With greater challenges facing public radio when it comes to simply surviving, programmatic advertising — the automated selling of unsold digital inventory on station streams and podcasts — has become a clear choice for generating much-needed revenue, as noted in the first of a series of “The New Sound of Sustaining Public Radio” webinars conducted by Paragon Consulting in partnership with SoundStack.
“[It’s] become more important than ever to continue to find sustainability strategies,” Public Media Company consultancy Director Carlos Barrioneuevo said during the April 30 webinar. “Public Media has struggled to monetize its digital inventory, in a way that commercial media has previously done.”
According to SoundStack Chief Marketing Officer Scott Klass, there are many more benefits from programmatic advertising in its current form. “It’s really not the wild west that it used to be,” he says. “There are many more controls. It can be highly targeted. Between the maturation of technology, new innovations, [there are] a lot more controls at the disposals of publishers and advertisers, buy side and sell side. It’s all about whatever the publisher’s comfort level is. Programmatic is a buying channel, a way to buy at scale, data focused, aggregated, and much more efficiently than buying direct. [It’s] a really strong avenue to generating new incremental revenue.”
Additionally, Klass says, “in an era where, especially with public media, staffs are getting smaller, the idea of something that’s still controlled but automated [is] a good option if you don’t have a lot of time. It’s very efficient in that way.”
Explaining how programmatic works, Paragon Sponsorship Consultant Geary Yonker notes that “it’s more like a setting process than a selling process. You’re going into a dashboard and setting the price parameters of what you would like to receive from the from the supply side, and then on the demand side, the advertiser is going to be doing the same.”
Yonker stresses that programmatic “doesn’t compete with what you’re doing from your local sales team. [They] can keep selling your podcast, your stream. This can work hand in hand with local sales and filling in the rest of that inventory.” He also notes that “your locally sold inventory will always air first as a pre-roll, then your local ads that you have within the broadcast are always going to be there, also playing within your live stream. So it shouldn’t interfere with what you’re doing locally. This should only be additive on top of that.”
Buffalo Toronto Public Media Senior Broadcast Radio Engineer Jerry Urban adds that “When set up properly, you can serve your listeners ads wherever they’re listening. If you are doing exceptions or things you don’t want to air, you can get very granular right down to the URL of the company that you don’t want to deal with. So ultimately, you do have an immense amount of control.”
When it comes to which sponsors to run, or issues with content or station image, there’s plenty of wiggle room with programmatic. “One of the things our CEO was very concerned about was making sure that we still had that public radio feel,” Urban says. “One of the things we learned quickly is your initial response is going to be to block a lot of stuff. Don’t. You want to loosen the reins. As an organization, you have to decide where that line in the sand is. We made a conscious decision leading up to the Super Bowl that we were going to allow DraftKings ads to run. There was revenue to be generated by allowing those ads to play once the Super Bowl was over.”
Were listeners upset hearing DraftKings ads alongside public media content? “We did not get any blowback,” Urban says. “[They] just see it as an interruption of what they’re there listening to. You don’t want to overthink it.”
Noting a Progressive insurance spot with Flo on Newark Public Radio jazz station WBGO Newark, NJ’s stream, Klass admits that “If you’re used to the more typical sound of a public radio ad, it’s a bit different.” But Paragon founder and CEO Mike Henry says it’s important to remember that “this is stream and podcast only, not broadcast. If WBGO had sold a local spot in that stopset, it would have run before the Progressive ad. And if I was listening in Denver and there was a geo-targeted ad there, I would have heard an ad for a business in Denver instead of New York.”
With ads like these, it begs the question, is programmatic advertising legal for public radio? “FCC regulations only apply to broadcast,” Henry says. “The only caveat is, if you are wildly successful selling a ton of programmatic advertising, be careful not to do too much commercial business that could risk your IRS tax-exempt status. There may be tax implications to consider with your tax accountant, but only if you exceed extremely high revenue thresholds, which no one has come close to at this point. A lot of us have grown up with public radio, trained on what we can and can’t do on the air, but what we can and can’t do on our streams and our podcasts are completely different.”
Yonker is optimistic about public radio’s acceptance of programmatic advertising. “We’re going through an unprecedented time in public media,” he says. “We face external pressures like unlike anything we’ve ever faced before, with the rescission of CPD funding and a federal government that is suspicious of our motives and our mission. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 17 years of working in public media, it’s that our industry is filled with extraordinarily bright forward-thinking people who care deeply about the fate of our stations. Every time we face new technologies, we’ve had the same concerns, and every time, our listeners and our members have stayed with us, they’ve grown [and] evolved with us, and they’ve understood why we make these changes.”
