As podcast advertising revenue continues to grow—to $2 billion by 2023, by IAB estimates—podcast networks are enhancing ad tech for the burgeoning industry.

The past few years have seen a slew of acquisitions in the space. Take iHeartMedia, which acquired Triton Digital, an ad-tech platform for audio, last February. Later in the year, Spotify scooped up Whooshkaa, an Australia-based podcast tech platform.

Big picture: Targeting and measurement capabilities have improved by leaps and bounds since podcasting’s early days. But the industry was built on host-read ads and sponsorships sold directly, so the integration of programmatic advertising hasn’t exactly been seamless. Still, podcast companies want to keep growing their ad revenue, and advertisers want to reach listeners at scale.

• “You’re taking lots of tech from different places, and you’re ultimately creating it on the fly, so you’re driving the train down the tracks,” explained Natrian Maxwell, GM, emerging channels at The Trade Desk. “You’re also fixing the train and building the train at the same time, so there is going to be a little bit of a [learning] curve in terms of integrating this new tech, testing it, ensuring that it’s working the way it’s supposed to be working, and then building upon that with new features.”

By the numbers: Programmatic spending makes up a small portion of the industry overall. It’s forecasted to be 8% of all US podcast ad spend this year, per eMarketer, but just 2.2% of podcast ad inventory was sold through programmatic channels in 2020, according to the IAB.

Marketing Brew spoke with several podcast ad buyers, sellers, and industry execs who broke down what the small programmatic ecosystem looks like these days, how it’s helping the space grow, and why some are opting out.

Murky middle

Those who work in the podcast industry say that, at least on the whole, it doesn’t have full programmatic capabilities quite yet. That’s largely because only parts of the process are truly automated.

• Much of it boils down to this: When media buyers purchase ads on digital platforms, they can do so with varying degrees of self-sufficiency. They can log into tools like Meta’s Ads Manager to place bids and manage campaigns without human interaction. That’s not the norm in the podcast space.
• “I can’t log into any of these platforms and actually make the buys on the back-end,” said Krystina Rubino, GM, offline practice at marketing firm Right Side Up. “There’s no bidding yet. When I say we are not a programmatic medium yet, that’s what I mean.”

As a buyer with years of experience across digital mediums—not just podcasting—Rubino said buyers need more control over transactions before she considers them fully programmatic.

Plus, she told us, most podcast networks, which actually produce the content that marketers are buying ads across, don’t make their programming available on an open exchange, instead operating in private marketplaces.

Click here to read more about how advertisers are buying ads programmatically on podcasts.—AM

We recently wrote about an emerging Super Bowl trend: Influencers could be well on their way to making more appearances in spots during the game, ads that more traditional celebrities have populated for years (and still do). But there was one conversation topic that didn’t make it into our story: Zendaya.

Experts we spoke with agree that Z is the ideal Super Bowl ad star, a blend of influencer and celeb. The actress is a household name and a recognizable face, but she understands social media as well as any mega-influencer, too. She boasts 129 million followers on Instagram, significantly more than many A-list celebs (Jennifer Aniston, for instance, has 39.8 million).

This year, Squarespace scooped up the Euphoria star. Zendaya starred in the website-building company’s Super Bowl ad as Sally, an entrepreneur who sells seashells by the—you guessed it—seashore. Marketing Brew spoke with Squarespace Senior Creative Director Gui Borchert about the inspo (sea-spiration?) behind the ad.

Origin story: What would a well-known tongue twister look like as a Squarespace ad? Among the many ideas the team came up with, “the notion of re-imagining a century-old story and bringing it to life was just so intriguing. It felt so charming to try to bring Sally and her world to life,” Borchert continued. As the team continued to iterate on the brief, he said the story “got better and better.”

Coney Island: The ad’s color palette is distinctive, full of washed-out pastels. Apparently, that stemmed from Squarespace’s team hunting for a non-cliché seaside color wheel. “The idea was to start with vibrant colors, actually, and then tone them down, as if the color naturally faded after being out in the sun for so many years—just like the signs and objects around places like Coney Island,” Borchert told us.

Read more about how the ad came together here.—PB

On Monday, while the industry was nursing a metaphorical (and potentially literal) Super Bowl hangover, Facebook Meta announced that it’s getting a bit better at reporting advertising conversions.

A reminder: In September, Facebook publicly acknowledged that Apple’s privacy protections—which let users opt out of the tracking tools it relies on to prove whether someone actually went on to buy that jacket they saw on Instagram—impacted its advertising business.

• Advertisers reliant on Facebook’s reporting data told Marketing Brew that they’d become “blind” to metrics on the platform.
• At the time, Facebook said it was under-reporting conversions on iOS by 15% as a result of the changes. But this week, Meta said that figure is now closer to 8%.

“As we continue to build ad solutions that can do more with less data, we expect some level of underreporting will remain as part of our baseline. However, we remain committed to helping your business succeed and grow as we adapt to ecosystem changes together,” wrote Goksu Nebol-Pearlman, Meta’s director of product marketing, ads, in the company’s blog post about the announcement.

+1: On a call with analysts in early February, the company said Apple’s privacy moves would cost the company roughly $10 billion in lost revenue. Meta’s stock is down 41% over the past six months, as of writing. —RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

By the numbers: From sentiment to ad spend, here are some key numbers to know about this year’s Super Bowl ads.

Lesson time: You sat through the commercials. But what can you learn from them? Hubspot has insights pulled from three popular Super Bowl advertisements.

Safe bet: TikTok created its very own brand safety hub that includes the platform’s announcements and news on the topic.

Check out this brand-new superpower. With Tubular Labs, you can see what no one else sees. Interested in understanding how content drives culture? Tubular provides a unified view of shifting audience values, interests, and shopping behavior across social platforms, so brands can make decisions that grow their business. Take a peep here.*

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Stat: More than 112 million viewers tuned into the Super Bowl, the most since 2015.

Quote: “The ads left a few things out,” US Senator and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown said, criticizing Sunday’s crypto spots.

Read: Rest of World’s looks at “what actually happens to all your online shopping returns.”

Watch: The production company Portal A parodied Meta’s Horizon in a video that includes the line, “Come join us in this dystopian hellscape of severed torsos, because if you don’t have legs, you can’t run!”

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• Why this CMO isn’t optimistic about metaverse marketing
• Inside Kendra Scott’s Bachelor Live sponsorship