Category: In the News

Like other publishers, The Economist saw a surge in traffic to its coronavirus coverage. Traffic was 60% higher on average on content around this topic compared to all other online articles from the publisher in 2020, according to the company.

The interest spurred The Economist to expand its coverage of the pandemic into audio — the publisher launched a weekly podcast about the vaccine rollout, called “The Jab from Economist Radio,” on Feb. 15. The podcast secured regional sponsors including Cigna for APAC and Fujifilm for EMEA.

“COVID is the most consequential and urgent story of the day, so we want to surround it with journalism in all formats,” said The Economist president Bob Cohn.

The Economist has produced podcasts since 2006, but did not launch its first daily series and flagship show “The Intelligence” until 2019. The company has grown its portfolio of podcasts to six, which attracts 3 million unique listens and 25 million downloads monthly, Cohn said.

Podcast-based revenue at The Economist is up 50% year over year. “There is a growing podcast line in our advertising business,” Cohn said. “Our podcasts are free… and we believe that they contribute to overall awareness and top of the funnel and drive subscriptions to the main Economist at the same time.” He called podcasts a “growing sector” with “organic consumer interest,” leading the company to “put some editorial and product muscle behind it.”

Most publishers view podcasts as an avenue to expand their brand and reach different audiences, with the hope that those listeners will become paying customers to their membership programs. That’s in addition to the advertising growth many are seeing from the medium.

There was a “huge uptick” in coronavirus-related podcasts around the beginning of the pandemic, according to Dave Zohrob, co-founder and CEO of Chartable, a podcast analytics service. Along with newsletters, live blogs and interactive maps, publishers embraced podcasting with a new sense of urgency to chase an uptick in traffic brought in by coronavirus coverage.

When “Coronavirus Daily” launched in March, it was NPR’s fastest growing podcast to date, for example, according to the publisher.

Other publishers also saw success with podcasts last year. Bloomberg’s overall podcast revenue was up 33% in 2020 over 2019, according to the company. Its narrative podcast “Prognosis” previously covered the future of healthcare, but became a daily show focused on the pandemic in late March 2020. Though it reduced its production schedule to three times a week at the end of last year, unique listeners per episode are up 140% year over year since it pivoted to covering the coronavirus crisis, according to a company spokesperson who declined to provide exact podcast revenue figures.

In March 2020, The Atlantic launched a daily podcast about living through the pandemic, called “Social Distance.” It became a weekly podcast in August, but its audience continues to grow steadily and attracted advertisers like HBO. Podcast revenue has also increased, though the media company did not provide exact figures.

Overall, podcast downloads are up 10% since the beginning of the year compared to downloads before the 2020 holiday season, when listening usually dips, according to Zohrob. Bloomberg Media’s audio portfolio of about 20 digital and radio podcasts has seen a 60% year-over-year increase in monthly unique listeners, the company’s spokesperson said, without giving exact figures.

Though COVID-focused podcasts were “extremely popular at the start of the pandemic,” those shows dropped on Chartable’s rankings in May 2020, Zohrob said. While those podcasts continue to be popular, they do not have the same growth rates as when the pandemic started, and are “not attracting as many new listeners,” he added.

Some podcasts launched to cover the pandemic broadened their scope.

In June last year, for example, NPR’s “Coronavirus Daily” podcast rebranded into “Consider This,” to include covering the civil rights movement, the economic crisis and 2020 presidential election. And the Los Angeles Times launched a limited-run series, “Coronavirus in California: Stories from the Front Lines” in early April with 40 episodes. Coronavirus coverage will be incorporated into other new and returning podcasts, said Abbie Fentress Swanson, executive producer for podcasts and audio at the Los Angeles Times.

Commercially, buying ads around coronavirus coverage on podcasts might be tricky for brands.

“You don’t want to be around the subject matter of the death count, but maybe around preventative care,” said Albert Thompson, managing director of digital ad agency Walton Isaacson. “You have to qualify the context of COVID that you don’t want to be around and establish those parameters.”

Hilary Ross, vp of podcast media at Veritone One, said she isn’t seeing a large number of advertisers seeking out coronavirus-centric podcasts, though in the past they have placed some ads on a few. The topic is difficult to avoid in daily news podcasts, many of which have begun to cover the pandemic. Podcasts are “generally an ad-lite environment” while brands’ messaging “has a higher share of voice in this ecosystem compared to others,” Ross said.

A publisher like The Economist, as an example, has chased this by growing its audio team to now include 17 employees.

“I have 100% confidence that we will continue to find opportunities to expand our podcasts,” Cohn said. “It is an area that we think is of growing interest to our audiences and is of growing value to the business at the same time.”

Every second counts in the consumer shopping experience

In the digital age of marketing, attention is currency, and with multiple demands competing for a consumer’s ever-decreasing bandwidth, something as simple as clicking a link creates friction, lengthening the buyer’s journey and introducing distractions. 

Imagine the following scenario. A consumer is reading the news and sees an ad for boots. They’ve wanted to buy new boots, so they click on the ad. The ad takes them to an e-commerce website. The consumer puts a pair of boots into their cart and clicks the checkout button. 

The next option pops up: Would you like to create an account or continue as a guest? The consumer hesitates. Do they want to spend the time creating an account with a password and then confirming their account? They choose to continue as a guest. And just as the consumer finishes inputting their address, they get a notification on their phone. It’s the kind of distraction that causes them to forget the boots, maybe not return to the content at all — the chances of them purchasing what was in the cart are now slim.

“With content commerce, consumers have the ability to check out directly within digital content,” said Mikaela Jaconelli, head of Sales and Key Accounts at Tipser. “It’s the same as with old retail management models; what matters when it comes to sales is location, location, location. This has been true in the physical space for a long time, and the digital surfaces are no exceptions. Today’s consumer wants to checkout at the point of inspiration, as conveniently as possible. The best opportunities are often granted to early adopters, and this is an opportunity for brands and publishers to keep up with this trend to stay relevant, keep reaching their target audiences and scale revenue.”

Content commerce: Keeping publishers and consumers together

Instead of encouraging consumers to navigate away from a publisher, content commerce gives consumers the option of buying an item without ever leaving the page. The result is a seamless experience in which a consumer remains immersed in the publisher’s content but has access to the entire shopper’s journey, from browse to purchase.

This doesn’t mean that affiliate strategies are obsolete, but it does mean they will be joined by other dynamic approaches that expand brands’ and publishers’ toolkits.

“Affiliate marketing, in my point of view, will still exist,” said Harm Heibült, director of BurdaStyle Group, a publisher based in Germany. “But if you are a publisher like us, where the entire experience is around inspiration and shoppable inspiration, then affiliate marketing is not the right approach because you have friction in the user experience by linking out to somewhere else … We were aware that if we wanted to become successful in the e-commerce sphere, we had to find a way to have somehow a fully integrated user experience.”

As an example of what “fully integrated” means, if a consumer is scrolling through Facebook or Instagram and comes across an ad for a product, they can simply click on the creative, see photos and descriptions, pick a size or color and check out with already saved payment information — all without leaving the feed. The content commerce environment fuses a more seamless on-site or in-app content experience with something close to a one-and-done purchase experience.

Adding content commerce and shoppable content to the marketing mix

So how do publishers get started with content commerce and shoppable content? 

One answer lies in partnerships. And while finding the right technology partners is essential to creating this type of unique experience, there are some key questions publishers should ask to ensure they’re working with the right external team.

• Do the products, the brand and the partner all align with the brand position and target group?

• Can the partner ensure that data regarding stock availability is consistently updated, avoiding customer disappointment? This is particularly important for specific campaigns featuring discounts that can drive a high volume of sales.

• Customer service quality — including factors such as shipping times and easy returns — is non-negotiable. Does the partner have an embedded shopping approach that ensures a premium customer experience? 

As Heibült notes, it’s premature to say affiliate marketing is a thing of the past — but as customer expectations continue to focus on increasingly seamless experiences, shoppable content has emerged as a viable solution to pitfalls such as abandoned cart syndrome and consumer distraction. The more steps that are required to complete a purchase, the likelier a customer will lose the inspiration to buy.

Keeping a customer’s attention — and driving purchases — requires brands and publishers to combine forces to deliver shoppable moments within content. When they create that outcome, everyone wins: The customer gets a seamless experience, the publisher sustains and drives engagement and the brand gets a new customer.

Sponsored by Tipser.