Media Roundtable: Industry Edition - November 15th

We’re back with an all new episode of Media Roundtable: Industry Edition!

Back on the host microphone is Oxford Road Founder & CEO, Dan Granger. Joining him are fellow Oxford Road luminaries, Neal Lucey, Julia Palermo, and Kyle Jelinek.

We’re talking big brand bucks, Bill Gates's new AI podcast picker, podcasting from behind bars, and streaming audio–the quiet juggernaut. Let’s dig in.
 

• The Land of Brands 🤑: A new IAB report says 61% of podcast spend now comes from brand advertisers. Partial credit goes to the massive increase in brand safety and suitability tools (now used by ~2/3rds of publishers). Are advertisers supporting a new influx of brand-worthy shows? Love to see it. But we hope the industry doesn’t shift too far away from the performance side. At the end of the day, all the ads still need to work.

• Bill Picks Pix 🤖✅: Discoverability isn’t always a Podcast’s strong suit, but that might change with Pix, a free personalized AI-powered recommendation tool from Likewise (backed by Bill Gates). Hard to say if this is a game changer or a nice occasional tool for cutting down decision paralysis, but it works for Podcasts, books, movies, and TV.

• Streaming FTW 🌊👂: Streaming audio doesn’t always get the buzzy headlines like Podcast, but it’s been growing steadily as radio’s continued to decline. A new Edison/Amazon Ads study shows that 3/4 of US Adults have recently listened to streaming (a 74% increase over the past decade). Plus, it’s a huge advertising opportunity reaching 78% of monthly listeners with ad-supported content.

For full breakdowns of these stories and a whole lot more, tune into the full episode by clicking the link below.