The Audio Advantage

Introduction: The Power of Audio Today

[Tom Webster] Hey, this is Tom Webster. I’m a partner at Sounds Profitable, the trade association for the podcast industry. What you’re about to hear is a panel discussion that I moderated at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs back in February. I was joined on stage by three people who bring very different and very complementary perspectives to this space: Rich Tunkel, the Managing Director of Nielsen Audio; Matt Drengler, the Head of Partnerships at Podscribe; and Gina Garrubbo, the President and CEO of National Public Media.

We wanted to share this conversation with a wider audience because we touched on a few things that I think are really important right now and are frankly not talked about enough.

First, with all the choices available to consumers and advertisers today, audio remains a uniquely powerful way for brands to tell their story in a memorable and measurable way. That’s not a hope, it’s what the data shows us consistently.

Second, audio is an effective and efficient channel to add to your media mix. And the case for that has gotten significantly stronger in the past couple years. And this conversation gets into the why.

And third, with the advances in ad tech, audio is now plannable and measurable in ways that completely change the conversation for media buyers.

That’s the frame. I think you’ll find that this discussion gets very specific and very practical quickly, which is what I most appreciated about moderating this fine group. Enjoy.

The Neurology of Audio: Sensory Processing and Memorability

[Tom] Good morning everybody. Thanks so much for joining us for this about a topic that we’re all extremely passionate about: audio. We’ve been in audio for a long time.

And one of the things about audio that makes it so significant and impactful is that it just hits the brain entirely differently. It hits the brain entirely differently than all of the visual input that we take in.

There’s science behind this, certainly. When we are sitting back with our phones, scrolling, swiping, and taking in visual data, our brains process that in an interesting way. They take in that information through electricity, through light. It then translates into chemicals, and then that chemical translation is translated back into electricity. And that’s how the brain processes it.

Audio does not work that way. Audio goes right into your ear balls, tickles the little hair on the inside of your inner ear and goes directly to your brain. And what that means is that all of that emotion, all of that impact, all of that memorability is indelibly imprinted on your brain. And unlike the IAB passes that you’re wearing around your neck, it can be reprinted over and over. So that’s a part of how audio really works, right? It captures our attention.

And I do want to start with that with our panel. We’re all going to be talking about a lot of research, right? We’re going to be talking about – Sounds Profitable has some research. We’re going to be hearing a lot from Nielsen, from Podscribe and also research that NPM and NPR have conducted. And all of that is going to be available at iab.com/research. You should never slash research, friends, [laugher] but that is where you can find it.

Comparative Attention and Ad Recall: Audio vs. Other Media

[Tom] So I’m going to start with attention. Last year Sounds Profitable released a study called The Advertising Landscape. And one of the questions that we asked about twenty-two different ad-supported media platforms – everything from podcasts to network TV to YouTube, everything that was ad supported – we asked if people could recall a specific ad from the last week. And amongst all of those choices, the number one answer, in terms of which channel people could recall a specific ad from, was podcasts at eighty-six percent. And number three was radio at eighty-one percent. Contrast that with Facebook, for example, at sixty-seven percent. So that memorability does something a little bit different, that quality of attention does something a little bit different. And I think that has to do with choice and selection. People actively choose audio. So, Gina, when people are choosing NPR content, how is that affecting the reception of branded messages and sponsorships?

[Gina Garrubbo] It’s a very unique paradigm because the NPR audience is deliberately seeking the content because they like the voice and tone of NPR. And when I talk about the case studies and the research we’ve done, it is because our audience wants to be told, not sold. And it’s very different from some other research which supports the fabulous power of endorsements for brands. So it’s – iHeart mentioned it yesterday, it’s really connecting with the hearts and minds of consumers in a unique way.

The Disconnect: Audio’s Market Perception vs. Actual ROI

[Tom] A lot of the brand lift work that you’ve done, Rich, at Nielsen, I think you’ve done thousands, right. Talk about some of the, I guess the key drivers of that and what you see in audio, both podcasting and radio for what you’ve done.

[Rich Tunkel] Sure. I’ll answer the question, but the first thing I’ll say is sort of the elephant in the room is that most of the marketers here, statistically, are not doing a great job with audio – because most marketers are not doing a great job with audio, period.

That is from our data, that is ad intel that shows the amount of dollars that are going to audio. It also comes from survey data that we conduct every year, a global marketer survey. And the last one that we conducted, thousands of marketers across the world, as well as here in the United States, we asked marketers which channels they perceive to be the most effective. Everything from social, digital video, CTV, TV, print, out of home, radio, podcasting. Radio performed at the bottom of that perception for driving effectiveness.

And then, we tapped into our MMM database. We have a compass norms database that spans thousands and tens of thousands of MMMs looking at which media are actually driving the highest ROI. And radio is among the top performing in terms of ROI, better than TV, better than CTV, better than video. Podcasting is better than television.

And why is this disconnect happening between perception and reality? And I think the reason is because so many marketers out there are not doing – they’re not really doing audio. It’s almost like if you bake a cake and it calls for a cup of sugar, you only put in a teaspoon or tablespoon. And they say this cake was no good. That sugar must have been bad. Well, you just – you weren’t doing enough to really drive a measurable read from it. So when that’s corrected, we’re seeing lifts and outcomes that are disproportional. So audio definitely punches above its weight.

Now to answer your question about brand lift, we also have done thousands and thousands of studies on outcomes. And what we found is that brand recall, perhaps not surprisingly, drives the biggest brand lift. And audio does a fantastic job at driving brand recall because it’s self-selected. People are choosing the medium, they want to be there, and it’s a format and it’s presented in a way that connects to them in the ways that you mentioned earlier.

Strategic Creative: Storytelling and Personal Connection

[Rich] And we also have decamped the outcomes data to determine exactly what are the creative elements that are going to drive the biggest lift. And among those, storytelling is the most effective way that you can shape your creative to tell the narrative. That’s what people want. They want to be ‘told, not sold,’ I think I just heard, in a storytelling fashion. And that drives brand lift

[Matt Drengler] And Rich, I’d build on that a little bit. There are nationally known advertisers that have created their brands with audio. How many of you have never heard of BetterHelp? Casper mattress. ZipRecruiter. These brands are the ones that I think all of us are recognizing, and maybe many of us didn’t realize started a lot of their journeys in audio. So when you do it well, you create a very powerful message in the marketplace.

[Tom] Yeah. I mean, even Chili’s knew that when they threw water onto a hot plate and made your fajita sizzle and made everybody want fajitas all of a sudden. And I love, Rich, you described the comment section of every New York Times recipe. I absolutely love that. Anytime you read a New York Times recipe, it’ll be like, you know, I didn’t add the oil. I put in a cup of chalk instead. It was really dry. [laughter]

I want to, I actually want to, I’m going to come to you in just a second, Matt. But Gina, just to follow up on what Rich said, do you have any thoughts on why audio is under bought?

[Gina] It just doesn’t have the same sex appeal as video. And I’m going to – should I share a case study of a food brand?

[Tom] Let’s come back to that because I want to ask Matt a question, but yeah, I mean, honestly, if you close your eyes right now, this panel gets a lot better just because of the compelling nature of audio.

Attribution and Incrementality Benchmarks

[Tom] Matt, at PodScribe, you have – I’m continually astounded by the data that you collect. It seems like every month you’re measuring something I didn’t know could be measured. But you’ve done a lot of work on incrementality. And all of this I think also plays into attention. So why don’t you talk a little bit about that?

[Matt] Yeah, thank you. I’m probably the least known brand on the stage, so perhaps I’ll introduce ourselves. PodScribe is one of the largest audio attribution incrementality platforms in the audio ecosystem today. We work with thousands of brands, hundreds of publishers. On a quarterly basis, we take the billions of data points that we get on a monthly basis, and we create a benchmark report. All of our clients are always asking us when they look at their results, is this any good? And our response is always, well, let’s compare your cost pers to your other channels. And they say, great, great, but how am I doing in the podcast and streaming audio space? And so with these benchmarks, we can obviously answer that question.

The last benchmark report that we put out – which by, by the way, can be found at iab.com/research, that’s iab.com/research – sorry. [laughter] What it came back with is what is the incrementality in terms of conversion incrementality that we see within podcasts and streaming audio. And the benchmark for podcasts is about twenty-eight percent. So out of every one hundred conversions that can be through standard attribution linked back to an audio impression, twenty-eight of those are incremental.

Streaming audio is about fourteen percent. We think about sometimes incrementality in terms of that percentage number and bigger number is better, but it’s always important to recognize, you got to put the dollars on that. What’s the incremental cost per acquired customer for each one of these? And they look pretty similar between the two. And so we can kind of see the powerful nature of how audio drives incrementality.

The Uniqueness of the Podcast Audience

[Matt] But I do still think there’s an interesting story in that the podcast ecosystem is about double incrementality from streaming audio. The reason why we think that is? Streaming audio, I think, is a part of a lot of people’s lives.

Listening to a digital stream of a radio station, listening to ad supported music…It’s a fairly common practice across a large number of folks in the United States. But when we think about podcasts, that audience is actually hard to find in other channels. The podcast audience typically pays for news, pays for streaming services. Not a lot of ad-supported stuff within their media consumption. And so advertisers, when done right, are really, I would say, awarded, by entering in the space the right way and using the strengths of that medium to drive performance. So that’s incrementality in the audio space today.

[Tom] I think another thing that happens, besides the fact that we choose that we select audio, the human voice itself creates a trust. It resonates with us, right? I mentioned before that layer, when you visually see things, it translates from electricity to chemicals back to electricity. What happens in that translation layer? Nobody knows. There’s no objective reality. We could all be monsters. But what happens in the audio? The ear, right, that goes right to the brain? There’s a kind of trust that develops and an authenticity.

One of the questions that we asked in the advertising landscape was, do you find that the messages being delivered, the actual advertising messages being delivered on each of these twenty-two ad-supported media to be authentic and natural? And again, two of the top three answers were podcasting and radio. Significantly higher, especially than social media, which certainly has a different role to play in there.

Case Study: Branded Audio for “Unbranded” Products (High-end Eggs)

[Tom] That trust and authenticity, Gina, leads brands to you, in addition to having people respond to the brand and messages. You want to talk about that a little?

[Gina] Yeah. So a recent case study is a, a new advertiser, a new brand, a high-end egg manufacturer. And they – producer, I should say. And they came to us because they wanted to deliver their message authentically and heard an NPR sponsor message for another food company.

As many of us know, the food companies really do prefer video visuals because they want to show their beautiful products, but they felt that we could really help them. They wanted to increase awareness, drive consideration, and we have a custom audio production unit that created a very rich-sounding, what we call Spotlight. So you heard the chickens, the sounds of the farm, the voice of one of the farmers / owners. And not only did they want to increase awareness and consideration, but they also wanted to build trust with an eco-friendly audience.

Spoiler alert: we used Veritonic to drive the results, which you can find on nationalpublicmedia.com/iab. We have two case studies up there. And so this drove ten percent increase in awareness, seventeen percent increase in consideration, twenty-seven percent increase in favorability, which is the trust portion.

So – and for any of you at the IAB Podcast Upfront, two years ago, we had Organic Valley on the stage. We went on to the scene and produced audio for them, and the brand said, I always knew what my brand looked like. I never knew what my brand sounded like.

[Rich] I actually remember that ad. I was on the train in New York going into the city, and all of a sudden I was transported to on a farm, hearing chickens clucking. I remember that.

[Tom] What’s amazing about that story, Gina, is that every egg looks the same, right? I mean, they absolutely branded this almost unbranded product through audio. Just kind of cool because you really can’t tell one from another.

[Gina] And they’re charging a premium for it.

[Tom] One hundred percent. Great eggs.

“The Record”: Time Spent with Ad-Supported Audio

[Tom] That trust and that quality of attention again. How does the data that you’ve seen, Rich, talk to that, to that trust, to that quality of attention? In addition to, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about just reach and we’ll get to reach again, I think, in a minute. But what’s the data that you’ve seen as far as drivers in audio?

[Rich] Yeah, I think it starts with the fact that people are first choosing to spend their time with audio and podcasting and radio. When we look at – we produce, in partnership with Edison, a report called The Record. And you might be familiar with The Gauge, that’s another Nielsen view of video consumption across linear and streaming. But with The Record, what we look at is ad-supported time spent with audio. And the number one place people are spending time with is radio. For all demographics, even eighteen to thirty-four-year-olds. Number two, strong number two, is podcasting. So people are choosing to spend their time with these medium.

And I think that translates into what we’re talking about in terms of trust, but it’s the authentic human connection. You may have heard iHeart’s campaign, Guaranteed Human? Makes perfect sense in this world where people are trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, and they’re choosing to spend time with human voices and content that they’ve specifically set out to grab. So they’re not scrolling. It’s not interruption for them. An ad in an audio is part of the social contract. People expect it and they understand why that fits.

So we’re seeing that trust, authenticity, I mentioned storytelling earlier, all rate very, very highly for audio ads, when they’re done in the proper way. But they’re definitely getting that halo effect from being in the content that they’ve chosen. And that’s why we see brand lift gains of four and five points consistently over the norm with audio.

Quantifying the Power of Host Endorsements

[Matt] If I could build on that too. Rich, I think there’s other data points that kind of prove out that the audience trusts who they’re listening to in these channels. So a part of what PodScribe does on a daily basis is we look at the ads that are running and we sort of rank them in terms of how good of a personal endorsement was this ad. So a ten being great, a one being there’s no personal endorsement found. And what we see in terms of response rates is when scores are seven or above, response rates are better. And when they’re six and below they look worse.

And I think it helps to kind of prove that when a host puts their word or their personal endorsement behind the advertiser, that translates into audience action. And so I just think that that data point is just so beneficial for what we’re all saying here and just supports all of the things I think, you know, iHeart and NPR and all of us are doing today.

Effective Reach and Audience Overlap Analysis

[Tom] We’ve talked about trust. We’ve talked about attention. I would like to talk about reach a little bit. And I think the reach of audio, certainly if you fold in all the ways that you can access audio and ad-supported audio, is pretty tremendous.

What is the role of reach and what is the role of the quality of reach that we see in audio?

I’ll throw out one quick podcasting stat I mentioned, that ‘can you recall a specific ad’ question earlier. We did something in that Advertising Landscape study called effective reach. We looked at the percentage of people that consume a particular media, and then the percentage of people who recalled a specific ad, and we looked at the differential between those two. It’s an average eleven point – percentage point – differential. For podcasting it was four, and for radio it was six. The average was eleven. I think Facebook was like twenty-four, right?

So it’s not just about the reach, but it’s also about the effective reach. And I think all of you have different data on both reach and the effectiveness of reach. So Gina, why don’t you speak to some of your experience about that?

[Gina] For NPR, it’s all about qualified reach, time spent, the particulars of the discerning audience. They’re educated, they’re curious, they’re interested. What’s funny to us is there’s very little crossover between our radio and podcasting audience, which surprised us when we started measuring that. And what’s not surprising – because if there are other audio companies in the room, I’m sure they know – that on our own platform, the NPR app, time spent is through the roof, and that’s where we get a lot of our best performance. So for us, it’s all about qualified reach.

[Rich] I think with each medium, when you look at the heaviest users for each of those medium, there’s very little overlap between heavy social users and heavy TV users, or heavy radio users and heavy podcast listeners. So you’re definitely getting incremental reach every time you add a new media type. That’s kind of elementary, but we see that the effective reach goes up tremendously just with tweaking budgets. And we can talk a little bit more about the tool that I’m referring to that we use to make this do this planning. But you can see easily ten, twenty point gains in reach with a modest amount of shift in budgets.

[Matt] Yeah to support all of that, we looked at reach curves across both podcasts and streaming audio. I think one of the most interesting things to call out is if you are supporting or spending in those channels, you can reach upwards of eighty-five percent of the United States population by being present in both of those channels.

The other interesting thing is there’s only about a twenty percent overlap in audience. So there is a lot of benefit to having both a podcast as well as a streaming audio strategy. I’m not even including radio in that. So there’s a lot of great opportunity to drive reach within this channel for sure.

[Tom] Gina, you obviously have broadcasts, you have radio properties, or you have radio content, you have podcast content. Talk about that overlap. How much of the audience is shared? How much of it is the same? What do you – what’s the Venn diagram of all of that for what you’re doing?

[Gina] Yeah. So radio is about twenty-three million and podcasting is fourteen million, and it’s only seventeen to twenty percent overlap between those two. Podcasting is younger, but psychographically, it is an environmentally conscious, early tech adopter, business decision maker…. So it’s funny how they’re very different and their media consumption is different, but, psychographically, it’s a similar profile.

[Tom] High end consumer, egg consumer, breakfast snobs, I think is a demographic? [laughter]

Net New Reach and the Value of Small-to-Medium Podcasts

[Tom] In terms of – I want to just go back to you, Matt, for just a second, because it’s parts of audio also reach people that are not easy to reach, right? Have you seen some data on that?

[Matt] Yeah, I think a lot of the performance data that we see backs that for sure. You know, I mentioned before, but a lot of people, I think listen to music. Not as many people necessarily, or should I say, because podcasts are sort of self-selecting. That helps a lot in terms of increasing that reach.

I think the other thing that I’ll mention too is advertisers that are heavy in the audio space today see a lot of great performance when they find net new reach. So when we’re talking to some of our clients, I think it’s common to want to look at some of the larger podcasts that are out there. And I think most people like to see their brand on the billboard right outside of their front door. But what we see is that a lot of these advertisers can find net new reach by finding those smaller to medium sized shows. And when they start to pack that into their planning, they get rewarded because we see better performance when these advertisers find net new reach and they’re sort of – it’s interesting.

So yes, they find better performance in net new reach. But the reason why is because these shows with slightly smaller audiences, the content creator cares a lot. And they care so much, they want that ad to really resonate with their audience. So oftentimes these host-read ads, these personal endorsements, they take a little bit more time where you might, let’s say, ask for a thirty-second or sixty-second ad. A lot of these smaller creators will make a minute thirty or a two-minute ad.

Attention Spans and Long-Form Ad Performance

[Matt] And it’s strange to say, and Gina, this kind of follows this, I know that you have different research to kind of showcase the power of short-form audio as well. But long-form works really well too, because it’s sort of a dialogue and a conversation. We see both on a response rate perspective – so things like visitation rate or conversion rate – and on a per dollar basis – so things like cost per visitor or cost per acquired customer – that those improve as the length of the ad goes up.

Isn’t that weird? Aren’t we used to kind of talking about the attention span of a goldfish happening within our ecosystem today? And to be able to tout within audio that the audience is so engaged, they oftentimes don’t even realize they’re listening to an ad, and that drives performance for advertisers, I think is a really powerful message. So that’s how we sort of see net new reach and advertisers that kind of dive in on some of the smaller channels and some of the performance that they see.

[Gina] I will talk about the power of the fifteen-second audio message we do in broadcast. But I will also say we do one to three minutes of audio storytelling in our podcasting. And one of the things we hand over to the brands is not only the creative because it’s white labeled – it doesn’t say NPR, it’s from our NPM team – but completion rates. People do – they want to hear it if it’s in a storytelling format.

[Matt] Totally agreed.

Modernizing Media Planning: Integrating Podcast Data into NMI

[Tom] So we’ve talked about reach. We’ve talked about attention and trust. And now let’s talk about where the checks get signed, actions that people take and how people respond to ads.

And we know when you all have data about how effective post-exposure actions of many kinds are, we have data on that. You all have data on that. People purchase products, they research them, they visit websites, they tell a friend. But Rich, you shared a stat with me before we started that blew my mind. And my job is stats. And I did not know – this stat just completely floored me about how podcasts and radio and how advertising is bought. Do you want to share that stat? Because I think it might actually –

[Rich] You’re talking about the ninety percent stat?

[Tom] Yeah.

[Rich] Yeah. So ninety percent of media is done and planned through a media planning tool at the front end. And the majority of that is done through a tool called Nielsen Media Impact, NMI. And so that’s where all the decisions are made and where media choices are set before they can be activated against.

And for years, up until this past year, podcasting was not represented in those media planning tools. So it had to exist in the experimental budget. People were saying, oh, look, I want to be in podcasting, but I don’t know how much to spend there. Give them the experimental budgets, and we’ll do that. But the media planner couldn’t answer the question, what does this do to my overall media campaign? They could measure the campaign in a silo, but that’s not really the way we live.

So we’ve now partnered with Edison Research to get podcast data into our planning tools fused with our currency national television panel. And you can see what happens when you shift budget from one media to the next. And as you add radio / podcasting, how that can grow your increased reach. Your efficiencies improve, your CPMs decline, your effective reach goes up.

And so we’re seeing as little as ten percent budget shifts – this is a shift in budget, mind you, so it’s not an increase in budget, it’s a shift of existing budget, to audio – iIs seeing increases in reach of twenty percent plus. It’s because of the unique nature of audio, because it’s happening at a different location with a different demographic. You’re reaching people in a different moment, and it really bears out in the data. So it’s a big moment for podcasting.

All of the major holding companies have this tool. Many of them are now getting up and running with the podcast data in there. So if you’re a brand, chances are your agency can help navigate you through and give you answers now that they weren’t able to do last year at this time or even six months ago. To give you a view of what radio and podcasting can mean to the overall plan that you have.

The “Three-Legged Stool” Strategy for Audio Buying

[Matt] I was just going to add to that it helps a lot with generating our strategies, our resource allocation, where should we be sort of channel planning. The tried and true tactics behind that strategy that we’ve found within, I’ll say specifically audio and streaming, sorry, and specifically in podcasts and streaming audio, there’s sort of like a three stool tactic that is helpful. It’s a three legged stool, should I say.

One leg of that stool is – yeah, buy the host-read ad. Find the people that make you excited. Have them personally endorse your product. Look at small and big shows. Yes. Do that.

The other one is what are your audience-based targeting? What are your other tactics in other channels? Yes, do that too. Let’s do dynamically inserted ads with intelligence behind that targeting. That’s the second stool, the second leg of that stool.

The third one is spread your message wide. Collect the data and see what works. So there’s a common method of buying in the podcast space called RON, run of network. I’m sure we’ve all seen it in other channels. And the concept is for whatever inventory is available, we place that ad within that podcast. With the right reporting, you can see which genre or which specific podcast or which topics that are being talked about in these podcasts are driving the best performance.

And now you’ve sort of got three different views of the data to help influence and inform your strategy moving forward. So you can sort of take the channel allocation from NMI and then use that channel allocation, whatever the right levels are for you to start influencing your strategy using these tactics. You will find what works for you as an advertiser, for your clients, as an, as an agency. And it’s sort of the tried and true framework that we talk to our clients about all day long and help to kind of hone in, where does their brand live really well in the audio space? So something to think about.

[Tom] Yeah, I think it’s a key distinction to pull things like podcasting out of the experimental spend, right?

[Matt] Exactly.

[Tom] And able to just, you know, tick a box, which, uh, I’m really glad that we’re getting there.

Neuro-Insight Study: 15s Audio vs. 30s Video

[Tom] When you’re measuring success for your clients, Gina, and obviously you have a number of different outlets that you’re putting content out on, how, how are you measuring it? And what’s a good case study of how people could look at the success of an audio campaign?

[Gina] So I just want to tout a standard, thoughtful radio spot. We have dozens of fortune five hundred brands who have renewed over decades because it works for them. And we have a recent case study about a catering company, a B2B catering company who wanted to reach business decision makers. They’ve been on with us for four years and they wanted to measure increased reach, consideration, favorability, which we did. And it was Kantar, and again, the research is at nationalpublicmedia.com/iab.

But the fifteen-second fact-based message that we serve up which is in the voice and tone of NPR, we actually did a Neuro study, Neuro-Insight study about. Because over the decades, clients were saying, my customers heard it, I get stopped on the street… I mean, it wasn’t just real customer data and purchase decisions. It was unbelievable anecdotal information.

So we hired Neuro-Insight. They took NPR’s fifteen-second fact-based message and compared it to the same client messaging in prime time news. That was a thirty-second TV ad, and they measured memory encoding and found that our fifteen-second message was as memorable as the thirty-second video ad. And you can find that at nationalpublicmedia.com/insights, it’s called the Transfer of Trust. But, Tom alluded to this earlier: when people are leaning in and they hear something that is resonant, fact-based, offers a solution – it’s memorable.

Conclusion: The “Halo Effect” and Human Voice Authenticity

[Tom] I’m going to have a quick wrap up question here. I just want to remind everybody that we’ve all cited a lot of data. You can find that consolidated at iab.com/research. Please visit PodScribe for all of the incredible data that they’re collecting. You’ve probably heard of Nielsen, but the inclusion of podcasting into NMI is something I’m very excited about. We are honored to partner with NPR and NPM on a lot of the research that we do at Sounds Profitable. We are the trade association for the podcast industry. We have a lot of resources available there as well.

And we are all excited about audio and I want to close with the human voice. And yeah, there’s music. Let’s set that aside. Is there something about the human voice that creates a permission structure, almost, in the mind of a listener that welcomes a brand?

That’s a wacky question.

[Matt] Thanks, Tom, for the curveball. No. Just kidding. Um, so I think what we see constantly in our research is the trust factor, like we’ve been talking about here today. I think we see that that trust factor is rewarded for the advertisers that really dive in and that explore the medium and align their message to the medium.

I would say too that I think that there are a lot of iconic sounds that we think about that we associate with brands every single day. So I think audio is very much so front of mind for all of us. I love having the opportunity to kind of speak about this here in front of you all. And thank you, Tom, for narrating us here because we see the power of it. And that’s what I have to say about that.

[Rich] And we do see that the host-read ads do drive higher lifts, and that gets back to storytelling. It’s the trust of the human voice. And we did test dog voices and they didn’t turn out well. [laughter]

[Gina] At NPR, we call it the halo effect. I’ve worked at a lot of big media companies. I’ve worked in media my whole adult life, and I’ve never seen a stat that we have, which is seventy-six percent of our listeners appreciate the brands that support NPR and that really endears these brands to our audience. And it’s just a unique paradigm.

Closing and Additional Resources

[Tom] Thanks again to our panelists, Rich, Matt and Gina. And thanks to all of you for listening. If you’re interested in learning any more about the research that we shared in this episode, you can visit nationalpublicmedia.com/audionow, or any of the websites from the panelists. For Sounds Profitable, I’m Tom Webster. Thanks for listening.