Podcasting a Net
Welcome to 2018 fellow Brandablers. Yeah I know it has been a long time and a lot has gone on in the world, but if 2018 has shown us anything, there is plenty to talk about.
One item that might not be on anyone’s radar has been podcasts. Sure they have been around since the early 2000’s. However, it wasn’t until 2005, when Apple introduced iTunes 4.9 that included podcasts as an option did they hit the “mainstream.” Which even Apple attacked people even using the word podcast as a violation of their copyright on iPod. That avenue that Apple had with iTunes allowed for rebroadcasts for major radio like BBC, NPR, etc. to house their shows and even in some cases be the only distribution method for some programs. That was all podcasts were at that point outside of fringe audiences for specific podcasts.
With that history in the books, popular podcasts came about with the NPR/BBC storytelling style. In 2014 Serial, a true crime podcast, took the world by storm. As of 2017, Serial has been downloaded over 250 million times. Pretty amazing considering people saying the spoken word to be a “dying industry.” This allowed for another true crime show done by the same producers called S-Town to go into production. That podcast set a record for being downloaded 10 million times in 4 days. Of course success breeds success but the story structure and format of Serial and S-Town is not something to be ignored.
However, it isn’t just the success of that production crew. Crimetown (a podcast about crime in government) which is produced by a very successful podcast producer Gimlet Meida (the company started at the same time Serial came out, conicidence?) is also getting downloads at around 3 million per month. We will talk more about Gimlet later.
So notice a theme with some of these popular podcasts? A lot of true crime in there. Could it be due to the popularity of true crime on Netflix spilling over into another medium or is there something deeper there with both?
Let’s dig a bit into the numbers. So once podcasting came about in that iTunes update, it had a jump in awareness from only 22% to 45%. Then Serial comes along and pushes that number from 48% to 64% awareness in 2018. This is extremely significant without any major push or disrupter in the industry, much like Netflix gave rise to the streaming economy.
Now the key number is the monthly podcast listeners year to year. Men from 2017–2018 has been stuck at 27% for those surveyed. Now, women on the other hand have grown at a rate of 3% year to year from 2014–2018.
Why is that number significant?
Well men have plateaued a bit obviously and that might be due to the content that is getting churned out by podcast producers. However, with the popularity of true crime at the top of the podcast charts, you can see it is coming from that steady growth of female listenership/marketing focus, just like Netflix numbers on true crime documentaries are geared toward women.
So remember how I said we were going to talk a little bit more about Gimlet Media? So Gimlet is the brain child of the Podfather Alex Blumberg. Gimlet has been taking money from venture capital since its inception. In comes 2015 and Gimlet gives out a subscription model (pretty gutsy for a media firm in the podcast arena). Now 2017 is when they got their real bump from a Series B funding, which caught the eye of WPP, the British advertising giant who took a minority stake in it a month after the Series B.
So that means podcasting is on the rocket ship to big ad dollars, right? Ehh, think again. In 2016, only $0.1 billion of ad dollars came from podcasts compared to $36.7 billion from mobile (search, banner, video).
Yeah George is those major companies looking at podcasts, completely ignoring that potential. However, what does WPP see that we might not on the surface?
Well WPP is most definitely looking at the awareness numbers currently but also what will happen after 2018. So Lore, a popular true horror podcast (see a theme here?), got picked up for a TV adaptation and debuted on Amazon Video in 2017. It got such great ratings that Amazon renewed for a second season in October 2018. Serial is being adapted for TV by The LEGO Movie directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord. ABC bought the TV rights for another Gimlet podcast called StartUp. In addition, Crimetown mentioned earlier, that too is being developed for a TV series on FX.
With all these podcasts being pushed from their audio roots into the visual realm, does that mean the death of the podcast as a creative medium? Hardly, this will push viewers into catching the podcast prior to it being popular on TV, word of mouth will grow stronger as people want to catch the latest new thing.
Now the next move for podcasts is what Disney is currently doing with Marvel.
Marvel is giving us a top tier audio production of a new scripted story. Marvel released it on Stitcher’s (another podcast media company) premium service and now will be free next month. It has been so successful for Marvel, that they not only are doing a season 2, but are in talks for more adaptations.
From a brand standpoint this is excellent that Marvel can utilize a new medium for consumers. This also opens up that advertising channel WPP is so geared to get ahead of. Right now podcasts have sponsors much like NPR programs, however WPP wants to get in that realm an insert ads at breaks between episodes or however it might work similar to streaming audio with a link to brand within ad on a mobile device (which is the most popular device for listening to podcasts of course).
Podcasts aren’t Radio 2.0, it is something else entirely and now in 2018, they are finally finding that out on their own.
