PodcastOne/Edison study reveals effectiveness of brand advertising in podcasts

PodcastOne today announced a completed research project conducted by Edison Research, meant to measure effectiveness of brand advertising in podcasts. The particular focus points were product awareness, perception, ad propensity to buy — in other words, whether commercials in podcasts could lift awareness of the sponsor, favorability toward the sponsor, and inclination to buy the sponsor’s products.

Edison conducted three research components involving five podcast programs in the second half of 2016. The key takeaways are:

• More than 60% of listeners mentioned a specific grocery brand post-campaign, up from 7% among listeners in the pre-study.
• Unaided product awareness grew from the pre-study to the post-study by 47% for a financial services product, by 37% for an automobile aftermarket product and by 24% for a lawn and garden product.
• In the post-study, over one-third of respondents had a “very favorable” opinion of an automobile aftermarket product, up from 18% in pre-study. In the post-study, 22% said they were “very likely” to consider using a lawn and garden product, up from 16% in the pre-study.
• Awareness of a specific campaign message for an automobile aftermarket product increased by 60% from the pre-study to the post-study, and for a casual dining restaurant by 76%.

“Our core focus has always been to independently verify that the podcast format provides enhanced brand impact well beyond traditional advertising formats,” PodcastOne Founder and Executive Chairman Norman Pattiz said. “These results further validate our multi-tiered approach to integrated advertising and measurement.”

Podcasting is facing a basic and challenging question: Can a medium which has thrived on direct-response advertising, verified by tracked visits to web sites, attract national brands to advertise with the same campaign goals (and budgets) they have in TV advertising? According to this study, the answer should be Yes.

As often the case in case studies, the advertisers are left out of the recap. We also don’t know which podcast programs were involved in the research — or even whether they were PodcastOne programs, though that is an obvious presumption.

“We were excited to partner with PodcastOne and these five leading brands in order to independently measure the impact of podcast advertising,” said Tom Webster, Edison Research Vice-President of Strategy. “Because our methodology allowed us to study these audiences before and after the campaigns ran, we were able to definitively show that podcast advertising has a significant impact on a variety of key effectiveness measures.”