News

Hosts With The Most

We looked at the rise of podcasts, and the potential benefits of advertising to highly engaged podcast audiences recently. (See – Creating Effective Ads For Podcasts).

While as a voice studio we naturally focused on the use of recorded commercials in podcasts, we also touched on having ads voiced by the podcast hosts themselves. The logic here is the same as any live announcer reads offered by radio stations: use a voice the audience trusts to deliver a marketing message.

Sometimes referred to as ‘sponsorships’, some outlets claim as many as 63% of podcast ads are host-read. They’re marketed as ‘native, creative and authentic reads’, and the connection listeners have with hosts can lead to ‘an unparalleled level of engagement’.

Evidence shows the right match of brand and podcast host can result in a wildly successful campaign. But there’s one word above we should focus on.

Authentic.

Because as AI marches into our lives, things are going to get messy.

AI To The Rescue?

AI is going to assist us and expand capabilities in ways we can’t even imagine yet. And AI can be a lot of things. But at this point, authentic is not one of them.

So when Mamamia recently announced an AI-powered voice named Sam, eyebrows were raised across the media industry. The curiously muted public reaction suggests no-one’s really quite sure what to make of the move.

We’re told Sam is ‘trained up on hundreds of hours of the media group’s podcasts’, and well…OK. Like ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, Sam will only be able to learn from what has already been. It can’t generate new thought, but thoughts based on utilising and rearranging already existing ideas.

So Sam will be a voice, based on other voices and the things they’ve previously said. But Sam can’t – by its very nature – be authentic.

Oh, The Humanity

All of which leaves Sam as an approximation of a human voice, and by extension an approximation of the human experience. It serves a purpose, sure. But can it deliver a better podcast ad than a commercial voiced by a real human, or an ad delivered by an actual podcast host?

None of this is to dismiss Sam – or any future programmatic audio advertising concepts – outright. Clients may try it, see a resulting ROI they’re happy with, and continue with the service. Sam may become a character in and of itself to the Mamamia network audience and carve its own niche as a non-human personality.

And you can bet other media companies are watching this rollout like hawks.

Sam-I-Am (or not)

For now, this feels like a purely commercial concept. It’s driven by the potential boost in profits for publishers who are always looking for new revenue streams. (And what do podcast hosts themselves make of all this?)

Low take-up and poor results may mean Sam comes and goes in the blink of an eye. Alternatively, it may be a relatively cheap and quick way to get new ads produced and running at speeds the industry hasn’t been able to previously. It might attract new advertisers and grow the value of the category, or fade into becoming a budget tier ad outlet.

But it simply can’t be authentic.

And when the industry tells us that’s precisely what the most effective ads are, it feels right now like AI-led programmatic ads could, at best – only ever be second best.