Audacy Launches Digital Audience Network to Help Advertisers Buy Audio Audiences at Scale

Today, Audacy is launching a digital audience network where advertisers can target audiences with audio spot ads by segments across a variety of digital audio programs rather than just by the show. The audio content company, formerly known as Entercom before a rebrand last year—and the network for podcasts like Pod Save America, Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade and the podcast of TikTok stars the D'Amelio sisters—knows that audio advertisers have issues with scale. For instance, a wellness brand may want to target women between the ages of 35 and 50. While they could advertise in Audacy's The goop Podcast, their full audience is much larger than the listeners of that show. People in this cohort may also tend to listen to alternative music stations and have loyalties to a particular radio personality. “It’s addressing a need that marketers have. They want to buy scaled digital audiences,” said Audacy’s chief revenue officer Brian Benedik. “[Marketers say] we want to invest more with you, but you got to build something that we can work with.” By finding a new way to facilitate ad buying, Audacy hopes to increase its market share in digital audio ad spend. Digital audio ad spend is estimated to grow to $6.2 billion in 2022, 11% up from last year and a 54% increase from 2018, according to eMarketer. Audacy has benefited from this growth. The company's digital revenue was $68 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, a 16% increase from the year prior. Audacy is the third biggest digital radio company by average active sessions, according to Triton Digital. But it still has to contend with the goliaths of the space. iHeartMedia’s fourth-quarter digital revenue is nearly four times as large as Audacy's, while Spotify’s advertising revenue is more than six times as big (though Spotify's reach is global, while Audacy's is stateside). Plus podcast advertising is still maturing, and the kind of spot advertising the digital audience network caters to is especially new for advertisers, who are typically drawn to podcasts as a place for intimate host-read ads. From legacy radio to a podcast network The digital audience network, which encompasses over 60 million listeners, is the latest pivot for Audacy, which has been on a tear of acquisitions. The company started as radio broadcaster Entercom more than 50 years ago, as such, digital listeners are only 30% of its total audience. In 2017, it acquired CBS Radio, dramatically increasing its reach. Two years later, Audacy’s acquired podcast companies Pineapple Street Studios and Cadence13. In June 2021, Audacy became the official digital audio and podcast partner of Major League Baseball, becoming the exclusive advertising sales partner for MLB audio streams within the league's subscription products. “The birth of this audience network started more than a few years ago,” Benedik said, noting that the past years of digital audio investment were crucial to supporting the new ad offering. Benedik said most of the ad buying will be direct across the network, though there is also the option for private marketplace programmatic trading. He said it plans to expand the digital audience network into programmatic guaranteed. Higher reach, but less ROI? At the heart of Audacy’s pitch to advertisers with its digital audience network is a play for scale. That means that the network is more designed to place audio ad spots than for podcasting’s historical bread-and-butter, host-read ads, Benedik said. Advertisers can still buy episodic or specific audio streams ads, he added. But not all marketers see reach as the best use-case for digital audio advertising. Krystina Rubino, who specializes in podcast and other offline media advertising at growth marketing consultancy Right Side Up, said she’s more concerned about establishing a connection with audiences than trying to find as many ears as possible. “The reason this channel is customer acquisition-focused for growth marketers is that host-listener connection," said Rubino. "When you hear [Pod Save America host] Jon Lovett mouth off about a brand, everyone loves it." This connection justifies high CPMs. Rubino said host-read ads CPMs can be as high as $50. Audio spots, more reminiscent of traditional advertising and therefore more likely to be tuned out, shouldn’t be worth as much she said. “They can’t be the same CPM because they don’t have the same value,” she added. Rates for episodic ads would be typically more expensive than investing across the digital audience network, said Benedik. Rubino said that as more audio companies sell advertising around audience, two main use cases for podcast advertising are emerging. “Do you do a scaled play or are you treating it as an influencer channel?” she said.