Entertainment / Enjoyment / Effectiveness: Signal Hill quantifies common sense for branded podcasts

Signal Hill Insights released its 2024 Benchmark Report, documenting and measuring effectiveness of branded podcasts. The company has for years been a leader in testing audio effectiveness in audio marketing. This latest report quantifies and evangelizes the power of brand-created podcasts.

 

“Brand podcasts leverage the medium’s superpowers – long -form, focused attention and engagement – enabling a brand to enjoy 100% share of voice and more time and attention than just about any other branded channel or format.” –Signal Hill Insights 2024 Benchmark Report

The Affinity Factor

Brand affinity — the relatable quality of a brand’s messaging to a listener — is extraordinarily high at 86% in this study’s outcome. Affinity, in this context, means that listeners are more likely to say they rate the brand as Very Good or Excellent (compared to non-listeners).

There is an upper-funnel and mid-funnel dynamic to this: Branded podcasts build mindshare while also bolstering the listeners’ opinion of the brand.

By how much? The brand podcasts tested for this study showed an average affinity lift of eight points.

Halo Effect

Relatability (above) is good, but not quite the same as favorability. That’s where the “halo effect” comes in — it is about favorability toward the brand.

The key result is that 61% of listeners on average say that listening to a branded podcast made them feel more favorable towards that brand.

“This might sound like common sense,” Signal Hill remarks, “but it’s important to have evidence to back it up and guide us in understanding what drives that appeal.”

Entertainment

The survey results propose one bedrock quality that keeps listeners coming back for more: ENTERTAIN THEM. (The study deck uses all-caps for emphasis.) That might seem obvious or overly broad, but the survey did test for five attributes. Thirty-nine percent of decisions to follow a podcast were motivated by entertainment value. By comparison, a podcast’s ability to hold the listener’s attention motivated only 32% of listeners to return.

But … What Does That Mean?

In this section Signal Hill presents qualitative research results, quoting feedback from podcast listening:

There is significantly more to this report than covered above, including data about brand recall, and a case study of brand advertising, information about custom integrations, “nutshell” benefits of branded advertising. It is all HERE.


Brad Hill