Podcasting's Frequency Problems Are Not Unique & 3 other stories

Manuela: This is The Download from Sounds Profitable, the most important news from this week and why it matters to people in the business of podcasting. I’m Manuela Bedoya. Shreya: And I’m Shreya Sharma.This week: The App Tracking Transparency Recession, Streamers struggle with frequency capping, Bumper calculates listen time, and IPG Equity Upfront Spotlights Lack of Diverse Adspend.Manuela: The Download is brought to you by Magellan AI. Track the trends in spend, ad load, podcasts on YouTube, and more with Magellan AI's advertising benchmark report for Q4, available now. Link in the description or at Magellan dot AIShreya: Let’s get started. The App Tracking Transparency recession Manuela: While not hot off the presses, an early January article from Eric Benjamin Seufert discussing the effects of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency has come across The Download’s desk. As with most things in advertising, there’s nuance in the numbers.Quick refresher for those who haven’t seen the letters ATT dozens of times: App Tracking Transparency was a privacy policy introduced to iOS in 2021 that turns most forms of mobile data tracking into an opt-in service. As a result, a significant portion of iOS users have digitally disappeared for advertisers. An upset to the status quo, for sure, but the overall numbers provided by Seufert show the digital advertising market is not in a cyclical downturn. That said, social media platforms and other industries most likely to be affected by ATT have experienced a significant downturn due to a combination of both ATT-influenced changes and changing consumer preferences.
Which is to say, not macroeconomic factors. A market-wide downturn, as well as more stress on those companies most affected by ATT, would primarily come from an actual 2023 recession. Overall, digital advertising has been working as intended. Consumers are consuming. Seufert points to a Bureau of Labor Statistics graph tracking US employment in December of 2022. According to these, unemployment is the lowest it has been since August 1969. From Seufert’s piece:
“But one might assume that the economy has utterly imploded from reading the Q3 earnings call transcripts of various social media platforms. Alphabet, Meta, and Snap, in particular, cited macroeconomic weakness, headwinds, uncertainty, challenges, etc. in their Q3 earnings calls.”In the weeks since Seufert’s article, the overall numbers are trending to agree. The Download has recently mentioned podcast ad spend has remained up while others decline, but the same holds true for other areas. Last week a piece by Ethan Cramer-Flood for Insider Intelligence reports mobile app install ad spending increased 24.8% in 2022, on track to a market growth of 12% this year. Meanwhile, still on Insider Intelligence, Daniel Konstantinovic reports that while market concerns aren’t gone, ad-cost inflation has slowed. 84% of ad executives told Insider Intelligence they're not lowering budgets for 2023. From Konstantinovic:
“But now, the industry is adjusting to a new normal. With inflation steadily falling and the cost per ad decreasing, some of the advertising spending that was staunched in the second half of last year may return.”The future may be uncertain, but for the wider advertising economy, podcasting included, things tend to be stable or trending upward. And, it bears repeating, podcasting has never benefited from mobile device IDs. From this industry’s perspective, at least, ATT has had little to no impact. It feels fitting to end with this quote from Seufert’s article:“While one might materialize, the belief that an advertising recession is currently and comprehensively depressing advertising spend is difficult to support with analytical rigor.”Streaming advertisers continue to struggle with frequency caps.  Shreya: If you’ve used a video streaming service with advertisements, you’re likely intimately aware of the industry’s issue with frequency caps. Last week’s Future of TV Briefing from Digiday’s Tim Peterson zooms in on this particular issue with the section Capping Out. Streaming advertisers are in a bind. Some viewers are getting underexposed to ads, while others are overexposed. Problems that will only exacerbate as digital video streaming continues on its overtake of traditional television. According to a recent eMarketer graph, US adults only averaged five minutes less digital video time than television last year, and are projected to overtake TV’s declining numbers for the first time this year. Of course, addressing the frequency issues isn’t as easy as it sounds. A myriad of reasons exist, from lack of ability to track exposures across multiple streaming platforms, to multiple DSPs buying from the same pool. Even when the solution exists, sometimes it comes at a price. Peterson reports some streamers are charging more in exchange for placing stricter frequency caps. An anonymous ad agency executive told Digiday:
“Some will endeavor to charge more for more restrictive frequency caps, which could be prohibitive or incentivize lower spend from partners. But more and more, they’re willing to waive those fees. And hopefully that will be the case going forward as I think these lower frequency caps are the expectation, not the exception anymore.”This particular piece made the cut this week for two reasons.It’s a good overview of the situation as it currently stands for streamers. It serves as a reminder that issues we experience in the business of podcasting are not always unique to podcasting, nor is the onus on our industry to magically fix the problem ourselves. Something to keep in mind before the next headline about ‘podcasting’s frequency capping problem’ rolls around.  Bumper Calculates Listen TimeManuela: Back in January, Bumper’s Jonas Woost posted a proposal for the podcasting industry to move past the download and evolve similarly to how YouTube has evolved past the view. While not abandoned by any means, video view counts have taken a back seat to watch time metrics in recent years. Bumper’s future aims for podcasters to have their own metric with listen time. This week Dan Misener has followed up Jonas’ post by calculating listen time on an episode of his podcast Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids. From the article:: “Inconveniently, many podcast apps simply do not report Listen Time, or equivalent metrics. At Bumper, we try not to let perfect be the enemy of good. So to calculate Listen Time for podcast episodes, we do the best we can with what we have, then use reasonable estimates for the rest.” While not a herculean effort, Misener’s step-by-step guide on how to pull your own numbers from Apple and Spotify require some arithmetic and a teeny bit of opening your browser’s code to find a specific JSON file. For anyone finding themselves interested for business reasons, or perhaps for a geeky weekend math project, the article also provides a Google Sheets template to start from.In addition to the guide for Apple and Spotify, Misener tosses in a few extra-credit opportunities into the assignment with suggestions for also implementing YouTube watch time, Google Podcasts ‘minutes played’, and ‘hours listened’ data from applicable embedded web players.
As Misener says in his closing bullet points, the download isn’t going anywhere. Bumper’s goal is to aim for a future where downloads are not the only metric considered. Now to see if various platforms and apps share a similar outlook and make steps to provide Listen Time. We’ll keep our ears open.     IPG Equity Upfront Spotlights Lack of Diverse AdspendShreya: This month the IPG Mediabrands Equity Upfront event in New York brought together around thirty publishers to focus on media with owners of diverse backgrounds. Ryan Barwick of Marketing Brew was in attendance to cover the event. From his article:“Nearly two years after many in the advertising industry revealed plans to invest more money in Black-owned media, those publishers said they are still educating media buyers and advertisers about what the