89: Where to Place Your Podcast Ads

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast growth coach. And today we are going to talk about podcast sponsorship placement, specifically where in your podcast episode is the best place to put sponsored ads. So in this episode, I'm going to start by sharing with you a little bit of knowledge from the television and radio world about sponsorships and advertisements that I think you're going to find really enlightening and valuable as you decide where to put your sponsored ad placements and how many ads to put in your episodes. Then I'm going to talk about the three main types of ad placements, pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll, explain briefly and quickly what those mean and go through the pros and cons of each. And then finally, I'm going to share with you the strategy that I use for putting sponsored ads on my podcasts. And so we got a lot to cover, let's dive in and begin. This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, Spotify, and even the New York Times. Riverside is not only great because it has unbelievably high recording quality regardless of your or your guest's internet quality, but it also gives you separate audio and video tracks for each person speaking. It's high tech but easy to use. Unlike Zoom, you don't have to have anything installed on your computer and your guests don't either. And did I mention that the audio quality is way better? If you're recording your interviews remotely, get off of Zoom now and hop into Riverside for your next interview. Your listeners will thank you. Head over to Riverside.fm and use code Grow that's GROW to get 63 minutes of recording and 15% off a membership plan. The link is in the show notes. Okay, so before we dive into the three main places that you can put your ads in your episodes and the pros and cons of each, let's just first talk about advertisement in general. Now sponsorship is well known to be a great way to monetize your podcast and the bigger and bigger your audience gets, the more and more profitable sponsorship is. Now we're not going to dive in this episode into exactly when you should look to monetize via sponsorships, but what we will talk about is once you are in the place of getting sponsors for your podcast, what do you do with all this opportunity and where do you put the ads? So before we talk about the different types of ads, I first want to talk a little bit about just advertisement in general and point out a couple things from the legacy, advertisement and TV commercials and radio commercials world that it's really, really beneficial for us to understand. And so there's three main things to point out to you that I think will enhance your understanding of advertisement and make you able to make better decisions about the sponsors that you have and where you put your ads on your show. So the first thing is the two types of advertisements that exist. Now if you're somebody who is familiar with the marketing world, you might already know this, but if you're not, this is extremely valuable to know. The two main types of advertisements are what's called direct response and brand awareness. Now a direct response ad is pretty self explanatory. It's any advertisement that asks the viewer or listener to take a specific action. So those are TV commercials that have a number on the screen and say, call now to get some sort of discount. Those are radio commercials that do the same thing. Go to this website and get a promo code, call this number now for a free consultation. On social media, it's the same thing when you see an advertisement that says, click the link below for more or for a discount or something like that. And on podcasts, it's also true that direct response advertisements are there to get the listener to take an action immediately. So anytime you hear a promo code with a discount or click the link in the show notes or go to so and so.com slash Kevin for an exclusive discount. Those are what's called direct response ads. The sponsors that use those ads are looking to get a return on those ads right away. They're looking to pay for the ad and then pretty quickly within generally 30 days make more money back from that ad than they paid for it. So that's direct response. The other type is called brand awareness and that's where an advertiser isn't necessarily looking for the listener to take an action right away, but they just want the listener to be aware of their thing. And so an example of a podcast brand awareness ad would be some of the ads that you hear on really big podcast networks by really big companies. So I was listening to a gimlet show recently on the gimlet network, which is a part of Spotify. And they had an ad for Nissan, right, the car brand and it was just Nissan has really great cars. Right. There was no action. Nissan dealer now for a quick discount. They were just like Nissan has the best cars think about buying one, right? So it wasn't a direct response. It was just they wanted me to think about Nissan. Now the vast majority of sponsorships that we as independent podcasters are going to get our direct response. So just keep that in mind. And so I just wanted to find those two things first because I will refer to those two types of ads later in this episode. The second thing that it is useful to know about advertisement placement is that in general, what TV companies and social media companies and radio companies that are old have figured out is that in general, people who consume media are willing to tolerate a four to one ratio of content to advertisements. So for every four minutes of content, there's one minute of advertisement decades and decades and decades of advertising industry testing and operations has proven that to pretty much be the max. You see that on TV shows, a TV show that is 30 minutes long is actually 22 minutes of content and eight minutes of commercial. So it's about four to one, about 20%. Same thing is true on radio, same thing is true on social media. So if you go to a social media platform that's fully monetized, you will see like on Instagram, for example, like if you look at Instagram stories, you'll see four stories and then an ad, four stories and then an ad, it's four to one. And I got that from a recent piece of content that Alex Armosey shared, he pointed that out. And that I was like, holy crap, that makes a ton of sense for us podcasters. So I'm sharing it with you here. So that's number one, remember four to one ratio. So keep that in mind when you're deciding how many sponsorships to put on your show. But the third thing that I want to share is something that one of our one-on-one podcast growth coaches here at Grow the Show, Jeremy Grader shared with me recently while we were on a coaching call with a client. So Jeremy comes from the radio world. He worked at a radio station for 20 years. He's been a podcaster since like 2004. He recently joined us full time at Grow the Show after decades and decades of podcasting and growing his show. He became a client and then he came on to become a co-chair at Grow the Show. And which is great because he's got so much experience in podcasting and in radio. He shared with me a study that his radio station did while he was managing it. And what he shared was that they did an extensive study. And what they discovered is that when it comes to listening to ads on the radio, people don't really care how long the ad is when they're thinking about how many ads is too much. So listeners care less about how long the ad is and instead care about how many ads there are. So what they discovered was that listeners would be just as annoyed after 4.30 second ads as they were after 4 minute long ads. Super weird. But weirdly enough, as consumers when we listen to an ad, we can't really tell the difference between a 30 second and a 2 minute ad or anything in between. It just all feels the same. So what does that mean for you as the podcaster? Well it means that cramming together 6.30 second ads while it might get you technically more money because that's 6 ads that actually as far as your listener experience goes will be a worse experience than if you had 4 minute long ads. Even though the 6.30 second ads are only 3 minutes in length, 4 minute long ads is 4 minutes in length, but for some reason less annoying to listeners because it's 4 ads instead of 6. So keep in mind, length doesn't really matter too much. It's the number of ads that people hear that they're willing to tolerate. Number 2, a 4-to-1 ratio of content to advertising content is generally the max that people are willing to tolerate. And number 3, there's a difference between direct response ads and brand awareness ads and we'll talk more about what makes them different now as we get into the 3 types of placement. So my more advanced podcasters listening probably already know that there's 3 types of placement generally for advertisements on a podcast. There's pre-roll, there's mid-roll and there's post-roll. Pre-roll are ads that are played before the content begins. Mid-roll are ads that are played in the middle of the content and post-roll are ads that are played at the end of the content. Makes sense, right? Pretty self-explanatory. Now you can place your ads technically wherever you want. So as the creator, it's up to you whether to have pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads or post-roll ads. But let me talk a little bit about the pros and cons of each. Pre-roll ads are first. So pre-roll ads, what's cool about them is that number 1, advertisers love them. So advertisers are willing to pay a premium for their advertisement to be first because they know that every single person that clicks on that episode is going to hear it because the ad plays before the content begins. So that's good for advertisers. Everybody hears them and they are willing to pay more because of it. Number 2, what's good for us is that they're generally shorter. So pre-roll ads tend to be shorter than a mid-roll ad. So as a creator, you don't have to put too much into the copywriting or record a really, really long ad. Although that is optional. The other benefit of pre-roll ads for us to creators is that some creators like to put them at the beginning of the episode and just get all of them out of the way right in the beginning. If you ever listen to the Tim Ferris show, which is a massive podcast, very popular, it's been around forever, Tim Ferris as soon as you press play plays like five ads right away. And so if you're like me, you press play and you skip like seven minutes into the episode until the actual content begins. Now if you're an advertiser, you don't want to hear that. So that is the first con about pre-roll is that if you're an advertiser, a lot of people just skip them right away because they're looking to get to the content. The other con is as a creator, if somebody clicks on your show for the very, very first time and what they hear is an ad, that experience is just not fun. So number one, some new listeners will be confused. They don't realize that depending on how you talk about the ad, they might not realize that it's an advertisement and the worst thing that you can do for listener retention is confuse your listeners in the first 10 seconds. It confused mind always says no and they will always leave and go listen to something else instead. But overall, this is kind of my opinion here. Overall, I think the experience of clicking on a podcast episode and immediately hearing an ad sucks. It's kind of like when you're on YouTube or some website and you click on a video that you really want to watch and they make you sit there and watch a 30 or 15 second ad before they'll show you the video that you came there for. That is like the most annoying, terrible feeling. It's literally the longest 15 seconds of my life are the ads before videos that I see on YouTube and I've literally had a leg broken in three places that got splinted before I had pain killers and 15 second ads before video is still the most painful 15 seconds of my life. Now with podcasting, you can skip it, which is cool, which is fine as a listener. But overall, I'm a big listener experience guy and so just throwing an ad right at the very beginning. Like I said, this is my opinion here. This is just me. I don't like doing it. I don't like that being the experience that my listenership has. Maybe I'll teach my mind on this in the future, but for now, you will never hear a pre-roll ad here on Grow the Show because my goal is for you to press play and immediately cut to the chase, get to the content. So then there's mid-roll. Mid-roll are any ads that are in the middle of your episode. Now there's a couple of ways to do this. The way that I do it on Grow the Show is either if it's an episode that has the theme song. So here on Grow the Show, when I have a guest on the show, there's like an extended intro with a theme song that's a little bit longer where I talk about what we're going to get into on the show. Then the theme song ends and that's where we usually put our mid-roll ads. So it's after the intro, but it's before the body of the content really starts in my opinion. It's really nice place to put the ads because you have sufficiently hooked the listener in to the episode content. You've introed the episode, you've talked about what's in it for them, and ideally you've made it so that they're really excited to hear what the episode has in store, then you can drop the ads and then get to the content. The other way to do it is that you can put your ads in the middle of the content, right in the middle. Some shows will take a break so they'll have a voiceover that says after the break, you are going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, after a word from our sponsors, right? Then they play the ads or some shows will literally just drop it in the middle with no intro or outro. We do both here. Sometimes you'll be listening to an episode here and you'll just hear me start talking about advertisements, other shows do that as well. Totally fine. You couldn't argue that that's a worst listener experience. Do you feel that way? Let me know. But that's where we put the mid-roll ads for the show. So the pros about mid-roll ads is that they tend to be the best bang for your book. Advertisers like that placement because they know that there's a very good chance that most listeners are going to hear it and they like that it interrupts people. That's just how advertising works. It's right in the middle of the content and so you are able to generally get the best bang for your book, both as an advertiser and for you as a podcaster. Generally those ads, the ones that are the most profitable for you. The cons about mid-rolls is that they sometimes can be super jarring as a listener and also as a listener, they can be overdone. Some people put way too many mid-roll ads. I know I've listened to some shows on big networks that have like seven ads in the middle and it is just brutal. That's a good problem to have if you're a podcaster that has so much demand that you have to decide between seven ads or six. That means you're raking in the dough. But just please, please keep your listeners in mind when you're putting sponsorships in the middle of your episodes. The last type is called post-roll. Those are ads that are played after the content is over. These are generally throwaways. Advertisers don't really care for them too much because most people don't listen to them because the content is over so they have no reason to stay. Very, very few people hear them. That's why I like to use them. I like to CTA my own stuff. You'll hear at the end of episodes of Grow the Show. I talk about my accelerator program because I'm not really going to try to sell that advertisement space to an advertiser because, like I said, they're probably not going to get great results from it because so few people are going to listen to it. But why should I leave it at? I toss an extended advertisement for my product in the post-roll and I'm going to be honest. I am constantly surprised that how many people stick around and listen to that. If you look at my retention rates, somewhere between 30 and 50% of podcast listeners of Grow the Show listen to the post-roll advertisement for my program. For a while, I believe that nobody listens to post-roll ads so I never had them until I put my own there and discovered that 30 to 50% of people do listen to it. If I was getting sponsors for the first time, I would not use post-roll because only 30 to 50% of listeners are going to stick around. That's if you have an 80% retention rate as it is. If your retention rate sucks, nobody's going to hear them. If you're just getting started with sponsorships, what I would really recommend is just start with mid-roll and that's because more people will hear it, number one, but number two, if you're just starting out with advertisement, that probably means that you're a little bit earlier in your show's journey. I don't recommend monetizing to the max and sticking pre-roll ads in there because when you're early on, what you really want to do is over-deliver on value to your audience. When they press play, hook them right away, intro the episode, cut to the chase, get to the good stuff so that you can build an audience that trusts you and build a brand that is trusted enough so that in the future you can add pre-roll ads where your brand is so strong that people are going to either listen to them or skip through them anyway. If you're early on in your journey and you have not yet established a solid foundation of your brand, which for most of us, that's the case. I would argue I haven't even done that yet, that I would not put pre-roll ads because your goal right now is to build trust and to grow and you can cash out to the max later once you have already established your brand foundation. So final summation, the question that this episode poses is where should you put ads in your podcast episodes? Well, if you're just starting out with your first sponsors, I would do mid-roll, I would put them in the middle. That is the industry standard and that is where you first want to get experience. Then you can optionally add post-roll ads if you want. It's like extra inventory, maybe throw it in as a bonus for specific advertisers or at a discount or you can add a post-roll ad for your own product or services. If you have that, I would refrain doing pre-roll ads for anything, your business or someone else's business until you have built an extremely strong brand foundation where your show is at several thousand downloads per episode. It has been around for a while. You have fans that you know are talking about how great your show is. Then you can start to put pre-roll ads because you're kind of ready to cash out because adding those pre-roll ads is not going to damage your relationship with this new nace and audience that isn't sure whether to trust you yet. So if you have established that trust, you've been around for a while. You can start to add pre-roll ads and start to make revenue on that airtime, which is awesome. You can be like Pat Flynn or Tim Ferris or many of the other shows that put pre-roll ads when you're just starting out. I don't recommend it. There you have it. Those are your options for where to put your podcast ads. If you have any questions about this, I invite you to join us in the Grow the Show Facebook group where you can post that questions and join the discussion. And if you are an advanced podcaster who wants to add anything to the discussion, we would love to have you there in the Grow the Show community as well. I'd love to hear what ad placements you have had the most success with. And I'd also love to hear if there's anything that I've said today that you disagree with or find to be otherwise. I'm sharing what I have found to be true. I'd love to hear if you have found something else to be true. And so I invite you to share it with us in the Grow the Show Facebook group. So that's going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. I will see you in the next one.