What Happens When A Podcast Host Reads An Ad?

What’s wrong with Jerry Rice and Brett Favre?

 Who likes ads? Whether an ad is on a podcast, TV, radio, the side of a transit bus, or the naming rights of a baseball stadium, companies selling stuff or services aren’t high on anyone’s bucket list. You’ve probably never heard of a case of a person experiencing FOMO from missing out on a TV commercial or an ad unless it’s a Super Bowl ad with Clydesdales or talking monkeys.

For podcasts, monetization derives from one of three major pathways. First, subscriptions – backed by the pocketbooks of “big podcast,” namely Apple, Spotify, and Amazon-- have invaded the safe “free” space once designated for podcasts. To be clear, a subscription model can offer advantages to listeners. The benefits include content valuable enough to be paid for, a stable and reliable listening ecosystem, subscription bundling that enables listeners to also access streaming music or video content, and, of course, the freedom from intrusive ads.

 Second, some podcasts thrive, or barely survive, via the donation funnel. Either through direct donations to the podcast or a tiered-donation system like Patreon, podcasts have flourished with this model.

Third, ad-supported podcasts have been the default model for any podcasts that strive to make a profit or simply pay the production and distribution expenses.

And there’s good news on that front. According to IAB’s U.S. Podcast Advertising Revenue Study, prepared by PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) and released at the IAB 2021 Podcast Upfront, podcast advertising will grow as much in the next two years as it did in the past decade. 

Driven by a robust fourth quarter (+37% year-over-year), podcast advertising revenues climbed to $842 million in 2020, up from $708 million in the year prior.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) comprises more than 650 leading media companies, brands, and the technology firms responsible for selling, delivering and optimizing digital ad marketing campaigns.

According to the report, marketers valued the ability to quickly switch out messaging as-needed: dynamically inserted ads, which enable ad placement at the point of listener download, increased share of revenue from 48% to 67% year over year. Announcer-read / pre-produced ads, which also put more control in buyers’ hands, increased share from 27% to 35%. Host-read continues to represent over half of the revenue by ad type, which illustrates buyers’ desire to tap the direct, meaningful relationship creators have with their listeners.  Half of the podcast ads lasted longer than 30 seconds in length.

In the comparatively short media history of podcasting, host-read ads dominated its early days. Recent research from the IAB indicates that listeners find real value in those types of ads.

Let’s look at host-read ads in podcasting and explore their genesis from more established media formats, such as radio and TV.

 

Don’t touch that dial

Radio, which has included ads for about a century, has a long history of program announcers and hosts reading ads. According to a 2012 NPR All Things Considered show, the first-ever radio commercial was broadcast in August 2022 on WEAF in New York City. The ad was for the Hawthorne Heights apartments in Jackson Heights, Queens. Since then, host or announcer read ads on radio have been a staple of advertising. There has been a bifurcation in radio ads. Pre-programmed ads tend to dominate on music radio, mainly because music radio stations have become so homogenized. The radio industry has consolidated into a few large companies such as iHeart Radio, Cumulus, and Entercom. In satellite radio, Sirius XM has the industry to itself.

Talk radio stations, by contrast, offer a generous offering of host-read ads. For example, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh read his ads for years, ranging from nutritional supplements to ID theft sponsors.

 

What’s wrong with Jerry Rice and Brett Favre

  On TV, host-read ads have a long and checkered history. We have an announcer like the classy John Cameron Swayze, who was famous as a spokesman for Timex watches (“It takes a licking and keeps on ticking”), counterpointed against infomercial Hall of Famer Ron Popeil (“But wait, there’s more!”), who sold everything from a pocket fishing pole to a smokeless ashtray. Baby Boomers remember that Johnny Carson sidekick Ed Mcmahon did ads on The Tonight Show, primarily for dog food maker Alpo, with the most famous ad being a time when a dog reluctant to eat the Alpo provided during McMahon's pitch was replaced by Carson on all fours doing his best “good dog” impression.

Local TV stations around the country still broadcast commercials where a massive 300-pound-plus NFL offensive lineman hawk cars for the local auto dealership. Nothing like seeing a large man talk with no expertise in car reliability and safety and encourage the average consumer to purchase a Nissan Versa at the local dealership. Especially since this behemoth couldn’t fit into a Versa without a liberal supply of Vaseline and a crowbar.

Recently, a maker of knee braces, back belts, compression gloves has aired ads with NFL Hall Of Famers Jerry Rice and Brett Favre apparently traveling the nation and annihilating “Average Joes” in touch football pickup games that they start to prove how these “slubs” need these products. If this becomes a trend, will we see recently retired Drew Brees tossing strikes to ex-Cowboy great Michael Irvin to sell hemorrhoid creams or rotator-cuff cuffs?

TV announcer-read ads often possess the most delicious irony. For instance, Magnum PI and Blue Bloods TV star Tom Selleck does a commercial for reverse mortgages with his first words being, “this is not my first rodeo.” Any sense that that multi-millionaire and confessed water-stealer Selleck knows anything about reverse mortgages is laughable. When ex-Jet great Joe Namath talks about his call to the Medicare hotline, I wonder aloud about two things. First, doesn’t he have “people” for that task? Second, how is it that they answer Namath’s call right away when I’m on hold for two hours to check on a $15 co-pay?

 

99 percent impossible

As previously mentioned, host-read ads are standard in the podcast industry. Ten years ago, when most podcast ads revolved around mattresses, Audible, sheets with a mind-blowing thread count, and debt consolidation, podcast hosts excelled at host-read ads with an enthusiasm that a dynamically inserted ad couldn’t match.

Even today, hosts like David Plotz of Slate’s Political Gabfest, Mike Carruthers from Something You Should Know, and even Paul Poundstone, with her trademark absurdist humor, excel at selling products and doing so with integrity, conviction, and humor.

There is an implicit understanding among loyal listeners that these podcast hosts are not experts on the product or service features. After all, when Roman Mars of 99% Invisible extols the virtues of Progressive Insurance, I do not expect that Roman can answer my specific questions on my ideal deductible amount, when I should drop collision on an older vehicle, and how bundling can save me money.

What I do expect from Mr. Mars is that Progressive Insurance is a legitimate insurance company that will not take my money and head off to the Cayman Islands without sending me the insurance card for my glove box.

In essence, I am safe with his recommendation. They may not be the best or cheapest insurance company for my car and home, but they are competitively priced and offer some acceptable level of coverage benefits.

David Brown, the host of Wondery’s Business Wars, is especially good when he describes the benefits of various advertisers like Monday.com and relates the competitive battleground he describes on the podcast narrative with the business service he’s selling in the host-read ad.

 

Exact or extemporize

There are still a few host-read ads that pitch products on questionable efficacy or laughable benefits. With naming host names, you know these people who push male enhancement pills that can “amp up the rage” so that male listeners turn around and punch the person behind them in the self-checkout line, just because they can.

Or the host that hawks some vital body part from an endangered species so that you can regrow hair, lose that belly fat that is already 80 percent ranch Doritos, or remove wrinkles overnight.

Joe Rogan has been selling supplements for years, but to his credit, he does so with guests extolling the product who have credentials and talk all “science-y.”

But it’s important to recognize that all host-read ads are not created equal,

The “ad-lib” ads where the host does not read from a script but simply uses his or her own unique style to emphasize the key points seem to be the best received by listeners. I’ve listened to some of these ad hoc ads by a host where the same narrative storytelling skills the hosts use for the show’s content bleeds into the product pitch. It often makes “the sales pitch” a lot more fun and even compelling.

Scripted ads keep the host constrained to pre-programmed words, but, in this case, it’s how the host pumps in genuine enthusiasm into the carefully curated words that can make or break an ad.

The best podcast hosts who read ads have a basic understanding that podcast listeners are typically on the go – commuting, cleaning, exercising, walking – so the goal of the ad is not an immediate purchase. It would be rare for a podcast listener to cut short a five-mile run to apply for a Capital One card or sign up for a bunch of college-level courses.

Instead, a successful podcast host-read ad provides interested listeners with a specific call to action and a convenient way to take that next step toward a purchase. A phone number, website URL, access code, app download are all more actionable items that can streamline the purchase process for a podcast listener.

What sets podcasts apart from TV when structuring ads is that podcast hosts have earned the credibility from their listeners that celebrities and athletes could never capture when fronting for products on the TV screen. If host-read ads on podcasts diminish in number and quality, then it will be yet another reshaping of podcasts to be more like TV and radio. And that would be a crime.

After all, we could see the three co-hosts from Slate’s Political Gabfest – David, Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and John Dickerson – travel the nation and challenge regular people to scholarly debates and then sell them public speaking courses when they inevitably fail.

Take that Jerry Rice and Brett Favre.