Podchaser, an Acast company, is releasing a new ad verification layer to its tech stack. Called Airchecks, and honoring the radio heritage of that term, the product leverages AI to analyze keywords and patterns in podcast waveforms. Two main goals propel this venture: confirmation to advertisers that their ads have run, and to understand brand positioning and representation within the ad by the podcaster. All this helps inform current and future campaigns, according to Podchaser’s announcement.
“For advertisers, airchecks have long been a staple of radio campaigns and have become a relied upon source for measurement as well as planning,” Podchaser observes. Advertisers still lack an industry-standard measurement protol to measure ROI.
Our take is that Airchecks works both backward and forward in time, reaching back for verification and forward to insight-driven planning. The tool is running as a beta across the top 5,000 podcasts. We asked Acast whether those shows comprised Acast-only podcasts, or the entire field. Acast’s anwer: The entire field. “Podchaser is still entirely separate from Acast,” we are told.
“Podcast advertising is reaching such scale that many brands are now buying across hundreds or even thousands of podcasts at a time. The industry has been calling out for a scalable way to discover and track these. With Airchecks, our Podchaser Pro users are able to quickly discover, listen to, and learn from podcasts ads through voice transcription technology,” said Bradley Davis, CEO of Podchaser. “Having access to this data is not only a powerful validation tool for in-progress campaigns, but also yields crucial insights for planning future campaigns.”
