The UK gets its own specialist podcast media agency today (12 May).
Earmax Media, which was founded in Australia in 2024, will appeal to brands (and possibly other agencies) with a promise to plan across every kind of podcast, and the ability to create audio ads through its sister agency, Eardrum.
Earmax was founded by Ralph van Dijk (who also founded Eardrum around 30 years ago) and Andy Maxwell, with the latter relocated from Australia back to London to run the UK office.
MediaCat spoke to Maxwell last week, about running a niche media shop, the changing landscape of podcast advertising, and the genius of BetterHelp’s advertising strategy.
You’ve started a media agency for podcasting. That’s quite a niche business, isn’t it?
Yeah, there aren’t any other full-service podcast media agencies that I know of. There’s other media agencies that do podcast buying, but I guess we’re the only one where the front door is podcast media.
The other thing that separates us is our sister agency, Eardrum. My business partner, Ralph van Dijk, who’s still in Australia, has had Eardrum for 30 years. Whereas I do all the media buying and have the relationships with the networks, publishers, independent podcasters, he will create the ads and do the script development. But yes, it’s pretty specific.
How big can you get if you stick to just that sector?
There’s more opportunity for growth now because podcasting goes into YouTube and across socials, and we do digital audio as well. So it starts with podcast media, and once you’ve cracked that, it’s then very easy to roll out into streaming across digital radio or music streaming. So, it’s using podcasts as the base. And once you’ve got great creative, it’s very easy to use the learnings from the podcast to go and target geographically and demographically across wider digital audio channels.
What’s the difference between a video podcast and just a video?
A video podcast needs to still work in just audio form. You still need to be able to switch off the video and have it make sense, and for it to be engaging as audio content as well. That’s my personal opinion.
Why would a client come to Earmax, rather than a large network agency that can do podcasts in addition to everything else?
First of all, we work with every single podcaster you can find. We’ll work with the big audio networks, the big podcast networks, but also independent publishers. There’s tons of independent publishers in the UK that often will miss out on briefs because the large media agencies typically will already have deals in place with the big networks. We also work with independent podcasters as well, and we really go out of our way to make sure that we’re finding the best podcasts to fit that brief.
And a lot of what we do, we do direct IO. We’re working with the publishers making sure that everything is being managed properly. And when it comes to measurement, we make sure that we go back to the business objectives, and then having either pixels on the website where we can track conversions — which a lot of people don’t even realise you can do in podcasting — or making sure that the links are in the episode description. There’s so much that can go wrong in the channel if you’re not all over it.
There’s also much more flex for us to do things with branded segments in YouTube or branded episodes, where we can go a lot deeper, and then go into social integrations as well.
What are podcasts best suited for, in terms of marketing objectives?
Driving consideration and brand affinity. There isn’t really another channel that holds attention like podcasts.
Do all clients want host-read ads, or has demand moved on from that?
It’s both. I think we’ve seen with recent campaigns the effect that really good ad creative can have in driving conversions as well. Obviously it depends on the budget as well. If you had a small test budget, I would suggest starting with a few host-read ads and then, as you grow and scale, and you understand the audiences that are converting, creating two or three audio ads and distributing those across a network or multiple networks or programmatically. A recent one we did with Explore Worldwide is seeing conversion rates on the 30-second-ad network buys almost in line with the conversion rates of host reads.
Is the audience for audio podcasting still growing or is it saturated now?
I wouldn’t say saturated; I’d say matured. In the UK, 39% of adult Brits are weekly podcast listeners, and if you look pre-Covid, it was only a third of that.
The trends tend to follow the US where the numbers have grown again. It’s definitely not the same spikes that we had through Covid times, but they are still growing year on year. The introduction of video podcasts is bringing more audiences into the channel, too, not just because they’re on YouTube, but also the promotional assets it gives you across TikTok and Instagram. One video podcast episode could give you five clips across social media that then bring in new audiences.
Audio listenership is still growing as well, and actually the weekly listenership is now growing faster than the monthly listenership. So what that says is the people in the medium are listening more frequently.
Are podcasts sufficiently represented in media plans?
Obviously I would say it’s underrepresented, but I do feel strongly that it is. Just being back in the UK this last month, I’ve spoken to a few parenting brands that have all said the same thing — they’re competing on Meta where it’s based on price and product, and there’s not as much room to get your brand messaging across. In the podcast space there’s less competition, and you’ve got more time.
Hopefully, as the channel has evolved and audiences get bigger, it will get taken a bit more seriously as a channel in its own right. From what I hear, usually audio only gets 5% of a media budget in any campaign, and then podcasts will only be a fraction of that.
But as I said earlier, if you start with podcasts, the rest of audio is easy because it’s just demographic. There’s only so much you can do in digital audio, whereas with podcasts you can go deep into the hosts and the content. You can make decisions based on common sense and what’s in front of you, rather than trying to test solely against demographics and geographies.
Did you say earlier that host-read ads still tend to get higher conversion rates than network buys?
Yeah, that’s generally correct. In terms of the pure numbers, host reads are higher. But they’re also more expensive. Let’s say it’s a 5% conversion rate from a host read, but it’s a 1.5% conversion rate from a network buy with a 30-second ad creative, it still might be similar in terms of the money that you’re spending.
Do you think planning and buying podcast advertising will continue to be done by a human, five years down the line?
I think so. I don’t know if there’s a more human medium than podcasting. AI’s impressive and we’re using it already, but I think we’re always going to need someone to go ‘yes, yes, yes, no’.
How has podcast advertising changed in the five or so years that you’ve been specialising in it?
People used to talk about the Wild West of podcast advertising, in terms of how ads were being delivered and whether they were actually being heard. That’s a lot better now. Most publishers will be IAB certified. So what counts as a download and what counts as an impression has come a long way since it started.
Still, there’s no perfect way of knowing whether your ad in the post roll has been heard. But I think the biggest changes are with video. Apple, Spotify and YouTube are all working towards digital video ad insertion. Usually, the way you buy podcast ads, you either have baked in ads that are part of that episode, or you have digital ad insertion, and if you’ve got a big back catalog, the ad can go in across all of that inventory. Until now, you’ve only been able to do baked-in video ads. So that’s going to be a big change for brands that have doubled down on the video strategy, in terms of being able to monetise their back catalog.
Spotify has streaming ad insertion, which actually tracks the ad impression itself, rather than digital ad insertion, which counts the impression once that episode has been downloaded, or progressively downloaded. But it has to be on Spotify.
Is it still possible to talk about content trends in podcasting — like true crime or chat shows — or is the channel too big for that now?
It’s a good question. Each of the categories is growing in their own right. You’ve got an abundance of business podcasts, personal finance podcasts, true crime, sport. The biggest trend for me is that a lot of big-name celebs and a lot of creators that may have previously had to rely on broadcast TV networks or radio networks can just set up their own podcast series.
Any podcasts you’d recommend?
I love The Rest Is History. That was my gateway podcast. Also, one from Noiser called Real Dictators. It’s almost more like a production-style podcast, rather than two people chatting. I’ve somehow ended up a bit of a history nerd.
I got into cosmology through podcasting. I keep being bombarded with ads for BetterHelp, the online therapy service, though.
They were one of the biggest podcast advertisers from day one. They’ve spent hundreds of millions on podcast advertising over the years. And now if you, as a podcast listener, need to get therapy, there is literally only one brand that you’ll even consider. They’re synonymous with the podcast medium, and that’s the opportunity I feel brands still have, but they won’t have it for much longer.BetterHelp has worked with The Rest is Politics, which can’t really endorse another mental health app now because their audience knows them to be aligned with BetterHelp. So, other brands have this opportunity to align with podcasts that are in line with their brand and just own it. But I think in five years the opportunity probably won’t be there because there are only so many big podcasts.
