If you publish a podcast, your podcast may well take advertising.

And if it does take advertising, you probably want people to actually listen to the ads. Your audience listening to podcast ads increases the likelihood of products being sold, and therefore the advertiser coming back to buy more advertising.

If your podcast doesn’t increase sales (or awareness, or whatever KPI your advertiser is judging success on), then maybe next time your podcast would be on that advertiser’s schedule.

What you probably don’t want to do is train your audience into normalising the skipping of advertising in podcasts. Because skipping the ads means that they’re not being heard, which leads to lower ad sales, less revenue, and so on.

But if you did want to train your podcast audience to learn how to skip ads, there are a few things you could do:

• Saturate your podcast with far too many ad breaks
• Forget to master the audio for your ads at the same level as the audio for the rest of your podcast, leaving massive volume shifts between editorial and advertising
• Encourage the use of Spotify as your listeners’ podcast player of choice 🙂
• And most egregiously… create a humorous presenter-read ad that delivers the key advertiser messaging, but then repeatedly run that same execution over and over

I particularly hate the last one because at least a regular ad usually lasts 30 seconds and has actually been designed to bear a certain level of repetition. Advertisers usually buy advertising to achieve a certain level of “OTH” or Opportunities to Hear.

But if you’re instead generating content as advertising (“sponcon”), then it’s often very effective on its first outing. It’s fresh, original and perhaps funny. Listeners enjoy the hosts even if the messaging is commercial. But by the second, third, fourth or more times of listening, it quickly becomes very wearing. Especially if it’s a longer execution.

Indeed, it becomes quite wearing to hear repeatedly in a way that regular spot ads can often avoid. (Of course, any advert played too many times at too high a frequency becomes unbearable very quickly). You might actually end up with a negative view of the advertiser!

If you ever attend a live recording of a comedy show such as a sitcom or a panel show, you will know that at the end of the main recording, the producers usually need to get a few bits re-recorded. Perhaps a word was mumbled or there was a technical issue. The lines are repeated, and the same gags are told again. In the studio, the warm-up comic who keeps the audience going through breaks in recording, has to usually prime the audience to laugh as loudly to a joke they’re hearing again as they did the first time. Because naturally, we’ve now heard the joke and it’s no longer quite as funny.

This is the problem with repeated “funny” bits in podcasts that are doubling as advertising. Truthfully, you have to keep the advertising as fresh as everything else in the episode.

In an ideal world, if you’re getting your hosts do a live read for an advertiser, every execution that’s broadcast would be different. That takes time and effort, especially if your podcast is publishing episodes at quite a cadence. But I would look to someone like Adam Buxton who is excellent at this.

If you don’t keep things fresh, then you’re practically inviting the audience to discover how to skip the ads. And that doesn’t help you or your client. Or podcasting in general.

Perhaps it does help you up-sell a subscription tier that comes with ad-free versions of your podcast however…

No names, no pack-drill. But I think we all know the culprits here!