In this special December installment of our Podsights UPs, you will find a few words from our CEO, your regularly scheduled monthly product updates, and a few 2022 predictions from Podsights team members. Stay till the end of this blog post for a special Podsights 2021 Holiday Jingle.

A Year In Review

A few words from our CEO, Sean Creeley

I bet you thought this was going to be one of those braggy year-end posts from companies. Slightly annoying, “look at how well we are doing!” as a way to show you, the reader, that the company will be around to see 2022. Twelve days of Christmas, more like the twelve days of happy customers, am I right?! I mean, the nerve of the writer to assume that anyone wants to read that garbage. Do you need all 624 words in that humble brag?

Well, if you thought this post was going to be that, you’d be right. It’s precisely what we are going to do here. Buckle up for 500 words of bragging, but humbly, because we know you are who got us here. ;)

Our growth tells a larger picture of pixel-based attribution in podcasting in our defense. In a little over two years, the technology went from an outlier to nearly ubiquitous. Moreover, it speaks to what advertising in podcasting is and what’s coming.

We will also throw in a few updates about the roadmap and a couple of predictions about the podcast advertising world in 2022.

Starting us strong in 2021, Podsights raised $4M in new venture funding. With this money, we invested quite a bit in our people. We hired a few new engineers to build new tools and improve existing ones. A marketer to write these posts and to help Podsights shine in new ways. We restructured and grew our platform success team to provide more support for our customers and partners. We also hired a General Counsel to help streamline contracts and a People person to help hire even more great people😉.

Through our team of intelligent people and pooled ideas, we continue to collectively work towards the same mission of growing the podcast industry and to create new tools to help advertisers effectively leverage the podcast medium. To do so, we attended several industry events this year including Podcast Movement, where we threw a NashBash party, and presented at both Digiday Media Buying Summit and Advertising Week New York. Our partnerships team toured around the East coast to visit some of our partners and demonstrated the power of Podsights.

In the later half of 2021, we introduced Audience Intel to our publishers. A little bit after that, we floated around the introduction of our latest tool, Advisor all while launching attribution for streaming audio.

Good things take time and we’re soooo not finished yet– We’re actually just getting started. Podsights has made a name for ourselves as a tried and trusted podcast ad attribution and measurement company but we’re looking to move beyond that, we want to become the world’s first “podtech” (podcast technology) company. While we will continue to provide our world class attribution technology, we will add more features to support marketers looking to advertise on podcasts. Keep a close eye on what we do in 2022!

December Product Updates

Now, here’s what’s new this month

What’s to come in 2022

Here’s what we’re working on

A focus on self-service enablement

In 2022, Podsights is working to build new features to give you more flexibility when managing your account.

  • New Billing Section - We will be adding a new billing/payment integration to streamline billing. Through our integration, you will now be able to see a usage meter and monitor the impressions used versus the impressions you have allotted for the year. As a step towards payment transparency, you will be able to check your invoicing history within the dashboard at your convenience.
  • An updated campaign dashboard - We will be adding in-platform Ad Ops ‘action needed’ notifications so users can be easily notified when something is needed from their end. In early 2022, you will also see a new and improved Campaign Overview dashboard.

Introduction of “Media Plans”

Over the past few months, you might have heard a thing or two about our tool, Advisor, which was created to help advertisers discover podcasts. Building on discovery, we will be introducing “Media Plans” in Q1 of 2022 so that advertisers can now plan out their campaigns all within Podsights and manage their campaign launch. Through Media Plans, brands, publishers, and agencies will have access to automatic campaign builds, so say goodbye to Google Sheets!

2022 Predictions from Podsights

“This year, we’ve seen brands dabbling in new tech and partnering with third-party providers to discover audience insights to help inform podcast advertising decisions. In 2022, brands will not only take advantage of diversifying their podcast advertising across more podcasts but also across more publishers and podcast networks.”

“We will likely see increased transparency on what and who is tracking podcast listeners via the various podcast apps. Overcast has begun doing this and I think others will follow in 2022.”

“Podcast technology (what we’re now calling “podtech“) companies will play a bigger role in 2022. With sophisticated tools to plan and measure campaign performance, more brands are poised to see major wins in the channel. For brands that didn’t strike gold with their first podcast test campaign, 2022 is the year to re-test.”

“We’ve seen continued growth in podcasting internationally this year so we should watch out for more podcasting in foreign languages and international brands breaking into podcast advertising opportunities in the new year.”

“We’ve seen some hype around dynamic ad insertion (DAI) this year. Advertisers are interested–and with demand, comes supply. More publishers, both big and small, will offer dynamic ad insertion as an option in 2022. By the end of next year, DAI could overtake embedded ads and become the dominating force in ad delivery types for podcasts.”

“My prediction for 2022 is that the small and medium size podcasts are going to start seeing more healthy ad revenue, as podcast adtech matures. It’s not just the big podcasts that are able to monetize now.”

“Podcast media is going to get easier for buyers. Podcasts are going to be injected into the ad tech world even more seamlessly than before, with media planners and buyers being able to research and discover network audiences and shows that align best with their target demographics. They’ll also be able to buy the media from a programmatic platform that enables both scaled-audience targeting as well as individual show placements. This will bring parity between podcast media and other digital marketing channels while opening up the floodgates for new brands and bigger ad spend.”

“This year, I expect to see programmatic networks gain traction as the overall podcast audience starts to plateau. Independent podcasts will continue to consolidate into perfect targets for programmatic buyers. I expect (and hope) to see some cross-publisher networks take off. All of these networks will rely on the advancement of podcast ad tech, as they’ve been in years past. The application of content, demographic, and audience targeting helps the advertiser reach their highest potential audiences, wherever they are.”

Last, but not least…

We commissioned a musician to create a little 2021 holiday wrap up jingle for Podsights to help drum up excitement for 2022. We hope it gets stuck in your head. :)

We are so honored to have been a part of the podcast advertising growth this year and we cannot wait to run it back in 2022! Cheers! 💝🔆