New podcast advertising marketplaces in Canada offer audience targeting capabilities
Agencies and brands in Canada can now work with The Podcast Exchange in new ways to target podcast listeners. Two leading podcast platforms - ART19 and Megaphone - are rolling out new marketplaces, exclusively represented by TPX in Canada, available now.
TPX has offered some targeting in the past, through direct buys with shows and networks. While this can produce great results, it’s also more challenging to curate and package, because it requires working with multiple publishers and platforms - a manual process that takes time to achieve at scale. These new marketplaces each have millions of monthly impressions available all in one system, with impressive inventories of world-class podcasts that are now available to Canadian buyers for the first time. Not only do they offer greater efficiency, they also have a wealth of deterministic and probabilistic data from their US-facing marketplaces that can help inform buying decisions in Canada.
Leading Canadian research shows that the demographic composition and listening habits of Canadians are very similar to Americans. While there are some differences in content choices (for example, Canadian podcasts are more likely to be listened to by Canadians than Americans), audience demos and listening habits are comparable.
The Canadian Podcast Listener (CPL) survey, now in its third year, provides another great advantage to buyers partnering with TPX. Using the Canadian Podcast Chart (a dashboard populated by data from the survey), TPX is able to aggregate some of the thousands of podcasts that were named by listeners in the survey by genre or region. These groupings have large enough sample sizes that we can layer in the Canadian survey data to identify age, gender, education, income, region and time spent listening, all based on the genre of the podcasts targeted and/or where listeners reside.
Let’s look at “Self-Help" podcasts as an example (see graph on right). According to the CPL survey, just over 4% of all podcasts named by 1,500+ Canadian listeners were Self-Help podcasts. By using the dashboard and selecting “Self-Help” as a genre, we’re able to see that listeners are more likely to be 25 to 54-year-old women, college-educated, over-indexing in the prairie provinces, slightly lower income (<$75K) and they are neither heavy nor light listeners (2-5 hours/week). There are also some Self-Help podcasts that are quite popular with French-speaking listeners.
Agencies working with TPX can leverage this Canadian data to help reach their target audiences quickly through a marketplace-based campaign.
So, what content do the ART19 and Megaphone marketplaces offer exactly? Thousands of popular podcast titles and dozens of networks, with tens of millions of available ad impressions served across the country in multiple content verticals. Networks include CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, CBS, Kast Media, Wondery and Viacom among others, with podcast titles that include 60 Minutes, Harmontown, 48 Hours, WSJ Journal Report, 2 Girls 1 Podcast, The Rachel Maddow Show, Fox Sports Radio Weekends and so much more.
There are three ways buyers can potentially activate campaigns in these marketplaces:
Geo-targeting - advertisers can target listeners by province, or buy nationally.
Category/Genre targeting - advertisers can run ads against specific content verticals, like Sports, Business, Entertainment, Comedy, True Crime and others.
Topic targeting - new technology enables some platforms to identify specific topics by episode (not just at the show level), based on what’s discussed within the episode.
With geo-targeting and category targeting, TPX can use the Canadian Podcast Dashboard to layer supplemental demographic data and help inform the campaign. There is also an opportunity to glean insights from third party data services like Nielsen and others in the US. At present, single-source data matching services are not available in Canada for podcast advertisers.
In addition, advertisers are able to work with these platforms to verify ad delivery with third-party tracking services like Google. Attribution tracking is also easy to implement, allowing advertisers to measure the success of their campaigns.
One note: the nature of this type of buying is that you cannot cherry-pick individual podcasts for your campaigns. If that’s your goal, TPX can help you with direct, curated buying. Marketplaces can sometimes allow you to opt out of one or two shows if needed, but generally speaking they’re designed for efficient, accountable buys with brand safety in mind.
Not sure what the best approach is for your campaign? TPX’s sales team can help you figure out the best fit, based on your target audience, budget, tracking needs, desired ad format (host-read/pre-produced) and more. Please don’t hesitate to reach out!
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