83 percent of podcast listeners across MENA region are happy with ads for free content DUBAI: Audio analytics and research platform Veritonic partnered with independent podcast company Acast to release a new report on programmatic podcast adverts. There were 5.1 million regular podcast listeners in Saudi Arabia last year, according to data from Markettiers. Across the MENA region, 83 percent of podcast listeners said they were happy with ads for free content, as per data from the same company. This makes it even more important for advertisers to tailor their ads to the growing podcast audience. “Hope is not a strategy; it’s no longer enough for a brand to create an audio asset and simply hope it’ll move the needle,” said Scott Simonelli, CEO of Veritonic. Marketers need to be creative with their audio ads “to ensure they are putting their best audio creative forward, regardless of how the ad itself is purchased or served,” he added. The goal of the research — which was conducted in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region — was to identify similarities and differences in podcast ads served programmatically across different markets as well as to help media buyers identify best practices in programmatic podcast advertising. The two companies sourced and analyzed podcast ads transacted programmatically with Acast across industry verticals including automotive, tourism, retail, healthcare, and entertainment. They analyzed the ads across themes like ad length, number of voiceovers, gender of voiceover, use of sound effects and call-to-action placements. Most of the ads were a minimum of 30 seconds in length, predominantly in the US and the EMEA region. All markets reflected similarities in the use of single voices for voiceover content. However, when it came to gender detection in voiceover content, there were dissimilarities across markets. In the US, half of the ads analyzed featured a female voiceover, 47 percent featured a male voiceover, and the remaining three percent featured both male and female voiceovers. In EMEA, however, 47 percent featured a female voiceover only, 27 percent featured a male voiceover only, and 26 percent featured both a female and male voiceover. The female-voiced ads performed 3 percent above the average Veritonic benchmark intent score for a podcast ad. All regions used sound effects in less than half of programmatic ads, indicating that this may be a newly emerging trend. Sounds effects, such as birds chirping, phones ringing, engines revving, etc., were used in 40 percent of programmatic ads from the US, 38 percent from Australia and New Zealand, and 33 percent from the EMEA region. The study also analyzed ads that contained a call to action. Of these ads, 67 percent featured the call to action at the end of the ad with these ads performing 1 percent above the average Veritonic benchmark intent score for a podcast ad. “The vast Middle East and North Africa region has reminded us that there are endless stories to be told and countless connections to be made,” Megan Davies, international managing director at Acast, told Arab News. Davies added: “It feels as though we have walked into an environment of rich content and willing advertisers and that we’re here to connect the dots by offering an aggregated business model that will bring all podcast companies together. It is a goldmine of potential, ready to be embraced and celebrated.” Acast launched in the MENA region in May this year and has since amassed a combined reach of 5.4 million monthly listens across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, and Israel.