Audio powerhouse SXM Media may be introducing the ability for advertisers to target mothers that listen to podcasts in the future, according to the company’s senior vice president of B2B marketing and ad innovation Lizzie Widhelm.
SXM Media is the advertising sales arm of SiriusXM Holdings, which also owns audio platforms Pandora and Stitcher. Along with serving partners with a number of ad solutions such as host-read and dynamic audio advertising, the company also focuses on podcast measurement, and has collaborated with Edison Research on a number of reports on the consumption habits of different podcast listener groups, including Gen Z, Black, Latino and female podcast listeners.
Widhelm told PodPod in the latest episode of the podcast that the demographics chosen for the reports are based on watching new creators that join the SXM Media podcast network and assessing what new audiences and behaviours they’re introducing - one of which is mothers.
“I'm particularly interested in the purchasing power of moms,” said Widhelm. “We work with a lot of clients that are also interested in that, so trying to bring forth even packages or the ability to target moms across many shows, is probably where more of our next bit of work will be, because I feel like we've researched a lot of audiences at this point and put out a ton of reports.”
In 2022, Edison released an infinite dial report on the media habits of mums in the US with Wondery, Art19, and The Research Moms. The report revealed that the number of mums listening to podcasts was growing, having increased by 8% since 2020, and nearly half have listened to a podcast in the last month.
Widhelm also emphasised the importance of the podcast industry providing detailed information on listeners, as it can benefit advertisers in judging which areas they should be advertising in. An example of this is SXM Media’s most recent report with Edison, titled Growing Up With Podcasts, on the podcast listening and consumption behaviours of Gen Z consumers.
The report revealed that over 70% of the respondents tend to binge listen to their favourite podcasts, which affects the way brands advertise on podcasts in terms of the frequency of the ads they put out to avoid overwhelming listeners. SXM Media is starting to introduce the ability for buyers to set frequency caps in order to address this.
“With streaming, you would always be inserting ads and understanding exactly who the listener was, and you could not only manage who you were targeting, but the number of times you were targeting different individuals or devices,” said Widhelm. “And so we are bringing that into the podcasting space to do just that, both programmatically and [with] direct sales.”
