Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a weekly newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah; we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday.
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 163, published June 5, 2018.
Well, you cats have sure been keeping busy. I’ll keep this returning newsletter clippy, as I need some time for my engine to run at full speed again. Let’s kick it off with a quick recap of the past few weeks.
The rundown. Here are the three stories that most caught my eye while I was supposed to be on vacation:
Programmatic, and progress. Google is officially getting involved with programmatic audio ads. Last week, the company announced that its DoubleClick product — you know, the giant advertising suite that’s among of the reasons Google is one of the two tech giants that collectively account for over 70 percent of all digital advertising in the U.S. — will now let marketers across the globe access programmatic ad inventory from Google Play Music, Spotify, SoundCloud, and TuneIn through its platform. (Access to Pandora is in the pipeline.) Here’s the blog post, and here’s the accompanying case study.
This development isn’t particularly relevant to the composition of the podcast industry at this point in time, but it will likely become more pertinent as (a) DoubleClick further refines its work in this area — its director of product management Payam Shodjai told AdExchanger that it’s still early days for the new feature, and that it’s really just a question of showing advertisers the “breadth of inventory available” — and (b) the audio platforms listed, especially Spotify and Pandora, become more prominent drivers of podcast consumption (should that ever happen). In any case, the timing of the announcement is conspiracy-theory–inducing, given its close proximity to Google’s confusing early messaging campaign around its podcast intentions on Android phones.
Over at Adweek, Panoply chief technology officer Jason Cox maintains that a deeper pool of programmatic audio ads is “great for everybody.” The article proceeds to note:
Panoply already has its own programmatic advertising technology, which it’s been building with Nielsen. Cox said said he’ll be watching to see what kind of creativity comes as a result of more supply and demand.
However, while opening up more inventory might create downward pressure on ad rates, Cox said media buyers will still have to think more about brand safety with audio ads just like they do with display and video.
“Some people think of programmatic as a dirty word, and programmatic has a lot to answer for in that sense,” he said. “But in on-demand audio, we don’t have to repeat the mistakes in the display world.”
In any case, the push to programmatic is nearly inevitable. The technology offers a willing segment of the podcast industry — professionalizing and eager for more revenue as they are — the clearest pathway to inject more pace (or steroids?) into its advertising growth, simply because it’s the most obvious sledgehammer to pull from the toolbox that’s been used to build other internet things. Even if some publishers oppose it, enough others will embrace it. And competitively speaking, the choice for the former will ultimately come down to whether to get in the game in order to shape the outcome or to hold steady on a bet that the programmatic wave plays itself out into oblivion. This is all exacerbated by the fact that, at this point in time, there doesn’t seem to be any convincing alternative tool, innovation, or model that even comes close to matching the promise of programmatic podcast advertising germinating in the minds of certain podcast publishers. (Are we seeing the effects of what some have called “dumb money”? Very probably.)
Which brings us back to Cox’s Proposition: On-demand audio doesn’t have to repeat the mistakes of the display world. But what are the necessary conditions that we need to see from the marketplace providers to prevent the past from repeating itself? That, I imagine, is where the analysis should go next.
Meanwhile, Apple, which is still understood to drive the majority of all podcast consumption, is in the midst of a busy few weeks. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the tech giant is looking to expanding its digital advertising business, an area that hasn’t always been the cleanest for Apple. The development chiefly relates to its app-oriented advertising network, so there’s no clear pathway or linkage towards the podcast side of things, but eh, it’s worth keeping tabs on.
Also, WWDC week kicked off yesterday. I’m pre-writing this newsletter on Sunday, because I will be on a plane for the entirety of WWDC Day 1, so if anything big and podcast-specific was announced yesterday — I doubt it, but you never know — I’ll cover it here in the Nieman Lab column next week. [Editor’s note: There really wasn’t anything substantial.]
Doubling up. Today marks the release of a new audio project from Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier of the highly popular Crimetown podcast: The RFK Tapes, a serialized 10-part series covering the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, told through primary interviews and original audio from tapes kept by the LAPD for decades. The duo originally announced the project during last month’s Vulture Festival.
The RFK Tapes stands separate and apart from Crimetown, the duo’s organized-crime yarn-spinner produced in collaboration with Gimlet Media — which, by the way, will be back for a second season later this year. In an intriguing twist, the new project comes out of a partnership with Cadence13, the podcast network that notably works with Crooked Media on advertising and produces original programs like James Andrew Miller’s Origins.
Interesting move from Smerling and Stuart-Pontier.
Doubling down. In case you missed it, Note to Self’s Manoush Zomorodi and fellow WNYC senior staffer Jen Poyant recently left the public radio organization to form their own media studio, Stable Genius Productions, which is part of the blockchain-powered decentralized journalism marketplace project Civil. Their first show, the StartUp-esque ZigZag, rolls out on June 14 under the Radiotopia banner.
Zomorodi will also serve as a cohost on a new podcast from Medium (yep) that the company announced today. According to the official description, the project, called Medium Playback, will crib from the Modern Love Podcast’s structure and apply it to metered stories on the platform. Which is to say, Zomorodi and cohost Kara Brown will “read a recent metered story along with music and SFX” before doing a 10-minute Q&A with the author to “share the story behind the story.” The podcast will be available on Medium first, before going wide the next day.
Medium Playback launches June 13.
Speaking of WNYC… The station has officially announced the new shows in its summer slate:
WNYC Studios also recently forged a most interesting partnership with Night Vale Presents that sees the former reissuing the latter’s fairly avant-garde Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air). For what it’s worth, I really like this model. On one hand, it illustrates a bigger organization extracting value from the long tail of an independent project that’s been hustling out in the open for a while; on the other, it’s an arrangement that maintains the creator’s original position of independence. As clean a win-win as there can be, if it works.
One other thing: WNYC Studios has partnered with Whooshkaa to monetize its Australian podcast downloads. It seems that the peculiarly-named Whooshkaa is proving to be the go-to antipodal podcast revenue partner for American companies. In April, the outfit struck a similar monetization deal with Wondery.
Miscellaneous programming notes:
TV Land. From a recent Variety writeup considering the humble but mighty TV podcast genre:
“Colony” executive producer Ryan Condal says that show’s official podcast came out of an abandoned idea for a televised after-show as a way to talk about the behind-the-scenes, too.
“A podcast is so much cheaper, and frankly, I think a better medium for the after-show,” he says. “We all travel around L.A., and we all sit in a lot of traffic and [a podcast is] a great way to pass the time. You may not have two hours of TV-watching time [for a show and after-show], but you have the time while commuting or walking the dog or exercising at the gym, and you can engage with the people who make the show. It’s the director’s commentary of the internet age.”
The “director’s commentary” analogy is one side of the TV podcast phenomenon, pertaining to the involvement of official TV studios in the medium. The other revolves around TV recap internet culture: While the genre remains very much alive in whatever the blogosphere has now become, its genes have definitely trickled down into podcasting.
Take the recent series finale of The Americans: I’m still rehydrating my eyes, and if this was a few years ago, my aching for post-televisual emotional processing would have spanned a few inadequate conversations with friends in my physical vicinity and then hours of refreshing search engines for verbose and often beautifully written recap posts from sites like Television Without Pity (R.I.P.) as well as writers like Alan Sepinwall and Joanna Robinson. Nowadays, I’m leaning more on TV recap podcasts from, well, anybody — I can’t get enough of it, no matter how variable the quality may actually be. (The same applies to my NBA viewing, by the way.) I still hit the recap blogs sometimes, which appear to have been absorbed into the major institutional architecture — Vulture does it, EW does it, even The New York Times does it — but I don’t know, I just feel better hearing someone talk her feelings out loud. TV recaps are partially forms of cultural therapy, and I prefer my therapy verbal.
Related:
Elemental. Virginia Heffernan, writing for Wired, on the deep pleasures of accent-filled podcasts:
Some have suggested that podcasting and the true-crime genre — hugely popularly since Serial — are singularly well matched because the intimacy of a podcast works well to both touch and contain the vulnerability we all feel to violent crime.
Maybe. Or maybe when we tune in to chatty Alabamans, Bostonians, Baltimoreans, Californians, Corkonians, and Norwegians trying to sort out what the hell happened in their towns, we’re just listening to what we’ve always listened to through our headphones: music.
What’s wild about Heffernan’s thesis — which I completely agree with, by the way — is just how much it contrasts the “voice of God”/”public radio voice” paradigm of audio news delivery. The move was once to hitch hopes on a generic voice that was meant to be appealing to the masses. But maybe where we were always supposed to go next, in this place, is greater specificity.
Bites:
