Grabbing attention with Podcasts

My mother once turned up for lunch at mine, excitedly clutching some boxes of Haagen Dazs mini ice creams, saying “I heard Lennie Ware talking about them on her podcast and they sounded nice so I thought we could try some”.

It turns out she’s not alone in being influenced by the things she hears on podcasts! We recently undertook a large study in partnership with the Guardian, finding that podcast advertising commands the highest levels of attention of any media channel, translating into a greater likelihood to buy the product or service being advertised.

51% of weekly users of each channel said podcast adverts made them want to buy something from the brand, vs. 38% for radio.

Through a combination of a quant survey (with clever maths) and qualitative interviews with a biometrics experiment (allowing us to see respondents’ physiological responses), we set out to understand the impact of advertising across a number of different media. We found that podcast advertising has clear benefits, not only on its own, but also when combined with other media, for example a campaign consisting of radio and podcasts is far more likely to help impart new information, in turn driving purchase. Which is clearly what happened with my mother and those delicious strawberry cheesecake mini-tubs.

You can find out more about this study here, and by coming along to this month’s MRG Members Evening on Tuesday 24th May at 6pm – register here.