Vocalize For A Better Podcast Ad Experience

Podcast advertising has much greater recall than other forms of ads. But how many times have you forgotten the URL, a coupon code, or even the name of an advertiser when you were ready to take action?

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

Podcast advertising is hard on all sides of the equation if I'm honest. It's hard to efficiently buy, it's hard to efficiently place, and it's hard for the ad buyers to integrate podcasting ads with the rest of their ad buys.

And, yeah, okay, okay, sure, I recognize that a billion dollars or so is already being spent on podcast advertising just in the U.S.. So the hurdles aren't insurmountable. But still, they could be made better. Especially for brand advertisers who've invested quite a lot to build up their brand equity - brand equity that they can't often leverage in podcast ads, whether they're live read, or programmatically inserted.

One company, Vocalize Inc., is trying to change that. Vocalize Inc. is the Branded Benefits Sponsor this month, and I recently sat down with CEO CJ Silva and asked him what Vocalize is doing to make podcasting better.

So there is an inherent flaw in podcast advertising as it stands right now. The call to action, the way that listeners connect to brands and the talent on the podcast is hard to remember. It's usually a URL. It's a string of letters - .com, .org - followed by, typically, an offer code, something that people forget right away after they hear it, right? They want to get back to listening to the content. So the ads aren't foremost on their mind. What's important to them is really the podcast, right? The content.

So what Vocalize does is makes it easy for people to remember how to connect with the brands or the talent.

What we do is we allow the brand or the talent to create a unique phrase, and when that phrase is spoken into Siri or Google Assistant, it will take that listener directly to the website that the brand or the talent wants them to go to.

So, for example, let's use Nike. Nike has a world famous motto in "Just do it." So instead of providing the listener a call to action of go to www.nike.com/podcastshowname, they can just simply Vocalize "Just do it."

So, the listener can then just into Siri, say, "Hey, Siri, Vocalize." Siri will ask for a phrase, and all they have to do is say, "Just do it." Safari's going to open automatically to the website that Nike wants them to land on.

And Nike can actually set a different website based on the state where the user's located. So they may have a different landing page they want for people in Florida because it's warm weather versus somebody who's still in the colder weather in Maine. So they can use the same campaign and still deliver a user to a more targeted experience.

Additionally, you're getting the listener to speak something about your branding, which is really unique and it's something memorable. It's simple for people to remember.

So it sounds like Vocalize is mostly an ad tech play. Do you agree with that summation?

Absolutely. The origin of the company was really listening to a podcast, I heard an ad for a company called Boll & Branch. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, sheet company. Kind of great messaging where they say three former U.S. presidents sleep on their sheets and it was something that resonated with me.

But like most podcast listeners, I didn't remember the name of the company. I didn't remember the website they announced three times during the ad, using up valuable time in that ad read. And a few weeks later I was looking for sheets, believe it or not, and I was like, oh, you know what, there was that company I heard, couldn't remember the name, but I remembered they said presidents use their sheets.

So, did what most listeners do, opened up Google, typed presidents and sheets, nothing. Nothing came back about Boll & Branch, which I was really surprised. I was like, wow, I was like, I wonder how much they spent for that ad in order for me to see every other competitor that they have out there.

So the minimum ad spend on that platform was about $10,000. I was like, what a waste. They just spent ten grand to send me to see every other competitor except for their product. And, you know, that's when I was like, it would've been a lot cooler if they just told me to grab my phone and say, "Sleep like a president" into Siri.

And I would have remembered that. I would have remembered that two weeks later, but I wouldn't remember the name of their website, the name of the company, and especially not the offer code.

Does this work out of the box? Does a brand need to do anything other than register their Vocalize phrase with you? And it just works?

So, yeah that's all they have to do. So we have a marketplace on the backend. It's similar to registering a domain name. In this case, you would register your phrase and then set the destination URL, and that's it.

The end user right now needs to have either our app or an app that has our SDK installed. So we're actively looking for SDK partners such as podcast players that are looking to provide a better experience for their listeners, something different against all the other podcast players that are out there.

It sounds to me like you're really looking at this more as a play for brand advertisers than direct response advertisers, yeah?

Correct. But there is some benefit to direct response, right? Because now the websites you can be delivered to don't have to be published websites, right? They can be deep links, something that's not searchable. So now you have the exclusivity factor. So if you're a podcaster, the only way that somebody can access this content is to speak this phrase.

So there's no way they could go to Google and search for it or find it. It's not going to be something memorable for somebody other than copying and pasting it, sending it via email.

So we've created speakeasies on the internet, right? So now somebody can say this unique phrase and get into somewhere unique and get that exclusive content that there would be no other way for them to get.

Yeah, so it's like click-based advertising where you can put a click for a deep link, but really we've tried that in podcasting, it just simply doesn't work for a lot of reasons. But one thing we can universally do is say something aloud.

Vocalize is doing something that's, well, unique in this space, but there are lots of other options where brands are trying to place ads and track the efficacy of their ads and get their name out there. What is it you think that Vocalize offers that's better than the existing standards today?

A lot of the tracking that's being done in podcasting is based off of IP tracking. Right? So we know that a podcast was delivered to this IP address or this household or this area. And then we look to see conversions based off of that within a certain amount of time.

Now we can see direct correlation. We can see how many times those phrases were actually said. We know when those phrases, where they're said, where they're coming from on what day. So the attribution could be much higher.

With the implementation of the tracking pixel, we can get really granular so now we know exactly the conversion where it came from, from the point at which the user spoke that phrase all the way to the desired effect for that ad.

The hurdle we have is education, right? Because it is changing consumer behavior. We've all accepted URLs as the way the internet works. And honestly, they suck. I mean, they're really, guys like me invented it years ago and it just became the norm. And they created domain names, which are our pseudo language because IP addresses were way too cumbersome.

I mean, there's a reason Google is a multi-billion dollar company, right? Because it's not easy to remove URLS. Right? We all remember jingles from when we were little kids, the DOUBLEMINT Gum. We all sing them, honestly, they just, they stick.

So if you can use that same capability within humans, something that's easy to remember, it's something that they'll go back to at any time.

What's next for Vocalize?

So we're in talks with some major companies as far as deploying our SDK. I can't mention their names, but this would Vocalize-enable upwards of thirty million daily average users instantly by them adding our SDK into their app a lot of people have installed already. We're also building out our development teams so we can fully execute some of the roadmap I mentioned with the tracking pixels.

But we're looking to also expand our exhaust data capabilities. So being able to find out how many people said certain phrases on certain times, and then potentially export that in a much more unique way. Right now we can do it in a CSV file, just some raw data that they can pop up. But we want to make that a little bit more user-friendly as well.

So that's really, we're focusing on our SDK work. The focus is we're not going to get fifty million people to download our Vocalize app, right? Not going to happen. But to focus on our SDK partners and we're making really good progress there, as well as building out our development team. We're really excited with what's upcoming in the next few months.

If podcasters are interested in this, what should they do right now?

They reach out to me. You can purchase your phrase on Vocalizemysite.com. If you have the app, you can just Vocalize "best website ever," if you want to get right to our site. Or you can email me, you can just email cj@Vocalizemysite.com and that's Vocalize with a 'Z' for those Anglicised listeners that may use an 'S' in there.

It's real simple. It takes about five minutes to set up a phrase and it works instantly. Even if you change the URL destination, it updates instantly. It's not like a domain name where it takes about twenty-four hours to hit and propagate across the internet. It's immediate.

Special thanks to CJ for coming on the show to explain how Vocalize is making podcasting better.

This conversation sparked a few ideas for me. Like, how do we make our podcasts more attractive to brand-based advertisers? What does a world where voice assistants are much more universal look like for podcasters? And what can we podcasters do to make our own content more memorable?

Those are topics I'll be exploring the rest of this week.

But for now, I shall be back directly with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra. He's on a mission to make podcasting better. Links to everything mentioned in today's episode are in the notes section of your podcast listening app. A written-to-be-read article based on today's episode is available at podcastpontifications.com where you'll also find a video version and a corrected transcript, both created by Allie Press. Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. Find out more at Simpler.Media.