Month: May 2022

While this deal was first announced back in May 2021 and the first slate of shows was originally planned to debut last year, Bloomberg and iHeart announced the first five shows today, with the first slated to be released next month. They are a mix of daily and weekly news programs and narrative-style limited series. Bloomberg Media’s existing slate of over 20 podcasts, meanwhile, has been distributed by the iHeartPodcast Network and can be heard on iHeartRadio as well as everywhere podcasts are available — as will the new original shows.

So why the delay? “We wanted to be intentional about building a slate of podcasts with iHeartMedia that showed the breadth of our newsroom and our coverage, which took some time as we started digging into the various formats and ideas,” a Bloomberg spokesperson said.

iHeartMedia will market, distribute and help sell ads against Bloomberg Media’s new podcast shows. Bloomberg Media will get access to iHeartMedia’s in-house marketing, distribution and ad sales resources, as well as the opportunity to reach a broader audience than its business readers and listeners. Both Bloomberg and iHeart will sell ad inventory for the new and existing podcasts, a Bloomberg spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to share the financial terms of the deal, including whether the companies will share the revenue resulting from the ads each side sells.

“iHeart does have a lot of people who probably aren’t familiar with Bloomberg. So if we can expose what we consider to be very good work to new people, perhaps they will explore some of our other offerings,” said Jared Sandberg, Bloomberg’s senior executive editor for digital.

iHeartMedia is one of the largest podcast networks, in terms of reach, with more than 632 active shows reaching over 31 million unique monthly listeners and 441 million global downloads and streams in April 2022, according to Podtrac’s rankings. According to its latest earnings report, iHeartMedia’s podcast revenue was up 79% in the first quarter of 2022 compared to the same period last year, bringing in $69 million.

The first five shows

The first podcast from this deal, called “Bloomberg Crypto” will premiere in June. The daily show will be led by Stacy-Marie Ishmael, the newsroom’s managing editor for crypto. In July, “Bedrock, USA” will debut on political extremism and small-town life. The limited series podcast will be hosted by Bloomberg CityLab reporter Laura Bliss. Two shows will come out in September: “In Trust,” a limited series about the land ownership of one of the wealthiest families in Osage County, Oklahoma, and “The Big Take,” a daily show on the big stories of the day, hosted by Weston Kosova. Lastly, “Crash Course” will premiere in October, hosted by Bloomberg Opinion senior columnist Tim O’Brien.

“If you look at the five [shows] that we’re talking about, they go in every direction. We’re hitting every format. We’ve got two daily podcasts that don’t resemble each other at all. We’ve got two long-form narrative, episodic podcasts that are very different but consequential stories we’re really excited about. We have one blended podcast where it’s a blend of talk and narrative,” said Sandberg.

The variety in the new slate of shows from Bloomberg Media shows the publisher is “taking different content angles targeting business to try to expand their audience,” said Stephen Smyk, svp of podcast and influencer marketing at agency Veritone One. “I think [this deal] is an interesting angle for Bloomberg in trying to expand the audience past their core Bloomberg fans.”

Bloomberg Media and iHeartMedia will market these shows by having hosts appear as guests on other iHeartMedia podcasts and run ads across shows in iHeartMedia’s podcast network that are similar to the new series, Boyce said.

This is an important part of the deal, as podcasters often lament the issue of discovery in the podcasting space. “As is always my concern with new content: What’s gonna be the marketing and promotion behind it? There are so many shows coming out. It’s so hard to distinguish oneself,” Smyk said. “The more shows that get launched, the more promotion necessary to break through the clutter,” he added.

The attractiveness of the business decision-maker

Business podcasts are popular among audio advertisers. “We’re always looking for quality business content, in terms of the audience that reaches,” Smyk said. In particular, reaching business decision-makers is important for business-to-business and business-to-small business companies, he said. Reaching this audience is “so hard to do,” especially as the more “historical” ways of reaching them (via TV, radio and magazine ads) are becoming less popular forms of media consumption, Smyk said.

“Podcasting for that very reason is critical to hit those business decision-makers that are running to ad-free subscription services,” Smyk said.

While targeting business decision-makers is valuable to advertisers, if the audience pool is “too small, it can be hard to monetize them well,” Smyk said. He added, “By bringing iHeart on, it allows for a lot more potential for revenue, allows them to scale and use best-of-breed products, in terms of serving and inventory management and monetization.”

The company has hired as its svp of addressable sales Jamie Power, who previously served as chief data officer and head of platform at advanced TV advertising company Cadent. Additionally, it has promoted Dana McGraw to be svp of audience modeling and data science and broadened svp of data enablement and category strategy Danielle Brown’s purview to include measurement and analytics.

In addition to the aforementioned appointments, Disney is in the process of hiring an executive who will report to Brown and focus solely on measurement. “That role is currently being recruited for,” said Valentino, to whom Power, McGraw and Brown report directly.

To be clear, audience-based advertising already represents a sizable aspect of Disney’s advertising business. In last year’s upfront market, 40% of the deals Disney struck were earmarked for addressable, according to the company. It’s important to note that Disney takes a broad definition of “addressable.” While traditionally the term refers to ads running on traditional TV and targeted to individual households, in this case the definition for Disney also includes audience-based ads running on its streaming and digital properties.

For comparison, a separate TV network owner that takes the traditional definition of addressable expects addressable to represent a “high single digits” percentage of the upfront commitments it will secure this year, according to an executive at the company. Sub-10% may not sound like much, but as indication of data-driven advertising’s growing importance, that figure would mark a doubling of addressable’s share of upfront dollars for this TV network group from last year’s upfront. Further to the point, historically addressable — the traditional variety — has not even played a part in the upfront, and in some pockets, it still doesn’t. Said an executive at another TV network owner, “we always have conversations about addressable and programmatic, but that is not part of the upfront conversation.”

In other words, while Disney’s broader definition of addressable bends the lens on the size of that business, it also reflects the rising role of data-driven advertising in TV as the line between traditional, streaming and even digital video blurs in ad buyers’ and sellers’ eyes.

“There’s a lot of opportunity in the convergence of channels. Historically you would look at linear, then [data-driven linear], then addressable, then [connected TV]. You’re starting to see them overlap,” said an agency executive. 

And major TV network owners are trying to speed up that shift from a business built on broad demographic-based advertising to one oriented around a data-driven approach à la digital. Disney and NBCUniversal, for example, are setting up clean rooms in order to facilitate more advanced advertising and measurement by matching their respective data with advertisers’. Paramount has worked with pay-TV providers to amass an addressable footprint of 50 million households. And AMC Networks has been pitching inserting addressable ads during the linear broadcasts of its original shows.

“We believe this is a huge area of transformation over the next two years,” Valentino said.

Naturally, Coca-Cola marketers are keen to avoid the same pitfalls. 

To do so, they‘re focused on what incremental gains they can get from having an in-house team, not how transformative it can be from the outset. This way the company’s grasp shouldn’t exceed its grasp, said James Donovan, global audience and addressable media manager at Coca-Cola on stage at the Programmatic Pioneers event in London earlier this week.

“We’re still getting started in a lot of ways,” he continued. “We went through a major company restructure in 2020 and part of that process was creating a marketing and media services division.”

This is where specialist marketing and media experts from inside and outside the company are based.

“They do so with the objective of making sure that all our processes, campaigns and our use of data are being done as efficiently as possible. Part of that was about taking ownership and control of that,” said Donovan.

None of this is especially new for an advertiser like Coca-Cola. On the contrary, it’s hard to think of an aspect of marketing, from design to creative to media management, that hasn’t been taken in-house at Coca-Cola over the years. This time, however, the business is trying to pool a lot of its specialist marketing talent together under a central function — one that would allow it to realize the operational and strategic benefits of having direct access to that knowledge.

“We as a company are not in-housing in a way that many people would expect in so far as it’s not us taking everything in-house, lock, stock and barrel,” said Donovan. 

The subtext behind these words is that Coca-Cola is trying to be tactful around the in-house topic. Time and again, it gets framed as net loss for agencies when it has been proven to be anything but. The reality is that many advertisers continue to use agencies after they’ve replaced them with their own teams.

Coca-Cola is no different. It has a hybrid approach for all intents and purposes. Or, to put it another way, those agencies effectively become a consigliere of sorts to those marketers in the in-house team. 

“I sit in a team with over 10 other people who are part of a company in over 200 markets — that’s impossible for us to manage so we rely on our agencies and partners,” said Donovan. “The in-house team, or hybrid model — call it what you will — ultimately relies on collaboration with agencies and partners.”

Take ad tech, for example. Coca-Cola owns direct contracts with multiple tech vendors, all of which are managed by digital experts who sit within the advertiser’s in-house media team. And yet agencies still remain a place for expertise on new trends in ad tech, which are too difficult for the internal team to stay on top of.

“The conversations we’re having with our agencies often involve our marketers saying to their colleagues at agencies ‘I’ve started this piece of work, what do you think about it?’ and they’ll give us an honest answer,” said Donovan. “There’s a confidence that these people are going to guide you through the process.”

It’s a balance many marketers have struggled to strike with their own agencies because they’re essentially having to retrofit operating models that weren’t designed with that in mind. Coca-Cola never had that problem because the strategy for the in-house team was being developed at the same time as a global review that saw it consolidate its media dollars from four agency holding groups into two. Simply put, the agency model was designed to work with the in-house team from the start. 

“The global agency review reset our relationship with our agencies,” said Donovan. 

Now, WPP handles around 90% of its media investment duties, while Dentsu covers the rest, he continued. In other words, Coca-Cola has a simpler, more streamlined relationship with agencies.

“The in-housing trend has strengthened collaboration between Coca-Cola and WPP,” said Donovan. “We’re able to challenge the execs at the agency, and they have a license to do the same to us. There’s a healthy dialogue across the businesses now. That’s the opposite of what I think many people would think instinctively about something like this.”

Recruitment has been key to this. Where many companies have struggled to find the talent they need, Coca-Cola has found success early on. Not that there weren’t challenges. As Donovan explained: “Building an in-house team isn’t something you can do overnight.”

There are a range of reasons why, from making sure a person fits the culture to archaic human resources systems to finding talent outside of a few coastal cities, he continued. 

To head off some of these issues, Coca-Cola got very prescriptive about what it did and didn’t want from potential recruits. In turn, it has ended up with a team from a diverse talent pool, with execs coming from places like Mindshare, Condé Nast and Tapad.

“We had to change the way we recruit talent,” said Donovan. “It wasn’t about going out and finding some media experts. Rather, it was about finding people who had experience in ad operations for example — who know what it means to analyze data and build out taxonomies from it all, but can also understand the nuances of DSPs.”

It goes to show that the in-housing trend was never the death knell to the agency model that some observers claimed it to be. It forced agencies to adapt their propositions, of course, but only to a point. Ultimately, the in-house model has been more additive to the agency model than transformational. 

“Agencies have definitely evolved their model to adapt to in-housing, a modern-day pitch is all about showcasing the bespoke team and tech that can be built to compliment the in-house team today and demonstrate the flexibility to change as in-house tactics change,” said Dan Larden, head of U.K. at digital media consultancy TPA. “We’re finding that there are more ‘flavors’ to in-housing than ever.”