Podcast audience intelligence company Number 8 has struck an alliance with media sales organization Katz Media. At the center of this business collaboration is Number Eight’s technology called Podcast Lookalikes.
This technology groups podcasts with similar audience profiles. Buyers can reportedly “dynamically surface shows that mirror their target audiences.” This is accomplished without relying on personal identifiers of listeners.
A key advantage of Podcast Lookalikes, according to Number Eight, is to provide available podcast inventory that matches audience characteristics of top-line shows that are often sold out.
“Podcast Lookalikes allows advertisers searching for a specific podcast, such as SmartLess, to find other shows with similar audience profiles and content signals.” — Press Release
This inventory expanding system purports to offer an understanding of both the audience and the content, then make a match to available inventory, as described below:
1: Analyse the seed podcast
— Audience understanding — Determine the podcast’s demographic characteristics using AI models trained on anonymised first-party publisher data and content metadata.
— Content understanding – Advanced natural language processing models analyse content themes across the podcast’s episodes.
2: Matchmaking – Find other shows that are ranked based on audience and content similarities, surfacing the closest matches to the seed podcast.
“We’re excited to partner with Katz Digital to help advertisers better navigate and activate across all publishers,” said Abhishek Sen, CEO and co-founder at NumberEight. “Together, we’re combining Katz’s unmatched inventory and scale with smart audience curation to drive better outcomes across one of the fastest-growing channels in audio—and this is just the beginning.”
