egtabite 403: RMS Podcast Ad Planner – making podcast campaigns easier to execute

The German podcast market has high potential but remains fragmented – it has over 80,000 podcasts, and planning and measurement have so far been difficult. There is a strong focus on host-read ads, native integrations and sponsorships, which are more difficult to scale.

At the same time, podcasts are very popular among German listeners – more than one third of the population listens to podcasts so the reach is significant.

Developing a strong podcast market requires the right tools to execute scalable advertising campaigns. In this week’s egtabite, we take a closer look at the newly-launched RMS Podcast Ad Planner, which was presented at the recent egta Marketing & Sales meeting in Stockholm.

As of January 2022, the AGMA Working Group started publishing the newly-developed podcast Study – ma Podcast. This measurement milestone is a big step for the podcast industry in Germany. So far, however, the research only includes about 100 podcasts and provides a technical overview of the valid monthly downloads for each podcast, but with no demographic information about the listeners.

RMS – being the biggest audio advertising sales house in Germany and building on its Audio DMP, which originally launched in 2018 – set off to expand the podcast advertising market and develop scalable solutions for their clients. The Podcast Ad Planner is RMS’s solution to make podcast campaigns easier to execute across podcast genres and target group criteria. It was launched in 2022.

RMS’s main focus lies in scalability, which they achieve with dynamically-inserted ads in podcasts, as well as new ad formats.

There are new podcast advertising formats beside host-read ads, which increases the scale and the revenue potential of the podcast market. Data from an internal RMS study proved that bespoke podcast ads are more efficient than repurposed audio spots.

In collaboration with a provider, A Million Ads, RMS inserts dynamically-created podcast ads that are personalised and adapted to various target groups within a single campaign. These spots are assembled automatically within a specialised software based on the script and the DMP data, such as gender, location or genre. Dynamic spots are then served via an ad server as a pre-roll, midroll or post-roll.

In order to feed data into the Audio DMP and provide more demographic information about the podcast users, RMS developed their own Podcast study. This study fills in the gaps of the above-mentioned ma Podcast study by providing more details about the podcast listeners. It provides socio-demographic data, when and where podcasts are listened to, on which device etc.

The Ad Planner enables audience analysis and provides campaign-relevant information about characteristics of podcast listeners such as their gender, interests etc. The planner has no information about the different podcast shows, which is not needed since RMS does not sell individual shows, but rather sells across their portfolio of 500+ shows based on genre or targeting.

The Podcast Ad Planner is accessible via an online dashboard where data on the podcast usage of the target audience indicates what genres to use to target a campaign to them. Once the client selects the desired target and other parameters via the planning tool, it is sent to the RMS teams who then execute the campaign via the DMP.

The Ad Planner’s goal is to build customer loyalty, establish market contacts and receive feedback, as well as attract more podcast creators and close the information gap on the market. Above all, it is a solution to make podcast campaigns easier to execute.