Jonathan Gill is the founder and CEO of Backtracks and serves on its board of directors.
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We’ve seen it happen time and time again throughout the evolution of digital advertising. With the introduction of every new ad format, history repeats itself in the struggle to define an industry standard for measurement and reporting. There is generally an initial rush to monetize new mediums or ad formats followed by a retroactive effort to impose guidelines, rules, standards and industry best practices.
Within this cycle, cookies have long served as a crutch — they're not perfect, but they serve as a means of tracking to fall back on with a sheer pervasiveness in the industry that has led to a sort of grudging acceptance among its players. However, the days of cookies are numbered whether brands, publishers and platforms are ready to lose the crutch or not.
Accuracy and efficacy issues aside, the ultimate fate of the cookie has been sealed in recent weeks, likely obliterating any remaining “cookie crumbs” following users around the internet. Both Apple and Google have announced seismic changes to their privacy policies — most notably, plans to stop using cookie-tracking technology. The industry has been dancing around this shift for years, but action taken at the top from Apple and Google will force change down to every corner of the digital ad ecosystem. And the timing couldn’t be better for audio and podcasting.
Podcasting stands at a key precipice within the medium’s evolution, poised to become a billion-dollar industry with double-digit user growth this year. And while all other mediums (video, search, display) will need to upend their current models to adapt to a cookieless world, cookies have never been ingrained within audio’s advertising ecosystem in the same way.
As such, as the rest of the digital advertising industry faces this evolve-or-die moment, audio and podcasting are uniquely positioned to lead its next, cookieless era, built on less intrusive and more effective methods for understanding and engaging with audiences.
Topic-Based Advertising
Targeting users based on topics or content they engage with is not a new concept. In fact, it harkens back to the early days of internet search, basing ads on topics and actions users are taking on a site. However, this concept does exist in a new context within podcasting. Podcasts are inherently topic-focused at an extremely granular level, with listeners opting into the topics that most interest them. Even knowing nothing else about a listener, podcast creators and publishers already understand a great deal about their audience simply from their choice to tune in.
Location (2.0)
Location is another relatively straightforward piece of information that can be layered on top of topic data to create a more distinct view of listeners. But audio technology has advanced to the point that we’re not just talking about standard location data here. Location 2.0 refers to the ability to reach consumers based not only on where they are but their journeys from point A to point B.
We’ve sort of seen this with Virgin’s use of real-time traffic data in the U.K., which allows commuters to see how much time they’d be saving in commuting by train instead of sitting in traffic. But imagine how much more nuanced a picture audio can paint of a distinct listener given that it's played in a consumer’s specific car — or, taking this a step further, when people are listening to podcasts not only when they’re in the car or otherwise commuting but running, walking or biking.
Gesture And Behaviors
Audio also has the ability to serve micro-movement and behavior-based ad formats, such as users nodding or shaking their heads. This can be used to delve further into a listener’s specific interests (e.g., "Nod yes to hear more on this topic"). Or, can even indicate positive or negative emotions if a listener is shaking their head yes or no, in turn triggering certain ad content to be played.
The end of cookies marks a clear paradigm shift in digital advertising, largely spurred by the ongoing arms race between Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and other internet leaders to build and own an entire end-to-end content and advertising ecosystem. Where audio and podcasting fit into these stacks has yet to be fully realized; however, the medium represents an emerging channel within advertising that is ideally positioned to thrive in a post-cookie world, already using the methods for reaching consumers that will come to define the next era of digital advertising.
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