How Slate is using its podcasts to drive digital growth

Slate is now making half of its overall revenue from podcast advertising, with total downloads up 39% this year following a 78% increase last year.

That’s made Slate a relatively large player in the podcast arena, while its site stayed modest in the range of 15 million to 17 million unique visitors per month in the fourth quarter last year, according to Comscore. And now, Slate’s looking for ways to shore up its site audience with its podcast loyalists.

The new season of Slow Burn, for example, used cross-promotion strategies on the site and throughout the podcast network, by featuring Slow Burn’s host on other shows to introduce him to new audiences, as well as publishing excerpts from Slow Burn episodes with further context on the site to get in front of the web audiences, which the brand recognizes comes to the site for more storytelling and deeper stories. The first episode of Slow Burn drew 300,000 downloads in its first 24 hours, a record for a Slate podcast.

Slate is looking for similar opportunities across its portfolio of 25 podcasts series. All podcasts also live on Slate’s site with their own landing pages and with partial transcripts of podcast episodes placed in a prominent spot on the site’s homepage. Additionally, select staff writers are featured on the Friday episodes of the “What Next,” a daily news podcast, giving them the opportunity to plug new content on the site to people who are solely listeners of the show. And when pitching new editorial projects, the editorial team is encouraged to look at how a story can live online and on the podcast network.

One example of this was the “The Lines of Code That Changed Everything” project that covered different pieces of code and software that have had major impacts on the world, which was the third-most-read story in October on the site and ran as a mini-season of the “Working” podcast.

Slate also launched its “Who Counts” project, which is an investigative series on voting rights, taking form both as a written series and as a few episodes on the What Next podcast hosted by the magazine’s reporters to talk about the work they’ve been doing in this area.

“One of the biggest challenges for audio is just discovery. There are so many great podcasts and so many platforms that they live on,” said Lowen Liu, deputy editor at Slate. “Having a homepage and a loyal readership that reads stories across the website gives us the opportunity to show them new podcasts.” 

According to Slate’s server stats, the site has seen a 30% increase in unique visitors year over year as of October and the past five consecutive months are five of the top 10 traffic months ever for the site. (However, Comscore tells a different story: a 12% decrease in uniques from September 2018 to September 2019.)

Jeff Ulster, founder of podcast and digital audio consultancy Ulster Media, said that by building an audio division, publishers are able to reengage audiences or create a new group of loyalists.

“They’re looking to build new and deeper relationships with these audiences on a new platform. Podcasts have really high engagement, so [publishers] lean into an on-demand medium that people tend to spend more time on than any other medium,” he said.

The post How Slate is using its podcasts to drive digital growth appeared first on Digiday.

Spotify taps Viacom for content marketing globally

For the next year, Spotify has contracted Viacom’s advanced marketing solutions arm to create custom content, programming and influencer content development for Spotify globally.

The deal covers 15 different markets across North America, Europe and the Middle East, Latin America, Asia Pacific and India. Both Viacom and Spotify declined to disclose financial details of the deal, but emphasized its global scale.

While Viacom isn’t doing the media buys — Spotify will still be placing ads with the help of its agency of record, UM, and its own in-house agency — it will use Viacom’s reach on linear, digital and social platforms to make sure that custom content secures what June Sauvaget, Spotify’s global head of consumer and product marketing, described as “added value and premium inventory.”

While the pairing like that between Spotify and Viacom isn’t a common occurrence today, Sauvaget sees it becoming more of a norm going forward. “Having the upfront discussions means you’re able to secure premium inventory, higher-impact inventory at a lower cost, and that’s always beneficial to a brand,” she said.

Spotify chose to work with Viacom, she said, primarily because of its global reach and because of the variety of different channels and resources it has to reach what she described as micro-audiences. Examples might be the Gen Z audience for Awesomeness TV or the urban demographic for BET, she said. In the U.S., Viacom reaches 80% of consumers ages 18 to 34.

Sauvaget said that Spotify is a platform that doesn’t want to focus solely on paid media to drive its brand proposition; it wants to be able to reach and speak to new audiences who can be users, and because its content is so rooted in culture, especially through music, it needs partners who get those cultural references.

“The way our consumers pick up content is influenced by local nuances in culture,” she said. “We need partners who reference the very nuanced nature of our marketing efforts and are both localized and fluid.”

Last year, Advanced Marketing Solutions, Viacom’s advertising arm, brought in $343 million in revenues, and it has built up its expertise in digital tremendously. It has an influencer marketing firm, Whosay, a Gen Z-friendly digital studio called Awesomeness TV and streaming service, Pluto.

“Depending on the challenge we have, or the audience we’re trying to capture, we can fit into their different solution and have that work hard for us,” Sauvaget said.

“Advertisers can come to Viacom and buy TV, or do an influencer campaign or buy space at our events or by digital,” Steve Ellis, vp of ad strategy for Viacom, said. “To be an effective marketer today you have to do all of it; you can’t just buy TV or Facebook. You need to be everywhere.”

Ellis said Viacom’s advantage for Spotify lies in its creative, distribution and reach, and an added benefit for Spotify is that the creative isn’t limited to Viacom’s properties alone. It can live and be distributed anywhere — but it’ll no doubt benefit from “premium” placement on Viacom’s channels.

“There’s a certain amount of commitment and a certain amount of output,” Ellis said. “You can distribute something with CPM value and deliver back a clear efficiency and price. That’s really how the economics of the deal are defined.”

Ellis said this deal is symbolic of how the client and agency system is changing. “We’re structuring businesses to address those needs longer-term and with a more holistic view.” The upcoming merger between CBS and Viacom, he said, will only “add even more value.”

Spotify didn’t enter into this partnership with Viacom blindly; it tested out what a potential partnership might look like with a few initial campaigns.

Last year, Viacom worked with Spotify on the RuPaul for Spotify’s Holiday ‘Wrapped’ campaign, and it drove the most traffic to Spotify than any other partner Spotify worked with on its annual campaign.

In June, Spotify enlisted Viacom’s help with the Sophie Turner for Spotify brand campaign “A Playlist for Every Mood or Moment,” and the Instagram story drove seven times the lift in site visits to Spotify in a single day.

Similarly, in the spring, Viacom brought in the stars of Hulu series “Pen15” to promote a Spotify Premium Hulu offer that drove traffic via an Instagram post that had twice more video views than Spotify’s average social posts.

Spotify is currently working with Viacom once more on its end-of-year “Wrapped” campaign, this time beyond just the domestic U.S. market.

Sauvaget said that Viacom isn’t the only publisher Spotify is interested in working with on future custom content, and said the Viacom partnership may be extended beyond a year if they continue to see success.

“My penultimate goal is to grow user acquisition,” she said. “All users are not created equally. When I think of a partner, I want to partner with someone who can bring high-value customers to us. It’s our determination that Viacom can lend us the reach into a consumer base that will be of high value to us. ”

 

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