revenue deriving from businesses that support advertising, to determine which companies are most important for the marketing industry.*
 
There are four media giants among the top 30 global media owners – Facebook, Baidu, Yahoo and Microsoft – and all have risen up the ranking this year. Facebook has moved up from 10th place last year to 5th place this year; Baidu has moved up from 14th to 9th; Yahoo from 18th to 15th; and Microsoft from 21st to 17th. Facebook is the fastest-growing media owner in our top 30, with media revenues up 65% on last year. Baidu is second-fastest (up by 52%) and Alphabet is third (up by 17%).
 
Between them, the five digital giants generated US$88bn in media revenue, which is 34% of all the revenues generated by our top 30 companies, and represents 65% of the entire global internet advertising market. Their collective dominance of digital advertising means that these five companies have captured most of the gains from its rapid growth.

Digital adspend has grown at an average of 18% a year for the past five years, driven by the spread of mobile technology, the rise of social media and online video, and improved advertising technology, such as programmatic buying and local real-time search. Adspend across all other media has grown by just 0.6% a year....

Sir Martin Sorrell acquired his way into the advertising business during the 1980s, first by scooping up small agencies and then by stunning the ad world with takeovers of J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather. By the mid-1990s his company, WPP, was a dominant force in advertising, and Sorrell himself saw the future of the business as going digital. In 1996, when the idea that the web could change media and advertising was still hotly debated, Sorrell wrote in Harvard Business Review: “The fact is that there is a reasonable chance that interactive media—including the Web—could transform the way we build brands and communicate them to consumers. And that’s enough to go on.”

Almost two decades later, Sorrell is still at the helm of WPP, a global advertising empire that employs 162,000 people in 3,000 offices in 110 countries. Though the influence of digital is now a given, that of social media—along with technology like the DVR and even out-there ideas such as programmable T-shirts and Google Glass—is still debated. Three days after one of advertising’s annual rites—the Super Bowl—Sorrell sat down with HBR’s editor in chief, Adi Ignatius, to talk about the future of advertising, balancing science and art, and why he thinks Facebook and Twitter aren’t really advertising media....