Every year, the number and percentage of minority podcast listeners continues to grow. Today, Scarborough research shows that 43% of the U.S. podcast audience is made up of minority listeners, compared with 30% 10 years ago.
Nielsen was a sponsor and presented findings at this year’s Radio Ink Hispanic Conference. Bruce Supovitz participated in a panel discussion on the revenue potential of podcasting and how it can help grow radio audiences. The panel was moderated by Eric Garcia (Director of Sales/Radio, Univision). Panelists included Yesenia Bello(SVP/Multicultural, iHeartMedia), Oscar Sermento (Director/Market Development at Triton Digital), and Matty Staudt (President/Co-Founder Jam Street Media).
When looking at general listener trends, Bruce noted that Hispanic podcast listeners over-index compared to typical podcast listeners for people listening to four to seven podcasts a week.
“We’ve seen that host read spots are very effective,” said Bruce. “We’ve done over 250 brand lift studies and non-host read spots have a 62% brand recall but a host read spot has 71%. Podcast Buying Service also has demographic information. For the very first time, you can look up Hispanic demographics and podcast listeners and tie them to specific brands to show how they indexed. It’s a very powerful tool.”
Rich Tunkel, SVP of Business Development for Nielsen Audio, also hosted a presentation on the podcast landscape and cross-platform opportunities. Rich shared with the audience key trends and insights related to the Hispanic listener demographic as well as how podcasting can boost audio listening.
Rich shared an example where a Spanish broadcaster can add reach by adding podcasting to their portfolio. Using an example of a specific Spanish broadcaster, he noted that adding podcasting to AM/FM radio increased the overall reach of radio by 6.5% among adults 18 and older and among 18-49 year olds as much as 7.3 percent of additional reach.
“Podcast audiences enhance audio campaigns,” said Rich. “Podcast audiences are going to be the next way that radio looks to extend what it has to offer (in combination with radio) to advertisers as they look for an attractive audience that is willing to spend money and ready to be responsive to advertising.”
