Why I won’t be recommending sponsoring Irish podcasts
Published March 5th, 2006 in PR in IrelandThe Sunday Business Post has a nice article on Irish businesses and podcasting in today’s Computers in Business supplement. Bernie Goldbach has a synopsis of the article on his website. One thing that annoys me about podcasting though is the belief that it will become a successful commercial enterprise in the near future. From an Irish perspective, where even some of our own leading experts on the field admit that the market size consists of “hundreds, not thousands, of listeners“, I believe podcasting is too niche to make a living from if you are specifically targeting an Irish audience.
I’ve heard some of the figures being thrown about for sponsorship and I have to say I’m quite shocked. You could sponsor a leading Dublin radio show for half a year and have a little change left over for less than one of the sponsorship figures I heard of. Relatively speaking, it simply doesn’t make sense to invest in such a sponsorship. Granted your brand will be exposed to a specifically targeted audience, but it does not provide you with a good return on investment. Worse yet, companies typically do not get good mentions as part of their sponsorship, the excuse for this is “that’s down to the media format, it’s not suited to the long ads.“
If Irish podcasters want to get serious about making money out of their offerings, then they are going to have to show that they have the figures to match the investment. I can ring a radio station tomorrow and get listenership figures, how many mentions my client will receive and whether they will get any promotions as well. How quickly will I get that from any podcaster?
That draws me onto my next point - is sponsorship the way to go? Podcasting, like blogging, is supposed to be part of a new era of interactivity, yet podcasts seem to be copying radio stations in terms of creating revenues. Why sponsorship though, if you’re going to copy any potential revenue earner, surely promotions would be the way to go? By running promotions, sponsors could get a better indication of the level of interest in the show and whether it is the right for for them. More importantly though, it allows listeners to engage with the brand.
In my opinion I think sponsoring Irish podcasts isn’t viable, unless they cater for a much larger international audience. I would recommend clients create their own podcasts rather than simply investing in sponsorship. Espeicially when you consider that the sponsorship cost could far outweigh the cost of producing and distributing their own material.
The real worry though is the long term popularity of podcasts. I don’t subscribe to them anymore, despite the fact that I can listen to them at my leisure. Why? Because I simply don’t have the time. I’m not the only person I know either that has hit the unsubscribe button. We’re the people most likely to tune into podcasts and if we’re switching off, isn’t that a problem?
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Piaras, can you give figures or roundabout figures for these sponsorships you talk about? How much are these podcasts asking for and how much is it to sponsor one of those rdaio shows for half a year?
All depends really. If the podcaster is in the business of making money by podcasting then they should know this and a whole lot more. They can’t really be compared to a radio station and ask for the same money otherwise.
If a sponsor is willing to invest an obscene amount of money ( a figure I’d like you to clarify if you can) in podcasts without the podcast producer knowing their product then surely marketing and PR has failed the sponsor if they are willing to take that risk or be that naive? Speaking as someone that knows PR, Is there a high incidence of sponsors that rich/stupid/desperate enough to do things like this?
I’d much rather see sponsors invest in polishing podcasting and working on improving standards and ways of making podcasting mainstream but I don’t know how many sponsors are into things for the long-term.
Not going to name names or figures on this one to be fair because I think the top price I’ve heard quoted was more so out of their lack of relative knowledge of radio sponsorship.
I’d agree with you that a company’s marketing or PR deptartment would have failed their client if they hadn’t thought about the return on investment for the sponsorship, but then again these are the days of bubble 2.0. There wouldn’t be a particularly high incidence of companies willing to take that risk (espeicially because you’d be most likely to get a response of ‘Pod-what?’ :D), but after an article like that appearing I’m expecting to hear more people talk about podcasts and thought I’d put a little clarity on the Irish podcasting scene from a PR perspective.
I’d also like to see sponsors invest in polishing the final product or helping to make it mainstream. I think that they’d have a better chance of achieving this though by creating their own material. It’s traditional media that will always help push it over the line. You only had to listen to the Zoo Crew DJs on Spin 103.8 harping on about their Bebo page to realise that Bebo is going to be huge this year. Or as Adrian Weckler pointed out about how the Guardian leveraged the Ricky Gervais podcast.
spot on Piaras, I totally agree with you, I was trying to get that across in the interview, but if the article is called ‘podding for profit’, there is little chance the anti mega bucks message gets through.
doop are not banking on sponsorship, while one of our clients quoted in the article speaks of a quick mention for a sponsor, doop are busy telling people to fund their own podcast for all the reasons that podcasting is good for them. cut the middle men. content owner paid for podcasts. But our client is right, the jog wheel killed the spot advert - dead.
I spent 11 years looking at failures in web sponsorship / advertising, even when the product was right and the audience was there, the cost per thousand was not.
making podcasts costs a multiple of a web design to produce, this puts the reality of podcast funding from sponsors even further down the line considering most contributors to the article were frank and honest about the achieved audience figures to date, ie bitbuzz, doop & rte.
so you can make a website for one fifth of X and get 1-5 million PIPMs
a podcast costs X and gets 500-5000 full downloads off subscription,
while the audio engagement is of much higher quality and far longer time by a factor of 1000’s versus a page load / scroll / click away, advertisers should hold their horses.
right now podcasting has a huge importance in exactly what it is, communications, the gold rush era is here, but like any gold rush it brings gangs of rich quick opportunists (not referring to anyone included in todays article more the premise that ‘podding’ = money).
podcasting is a radio story, not a business story. its about what is now possible with radio for businesses (in this case) that was not before broadband & rss enclosures. podcasting could also be a video brochure eg. B&B tour, now who will we get to sponsor that? er… the B&B..
their is a subtle difference between
podcaster makes product / attracts ~ audience / seeks sponsorship
&
podcaster makes company podcast / achieves its just audience
we are in the later camp at doop.ie
I forgot to mention Brian, I can’t wait to hear what you guys are doing with Whipping Boy.
Although you’re not alone on hitting the unsub button, the trendline is towards increasing subscriptions. The trendline is helped along by the homogenisation endemic to mainstream broadcast media. All niches products spawn niche audiences. If those niches gain obscene sponsorship, it’s probably the result of a benevolent spirit or misguided intentions. I know the consultancy figures alone commanded by Dublin’s top-flight digital casting agency would drown most indie podcasters in comfort. Podcasting sponsorship amounts to small peanuts for most players. Amalgamated deals where your podcast rolls into a satellite mix have shown sweet listenership numbers in the States–just like good numbers can get advertising revenue lines justified for community radion in Ireland.
On balance, I agree with BHG and Piaras here. We’re dealing in niches not masses.
Moving away from the commercial opportunities for podcasting, it provides an interesting outlet for corporate PR. If a company is going to be going for planning permission, or has a topic that want raised, podcasting offers a direct line to people without editorial influence, as part of an information and consultation process. A ‘company x planning permission blog’, with comments enabled and a podcast, or even a video podcast, available would be a good strategy for part of the EIS report and consultation process.
Tom Murphy, of natterjack pr fame, mentioned at a course I went to that more people went to the American Airlines site on September the 11th, 2001 than went to CNN or other news network sites. This can create an opportunity for a campany, in a crisis, to add an additional channel to its communications strategy, and can allow a company to frame its response in its own terms.
As one of the comments said above, it does seem like the beginning of the goldrush period, but there is a more strategic element of podcasting that also remains to be explored.
That’s an interesting fact that so many people visited the American Airlines site.