"Investors as well as brands have had the realization that a somewhat tech enabled agency didn't enable a true level of scale that the brands needed," said Leopold. "If you look at like the 10-ish billion dollars of brand direct to creator spend, that's very constrained. It's less than 2% of the $800 billion of digital media spend running through platforms."
For decades, 'primetime' has been a familiar concept to advertisers: the moment when audiences gather, attention peaks, and impact follows. Yet in digital out-of-home (DOOH), the idea of prime time is still a new and unexplored concept. Traditional DOOH planning relied on fixed schedules and average audience estimates, assuming exposure was relatively constant. But the real world doesn't work like that. People move in rhythms, not averages.
"Despite strong growth in podcast listenership, many marketers still see the channel as complex and hard to understand," Acast asserts. "Ads Academy aims to remove that friction by providing structured, flexible training that covers everything from ad formats and creative to targeting, programmatic buying, and measurement." The curriculum provides two on-demand courses, free of charge, designed to build the knowledge and skills which help plan and implement a podcast advertising campaign.