New Study: What Marketers Can Do to Improve Podcast Ads

February 20, 2024

Create More Effective Audio Advertising

Audio is one of the most immersive, affective, and effective media channels available to brands and advertisers today, yet it’s still not getting the focus and investment it deserves.  As a result, advertisers who invest in effective audio advertising can capture disproportionately large returns. In order to do so, advertisers must ensure their audio advertising is high-quality and fully embrace creative effectiveness programs for audio ads.

This is why we partnered with Realeyes, the leading computer vision and attention AI company, to create and unveil Veritonic’s Audio Attention Report as the new gold-standard tool enabling advertisers to create more effective audio advertising.

Hundreds of loyal podcast listeners opted-in to listening to a handful of podcast ads for a vitamin subscription service with their webcams enabled. Realeyes provided its award-winning PreView technology to capture and overlay their self-reported reactions to the ads with the passive attention and reaction metrics captured via webcam.

“We are dedicated to collaborating with forward-thinking leaders to deliver unparalleled data and insights to advertisers, brands, agencies, and platforms around the world,” stated Scott Simonelli, Founder and CEO of Veritonic. “Realeyes’ expertise in measuring and categorizing human responses to sound, leveraging the largest culturally sensitive AI training set, perfectly complements our decade-long refinement of AI-powered audio measurement and optimization solutions. This unique combination allows us to provide advertisers and brands with unprecedented insights into audience reactions to audio and podcast ads—cognitive, emotional, and physical. We take pride in offering a level of insight for audio advertising optimization that has never been available before, contributing to the success of podcast and audio advertising globally.”

“We are excited to partner with Veritonic, a pioneer in audio measurement to the world’s largest advertisers, agencies, and platforms,” said Alex Browne, Head of Partner Strategy at Realeyes. “Our work with the Audio Attention Report will provide advertisers with granular and unparalleled performance data that allows them to optimize their audio and podcast ads, and increase their ROI.”

Key findings from the report include:

  • The proportion of the ad where people had sustained attention (did not look away or get distracted) was the weakest for audio ads with voiceovers that were low in volume, at 10% below the benchmark
  • The proportion of the ad where people had sustained attention was similarly weak for audio ads that contained many competing sonic elements (lengthier messaging, 3+ sound effects + music), at 7% below the benchmark
  • Attention quality was highest for the audio ad that had the highest voiceover volume (36%) as opposed to the ad that had the lowest voiceover volume (27%) and the ad that had too many competing elements within the creative (25%)
  • 75% of participants reported a good quality audio ad positively influences their consideration to purchase a product

To download the report in full, visit https://info.veritonic.com/audio-attention-report

Research, Test, and Measure