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Lookalike podcasts extend a winning audience
Extending the audience
The same analysis that describes the listeners of those first podcasts finds other podcasts and environments with a similar audience, and the brand extends its ads across them. Combined with a host-read sponsorship, this lookalike extension is one of the most common ways advertisers now work in podcasting.
Programmatic buying
Programmatic ads are what make the extension practical. They are served in real time or near real time, bid on by computers in microseconds, and placed into the listening experience of a targeted niche audience.
Narrower targets
Targets have also narrowed. Demographics such as women 35 to 44 were the bread and butter of advertising for a long time, and brands now ask for pet owners, grocery buyers, or affluent consumers, the same parity they get in other digital channels. Podcasts and networks use the same data to show a brand that their listeners are the ones it needs.
How does lookalike modeling find similar listeners?
A lookalike model starts from a seed group, here the listeners of the podcasts where a brand saw results. It compares what that group has in common, such as the content they consume, their locations, and their demographics. Every other podcast audience is then scored by how closely it resembles the seed. Facebook popularized the approach in advertising when it launched Lookalike Audiences in 2013.
Why did age and gender brackets dominate ad buying?
Television ratings from Nielsen reported audiences in age and sex brackets, such as women 25 to 54, and advertisers bought against those numbers. Panels of households were small, so slicing the audience any finer produced unreliable counts. Agencies built their planning, pricing, and reporting around those brackets, which kept them in use long after finer data existed elsewhere.
How does a programmatic ad auction work?
When an app is about to play an ad, it sends a bid request to an ad exchange describing the placement and the audience. The exchange forwards it to buyers' systems, which each decide whether to bid and how much. The OpenRTB standard, maintained by the IAB Tech Lab, defines the format of those requests and responses. Buyers typically get about a tenth of a second to respond.
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