Page 36 - Adnews Magazine January 2022

Investigation
improved since the year prior despite ongoing discussions about the need for bespoke creative across the audio sector.
“There’s certainly an opportu- nity to improve creative by approaching each channel within total audio quite separately and specifically,” says Aniseko.
“For example, you don’t want to be putting a radio jingle within a podcast, you want to be trying to create creative that’s a lot more specific to that environment to really see the benefit of using each of those channels.
“You really do have an oppor- tunity in audio, even more than how you would approach other channel planning around creative, because of how listeners and con- sumers are engaged with content in different ways. Whether you have radio, which you would expect as broadcast whether you are listening in your car or at home. and then podcast, which is in most instances having head- phones directly in your ear. So it’s much more of that one-to-one and there’s certainly an opportunity to be very strategic with your crea- tive to be able to tailor those for specific listening and contextual environments.”
Industry experts argue that improving creative by tailoring to each medium wouldn’t require too much investment from brands.
“In terms of prioritisation, when it comes to brands and engaging their creative agencies then it’d be fair to say that time spent, and this would be a gener- alisation, I would imagine would be limited,” Anthony Ellis says.
“So, then breaking that down, when you go, ‘Well, if we’re in audio then what do we do in pod- casting?’ and that’s part of the challenge, but that’s part of the power of advertising in podcast- ing. So, unless you’re going to do it well and focus on it, from a creative asset point of view, then I would caution applying your one-size-fits-all approach into audio.”
Corey Layton, head of digital audio at ARN, says not understand- ing the best way to use creative is holding back the sector’s ability to monetise podcasts.
“Some advertisers continue to place their shouty ads in podcasts in a race to the CPM bottom,” Layton says.
“Others understand the value a podcasts talent voiced, solus environ- ment brings. While publishers are constantly educating advertisers, they too are leading the medium’s evolution with new methods of brand inte- gration continually being tried and tested.”
Lauren Joyce adds that brands still aren’t adopting sonic branding at the rate they should be given the prevalence of audio.
“We’ve been talking about the importance of audio branding for quite some time but the practice of ensuring that sonic logos and audio identities as part of a brand’s overall strategy is still not commonplace,” Joyce says.
“As brands continue to increase investment in audio and seek to squeeze even more from their budgets, it would be prudent to ensure this component of a brand strategy isn’t overlooked. It plays a role across audio formats certainly but can also make audiovisual formats a lot more effective, especially when channels are combined across a campaign.”
“Time, money, thought, courage. When it comes to creative for audio,
I feel that too often brands are under- investing across all these parameters, these days.”
Bart Pawlak 303MullenLowe ECD