July 6, 2022

Are Your Podcast Ads Working? Jeff Vidler Talks Podcast Advertising Research

"If we compare podcasting to radio, as a digital medium, podcasting has a greater opportunity to be an accurate measurement of listening." Jeff Vidler, Founder of Signal Hill Insights.

 

Have you ever wondered how advertisers know if their brand initiatives are working correctly? I am a huge proponent of data and Jeff Vidler, Founder of Signal Hill Insights is helping podcasts and advertisers measure their efforts with brand lift studies, surveys, and more. 

 

“One thing we do have with podcasting is we have digital data that gives us census level data as a baseline that we can use and work from that and really give advertisers a chance to see how the mediums working.”

 

Jeff is able to work closely with other companies, such as Triton Digital, to blend survey and census data together to get a clearer picture of who is listening.

 

 “You've got apps, like Spotify, that will give you demographics, but that's filtered through who uses those apps. It's not necessarily a reflection of their entire audience. There are household graphs that you can get, but IP addresses are not personal. So we think that surveys are an important step toward getting demographics into podcasts measurement. 

 

To connect with Jeff, reach out to him at jeff@signalhillinsights.com or visit their website: https://signalhillinsights.com/

 

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Transcript

This transcript is edited.

 

[00:00:15] Heather Osgood: Hello and welcome to the podcast advertising playbook. I'm your host, Heather Osgood. And today, I am joined by Jeff Vidler. Now Jeff is the President and Founder of Signal Hill. I am excited to have him on the show because, to be honest, I don't know a ton about Signal Hill and the work they're doing.

[00:00:32] Heather Osgood: So Jeff, welcome to the program. 

[00:00:34] Jeff Vidler: Oh, thank you very much. I'm really honored to be here. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you. 

[00:00:39] Heather Osgood: So now, Jeff, why don't we start by telling you a little about your background and how you made your way into the podcast space? 

[00:00:48] Jeff Vidler: I've loved audio in my life, and I'm fortunate enough to have two careers. My first career was working in radio as a copywriter and then music director, program director, and station manager consultant. And that's when I got into research. And that was my second career in research. And much of that research was for television, print, and digital. Still, my immediate research years were spent on radio.

[00:01:13] Jeff Vidler: Since 2016, I have gotten deeper into podcasting. And we started our company two years ago, Signal Hill Insights. Really focusing on that, doubling down on podcasting audio in general, but just helping advertisers, broadcasters, and publishers tap into all those new opportunities that are out there in audio.

[00:01:34] Jeff Vidler: And, when you think of new opportunities in audio, you can't help but think of podcasts. Yeah. 

[00:01:39] Heather Osgood: Yeah, for sure. I think about my early career selling radio advertising and working with Arbitron. Many years later, I discovered that maybe the research wasn't quite as substantiated as I wished it had been. But in terms of audio, I think it can be a tricky medium to study just because of its nature. Podcasting is different because it is so intentional. Radio listening is still, of course, intentional, but there is this passive duty to it. And I remember when we sold the ads, we would say that was a great thing because people wouldn't even realize they were listening to the radio. So suddenly, they would hear this ad, which would change their world, right? But I think that audio can be a little bit challenging to research. Have you found that?. 

[00:02:36] Jeff Vidler: I mean, it is in the sense that it's not the most tangible of all media, right? And if the research isn't great, it is a bigger challenge. If we compare podcasting to radio, podcasting, as a digital medium, has a greater opportunity to be an accurate measurement of listening. We're not there yet. We're just getting started. And there are still many mountains to climb, but the potential is there. And for radio, it's just the over-the-air radio.

[00:03:19] Jeff Vidler: How do you really measure that effectively with any kind of sample size to give you the data you need? The one thing podcasting has, is digital data. That gives us census-level data as a baseline that we can use to give advertisers a chance to see how the medium measures.

[00:03:39] Heather Osgood: Yeah, can you dig into that a little bit more? What are some of your methodologies when you do this research? 

[00:03:48] Jeff Vidler: Our specialty is that we are a survey research base audio research consultancy, which means that there are various applications of that.

[00:03:57] Jeff Vidler: The thing that got us into podcasting, in the first place, was the work we did with Pacific Content. I was fortunate enough to have done some research for the CDC in Canada, a public broadcaster. Two brilliant guys, Steve Pratt and Chris Boyce, started this amazing Pacific Content company, creating really high-end original podcasts for brands. And as they just started, they had brands saying, "I need to be able to prove to my CMO that this is worth all of this money we're spending to produce this really high-end audio." So they came to me, allowing us to try a few different things and build different ways of establishing what the branded podcast is doing for those clients. 

[00:04:43] Jeff Vidler: So we have done more research in branded podcasts than anywhere else. After that door opened, other advertiser opportunities came about because there was a need for information. The measurement gap is still a big part of the story.

[00:05:03] Jeff Vidler: What is keeping podcasts from getting maximum opportunities for monetization? We've also been doing brand lift studies from the advertisers' side, working with Stitcher, SXM Media, Cumulus, and iHeart. Also, doing a lot of work in Canada still.

[00:05:21] Jeff Vidler: Canada is a little bit behind the US, well, actually, quite a bit behind the US in terms of developing a podcast industry, but it's just starting to point now that they are having to go to the market to do brand lift studies, to be able to prove the value of that medium, to get some of those advertising dollars as well.

[00:05:37] Jeff Vidler: Right now, 70% or 80% of the branded podcast lift studies are in the US. We also do a Canadian Podcast Listener Study, which we've been doing since 2017.

[00:05:58] Jeff Vidler: So it's now in its, I guess, that'll make it the sixth year. And that's to provide information to the marketplace to educate, inform, and elevate the medium to help advertisers understand it. And help people who are creators and publishers understand the opportunities.

[00:06:15] Jeff Vidler: And it's been a great opportunity working with Jeff Holster from Holster Media, head of Digital Talk at CBC at one time. But he is now one of the partners in TPX, the podcast exchange that partners with us. On the survey side, we've been working with Triton Digital for the last year. Triton has The Podcast Metrics initiative, where they work with publishers to validate the downloads from those publishers and then put them into a ranker for those subscribing publishers. 

[00:06:56] Jeff Vidler: Darryl Battaglia came to us and said, "What if you did surveys, and we mix that to the census level data we have." So we brought in a data scientist who has taken census and survey level data and effectively increased the sample size. So we do 12,000 studies/surveys a year.

[00:07:19] Jeff Vidler: We just finished our first year. But even with that, we only have the top 200 podcasts with enough sample size to provide a clear demographic picture. So we can connect that to podcasts that people listen to and their other podcasts. So we develop neighborhoods to bring in survey data from all the other podcasts people currently listen to and then podcasts they will also listen to.

[00:07:42] Jeff Vidler: This allows us to get reliable, robust profiles down to about 5,000/6,000 of the podcasts they have. So, it's one of those measurement things that has been a bit allusive for podcasting. Getting demographics through listener surveys. You can, and that's great, but they are engaged listeners, and that's worth something in itself. So it's not what advertisers necessarily are looking for. You've got apps (Spotify or Apple) that will give you demographics, but that's filtered through who uses those apps. So it's not necessarily a reflection of their entire audience.

[00:08:22] Jeff Vidler: You can get household graphs, but IP addresses are not personal, right? So we think this is essential to getting demographics into podcasts measurement. 

[00:08:34] Heather Osgood: Yeah. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about Triton because I think that's really fascinating. I know Darryl, he has been on our show, and we've talked about this, so it's great to hear the other side of it.

[00:08:44] Heather Osgood: So, what they're doing is they're looking at census level data, which is what they are calculating. And then you are looking at the survey data, and you're going out and serving people. I know, obviously, with Edison Research and the reports that they create, that is survey level as well. You had mentioned surveying 12,000 people. So how are you getting people? Are you just asking them about the podcast that they listened to? Tell us a little bit more about that? 

[00:09:26] Jeff Vidler: Yeah, they are brief surveys, about seven minutes long to stay efficient. But we do collect demographics. The demographics they can then bring into the data, too, that we can then help model profiles using the census level data. And we ask listeners based on monthly podcasts listeners, they have to say they listened to podcasts in the past month and that they listen monthly.

[00:09:48] Jeff Vidler: And we asked them to name up to 10 podcasts they've listened to in the past year. We have an auto-fill that allows them to go in and see the cards as they're typing in, see what podcasts are, and click on the card and give us that information.

[00:10:04] Jeff Vidler: That's the basis for the survey. That's how we collect that.

[00:10:07] Heather Osgood: That's great. That's terrific. And you obviously hit the nail on the head. One of the most complex pieces is the demographics piece. And I think that you are spot on because Spotify provides us with really great metrics.

[00:10:26] Heather Osgood: So if you go into Spotify, you get what you need to tell an advertiser like, Hey, look, this is this audience. But I think it's really fascinating, we had a show that recently joined True Native Media, and we were talking to them about their demographics. And we were like, well, what does Spotify say? And he's like, well, Spotify is like 5% of my audience.

[00:10:45] Heather Osgood: And what they represent is very different than what we have seen in other players or the information we've done on surveys. Another thing that skews the data is, if I'm a Spotify user, that in and of itself puts me in a particular category, which is then going to skew the information, right?

[00:11:09] Heather Osgood: Because people who use Spotify fit into their own demographic of users versus those who use Google, Apple, or another player. Those are all skewed a little bit. And it is really not the easiest thing to determine who exactly is listening to a podcast. I'm curious what your thoughts are. 

[00:11:32] Jeff Vidler: Yeah, Spotify is a good example. If you look at people who say that Spotify is their primary podcast platform, it is a younger audience. On average, five and eight years younger than an Apple Podcast listener. YouTube is another story entirely. It's either very young or very old.

[00:12:12] Heather Osgood: Oh, YouTube Is very young and very old? 

[00:12:13] Jeff Vidler: Very young and very old, that's where you see it indexing high. 18-24 years or younger and 55 plus as well. 

[00:12:21] Heather Osgood: That's so fascinating. So my dad came to visit for a week recently.

[00:12:26] Heather Osgood: I swear, the man just watched YouTube. I was like, what are you doing? Then I've got my 13-year-old, whom I can't unplug from YouTube. But I never go on YouTube. I just don't have the time. So that is really fascinating.  

[00:12:57] Jeff Vidler: YouTube is the place to go for all the entertainment information. So why not podcast, too. 

[00:13:02] Heather Osgood: Oh, absolutely. YouTube could take over the entire industry if it wanted to. Realistically, if people were listening to YouTube for free, we would have a big issue on our hands as an industry. Everybody would go to YouTube to listen to their podcasts because so many people are already doing videos, which is interesting.

[00:13:41] Heather Osgood: So even though we are provided with stats from different platforms, ultimately, it's about creating a more cohesive view of your entire audience, which is challenging.

[00:13:57] Heather Osgood: You recently wrote an article about some of the changes and crossroads our industry is at. I thought some of the points that you made were really interesting. One that stood out to me was better metrics as an opportunity.

[00:14:15] Heather Osgood: And I know that, gosh, we have used Podsights for quite some time. Obviously, they have recently been acquired by Spotify. And just the other day, I was in Podsights with one of my sales reps, and we were looking at a campaign. We were looking at how it performed. She's a newer sales rep, so I pointed out some aspects of the campaign. And I was like, look at the conversion rate, how many people visited this site, and how many listeners we got. And we were just kind of processing through all of them. And as we were going through it, it made me feel so good.

[00:14:50] Heather Osgood: And it made her feel confident in creating successful campaigns because we had solid numbers and excellent conversion rates. And it's so terrific to see all of that. But many industry people feel this underlying insecurity about what will happen with attribution companies now that they've been acquired.

[00:15:15] Heather Osgood: When you think about better metrics, are many companies coming up the ranks to replace others? 

[00:15:30] Jeff Vidler: Many companies are looking at that opportunity.

[00:15:33] Jeff Vidler: Many companies are getting phone calls to say, what can you do because we are a little concerned about using Podsights or Chartable. I'm not sure that's entirely fair, but it's understandable. We'll find out, I guess, what happens along the way. Obviously, Spotify is a data company. Their music streaming company and podcasts can be, but if you go back to the early days, a lot of it was built on data. And so you do wonder, what will they do with that and how will they use that to better themselves and probably not at the expense of an individual advertiser or publisher.

[00:16:08] Jeff Vidler: We have had conversations with other companies. Maybe there is a chance to help them build that better mouse trap that is truly independent. And I think there's a real potential there.

[00:16:22] Jeff Vidler: Better metrics are also about recognizing, and again, part of the crossroads. Podcasting was built on the backs of direct response advertisers, and why? Because it was no measurement. One of my theories, anyhow, is that there was no measurement. I mean, how will you know my ad is working because I have no way of measuring, and they're telling me how many downloads they have.

[00:16:42] Jeff Vidler: Do they really know how many people are listening? All of that. Well, I'll add a vanity URL and see if it drives people to my website. Podcasting has worked like magic for those direct response advertisers. And they keep coming back, and they keep coming back. Look at those Magellan charts every month. It's still primarily direct response advertisers at the top. Although, Magellan also tracks it. More and more brand advertisers are coming into the medium, but they're just testing it. They don't seem fully committed to it in that same way.

[00:17:17] Jeff Vidler: And I think part of it is, and certainly something we hope to help solve, the brand advertiser doesn't necessarily care much about website visits or sales conversions online. An example of one that I saw recently was Milano Cookies.

[00:17:36] Jeff Vidler: They don't care that you go online to look at their cookies. They want to know that you'll think of Milano Cookies when you're walking down the supermarket aisle and remind you how much you love Milano cookies. Right? So those attribution services, as great as they are, aren't beneficial for those brand advertisers who are coming to test and learn how effective podcast ads can be. Survey research is the only way to help show the same kind of lift they're seeing with web visits and sales conversions. It also connects to awareness, favorability, and consideration? All those things put a brand in people's heads when they're ready to make that buying decision.

[00:18:25] Jeff Vidler: Not at that moment necessarily, but when they're ready to do that. And so we are working with some ad tech partners on pixel-based surveys where they can identify people who've listened to the ads, tagged and listen to the ads, then follow up with a survey, and then have a matching control.

[00:18:46] Jeff Vidler: So you can compare the control to the exposed to see if that is showing lift for, again, awareness, favorability, consideration. Whatever else the brand is interested in, understanding whatever its objectives are. It is showing some results. And others do the same thing.

[00:19:00] Jeff Vidler: We're not the only ones who do that. But I'm not sure we've got quite figured out yet. It's still very early. Part of the opportunity for podcasting is bringing those brand advertisers on board. To be able to give them the metrics that the direct response advertisers have had since day one. 

[00:19:18] Heather Osgood: Yeah, I find all that fascinating.

[00:19:21] Heather Osgood: And I would love to dig into it more because you have worked so heavily on the brand side. Certainly, the industry needs more brand advertisers. We also want to keep our direct response advertisers. We don't want them to go anywhere. Still, I believe that more brand advertisers in the space would ultimately result in higher sales for the whole industry. So I love what you're saying. A brand campaign's KPIs are very different from a direct response campaign. So the in-depth brand list research you do with consideration, etc., what can the brand expect or what does the brand get from a campaign? Glenn Rubinstein from Adopter discussed the differences between direct response and brand advertisers. He pointed out that direct response advertisers are very consistent, right? For example, Athletic Greens will advertise this month because they know they can get a return. They will constantly advertise on podcasts because they know I will get this much out if I put in this much money. With brand advertisers, though, there may not be that same consistency because they aren't necessarily just going to say, I'm going to run on this podcast for the whole year. Maybe they have a particular initiative they want to push, or maybe there's a high or low season.

[00:21:04] Heather Osgood: And they want to be out there at certain times. And then the reality is, is I presume the studies that you're doing are not instantaneous, right? Because they're not software base. They're not behind the scenes, you know, big brothering in and looking at what we're doing. So there's some real effort that is being put out.

[00:21:26] Heather Osgood: So when we think about brand advertisers in the space, of course, we want them to see the legitimacy of, you know, what it is that we're creating here in the podcast industry. But what about the timeline, and how do you see that affecting campaigns? 

[00:21:42] Jeff Vidler: Yeah, it's a great question. We were talking earlier, but tangibility, right? Direct response advertisers can get tangible results immediately. Whereas the brand advertiser isn't even looking for those same tangible results. Part of it is built on the faith that you build a strong [00:22:00] brand, and over time that translates into success.

[00:22:04] Jeff Vidler: And you're not necessarily even looking for immediate results. You're looking to build brand equity, and that's something that takes a lot of effort across a lot of media over a lot of time to really build, to have that brand salient. So that people say, yes, that's my first when I go into the liquor store that Molson Coors brand is the beer I'm going to buy.

[00:22:25] Jeff Vidler: Molson Coors is one brand advertiser that has used podcasts and obviously has faith in it. The only way they can really measure that they can't measure it from, you know, web conversions, or sales conversions, or website visits. But it is difficult, particularly without those brand lift metrics in place, to have them feel this is where we're actually able to move the needle where we want to move.

[00:22:52] Heather Osgood: And if you were doing a survey for a brand, let's say they ran a three-month campaign. Are you running the study while the campaign is running or wait until the campaign gets over? You've done a lot with branded podcasts, so maybe they do a 10-episode season. So when does your research commence, and when does it conclude?

[00:23:13] Jeff Vidler: It depends on the nature of the campaign and the methodology. We talked about pixel-based surveys. Those you want to measure while the campaign is running. You want to be there from the beginning to the end to see how it's built over time. Frequency and exposure are what's done to produce some of those key metrics you're trying to achieve. You can also do pre and post-studies as another way. Radio does that because it doesn't have that digital connection, but you can do a pre and post. You can connect to radio listeners and see if it makes a difference.

[00:23:48] Jeff Vidler: And for branded podcasts, it's the hardest because it's out in the wild with branded podcasts. They generally have a relatively small listener base that is deeply engaged. So we're digging into that engagement as much as possible for that work.

[00:24:06] Jeff Vidler: We will use listening surveys and controlled exposure to test the podcast effectivity. And in terms of content, we have benchmarks for that. What it delivers for the brand as well, but that's like a single exposure before the podcast. Usually before the podcast starts, or maybe they want to test a different approach to it for a new season or something like that.

[00:24:27] Jeff Vidler: So that's pretty much content-based as much as it is advertising-based. With branded podcasts, the most important thing is people who have listened to and loved them. Whatever the brand delivers is useless if nobody listens. And we've seen examples where a heavy brand touch can dampen appeal and stall it out of the gate.

[00:24:48] Heather Osgood: The idea of studying branded podcasts is fascinating because, as you mentioned, you need to have an audience size; I would think that was even substantial enough.

[00:25:02] Heather Osgood: Have you ever seen a branded podcast where you're like, "Oh my gosh, this audience is so tiny, I can't create a story around it? 

[00:25:16] Jeff Vidler: Yes, some podcasts aren't; they're so small, you couldn't even do a listener survey to get enough respondents.

[00:25:23] Jeff Vidler: But often for those ones, we'll study how that podcast is performing relative to the benchmarks of other more successful podcasts. Is the problem with the podcast or their audience development?

[00:25:41] Heather Osgood: Right. As we get more and more podcasts, audience building is increasingly difficult to get a solid listenership. So in terms of your work, have you done any research around just ads? Programmatic, dynamic, or embedded ads? 

[00:26:10] Jeff Vidler: We do a lot of brand lift work for individual ad campaigns, and we've done some with Stitcher and SXM Media on testing ad length using, actually, controlled exposure approaches.

[00:26:24] Jeff Vidler: What's the impact of different ad lengths? We've established more than any other study that host-read ads are so much more powerful than announcer-read or pre-produced ads. So we do some of that more thought leadership work. We are doing some pixel-based survey work with larger publishers as well.

[00:26:47] Jeff Vidler: It's an important part of what we do because if we get brand advertisers into podcasting, we have to be able to establish that effectively, right? 

[00:26:57] Heather Osgood: Yeah, for sure. And I'm sure these companies are hiring you to do these studies but don't want the information disseminated out there.

[00:27:05] Heather Osgood: Where is that line of where you have done the research for a company, and you're able to say, okay, across maybe these six projects we've done, the Podsights benchmark reports are really interesting to me to be able to look and see like, oh yeah, like we need this kind of a frequency, or we need this kind of penetration to come up with a campaign that's going to be successful.

[00:27:28] Heather Osgood: Are you ever able to take that research and kind of share it with the industry at large? 

[00:27:34] Jeff Vidler: It's a good point. We have shared parts of what we learned about what makes a successful branded podcast. In fact, we've written a couple blogs on that. Matt Heard, who works with us, just put one out about a month ago. I wish we had the amount of data, the sheer amount of data that Podsights has because attribution studies are so easy to run simultaneously. The sad part about survey research is it still is a manual operation.

[00:28:04] Jeff Vidler: It's not a turn-on and off process. There are still person-hours and everything else involved. And that adds cost to it. So there's only so much budget, and there's only so many different studies we can do. But certainly, we are building enough that we're starting to develop some, some really, particularly in branded podcasts.

[00:28:25] Jeff Vidler: We built some pretty solid benchmarks. 

[00:28:27] Heather Osgood: That's awesome. Anytime you share that, I'm sure we would all just love to hear it. And it sounds like you share most of that information in your blog. 

[00:28:35] Jeff Vidler: We try to share what we can without revealing any secrets.

[00:28:40] Heather Osgood: Yes. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Okay. So one of the things that you said that you saw as being a potential challenge in the industry was programmatic ads. And, you know, as you had mentioned, just a bit a go, obviously, we have seen that host-read ads do tend to work better than those announcer-read programmatic type ads. 

[00:29:00] Heather Osgood: And it makes total sense, right? I'm likelier to listen to it if it feels less like an ad. And when it feels like it's pre-programmed, it comes at me. So I see it as more of that outbound screaming in-your-face ad.

[00:29:22] Heather Osgood: When it's a host, you know, you're like, "Hey, I like the host. I want to support the host. I'm interested potentially in the products that they're sharing." But I also see that from a scalability factor, if we really, as an industry, want to hit those big numbers, I think programmatic is inevitable.

[00:29:39] Heather Osgood: I go back and forth and, you know, certainly have created a lot of content around the pros and cons of both of them. And the way that I see it is I do really believe that at some point, programmatic is going to take over. But it's, I would say it's growing much slower than I would have anticipated. And I think that that has a lot to [00:30:00] do with where technology is at.

[00:30:02] Heather Osgood: So I think that that could be a piece of it. And I also am curious about the demand side. I feel like often when I talk to people in the programmatic space, they're like, oh, the demand is there. We just need more supply, but then you see and hear these podcasts with a lack of ads in them.

[00:30:21] Heather Osgood: And that makes me think, is there that much demand, and is it a supply issue? Because I feel like all the podcasts would be chocked full of ads if that were the case. And many of them still are pretty light on ads. So what are your thoughts about programmatic ads and the role you see them playing in the industry in years to come?. 

[00:30:46] Jeff Vidler: The analogy I use is that programmatic ads are a bit like self-driving cars. They will definitely be part of the future, but you still must keep your hands on the wheel. Because it gives a scary aspect of me sort of turn the switch on programmatic and then suddenly you have the wrong ads running on the wrong podcasts. And you also risk killing the amazing relationship between listeners and advertisers that is unique to podcasts. And in any media, I mean, this is the one medium where listeners say they will support a brand that supports their favorite podcasts.

[00:31:28] Jeff Vidler: Because of host-reads and the kind of authenticity and the connection there as well. There's something about podcasts that is a unique experience in that sense of support for something that you know is, to me, a lot of the magic for podcasting.

[00:31:44] Jeff Vidler: There's a podcast for everybody. There's a podcast out there that's exactly right for you. And when you find that podcast, it may be way out on the long tail, probably because it's that specific to you. So when you hear that there's a brand or an advertiser, who's supporting that podcast, you go, yes I'm going to look for that brand next time I go shopping. You don't see that in other media besides ethnic, LGBTQ, and Christian media. So there's that sense that they're supporting not the host but something that matters a lot to me. And I think there are those kinds of relationships for a lot of podcasts, particularly out in the long tail. And the real challenge is how do we get to, you know, get the ad dollars, moving down that long tail to reach those podcasts where it may not be practical to have host read ads because just too many hosts to deal with. However, what kind of ad is there that would still work and still make the message that still communicates that this is a brand that believes in this podcast. And we want you to listen to what this brand has to say. And I think it isn't a radio ad. It isn't, you know, a Popeye's jingle, which I have heard on podcasts.

[00:33:12] Jeff Vidler: Crazy. Like, I feel like, excuse me, I might, I'm not listening to the radio right now. I'm right here. You don't have to yell across the room at me. So I think that you know, to me, what succeeds the host-read ad that can be scalable, could be the silver bullet for podcasting.

[00:33:34] Jeff Vidler: And it may not be one type of ad. Different ads may do it, but it can't be purely a radio ad; it's another medium. You sold radio advertising. You know it's a different medium than the ads are different. So anyhow, you know, again, my opinion, my theory, we'll see.

[00:33:50] Jeff Vidler: But I think to my mind, a lot of focus really should be over the next couple of years on how do we get the right kind of ads into podcasting? How do we build smart programmatic? Where we're putting ads into the right place, the right ads in the right place. And we can do it to scale, but that's, you know, it's a challenge, I think.

[00:34:11] Heather Osgood: Yeah. Yeah, no, for sure. Well, Jeff, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure chatting with you today. Where can they find you if folks are interested in learning more about you or the services you offer? 

[00:34:24] Jeff Vidler: They can find me at jeff@signalhillinsights.com. You should visit our website, signalhillinsights.com, and subscribe to our newsletter.

[00:34:35] Jeff Vidler: We send out blogs where we share some of the insights we get from research or some of our thoughts with a few hundred people. 

[00:34:45] Heather Osgood:  I have been connected on LinkedIn for a little while, but your articles are really great, and I definitely need to put up more time aside to read them and certainly would encourage you to check out the newsletters and blogs, because I think that there's a lot of really good insights. So if this industry just intrigues you, if metrics intrigued, you make sure you go over and check it out. Cause I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. And yeah, just wanted to say thanks for listening today. And Jeff, thank you so much for being. Yeah. 

[00:35:24] Jeff Vidler: Thank you, Heather. Um, I mean, and you're an inspiration too on that and that same front; I mean, I've also been watching you on social media for the last couple of years.

[00:35:31] Jeff Vidler: So it's really a treat just to have had the chance to sit and chat for the last 40 minutes or whatever it's been since we started. 

[00:35:38] Heather Osgood: Yeah, for sure. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. And we will hit you next week on the podcast advertising playbook; take care.

 

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Jeff Vidler

President & Founder