What is dynamic ad insertion?

Today on 5 Minute Mondays, you’ll learn about dynamic ad insertion and how it can (potentially) help your podcast.

Platforms that offer DAI:

• Art19
• Midroll
• Megaphone

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Transcript

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Travis 0:00

Today on five minute Mondays you'll learn about dynamic ad insertion and whether or not it's a good idea for your podcast. Welcome to five minute Mondays where we're bringing the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now we are wrapping up our nine part series about podcast monetization two day . That's right. This is the last episode. And over the last two months or so, we've been covering the pros and the cons of each of the currently popular strategies to help you decide which, if any of them are right for your podcast. And today we're going to talk about dynamic ad insertion, which is a newer technology that is coming into the podcasting space. And a lot of people are curious like what is it and is it helpful and how can I use it? And under what circumstances would it be beneficial. So want to cover all those bases for you today so you can walk away as a dynamic ad insertion expert. So first of all, what is dynamic ad insertion? Uh , well if you think about traditionally how host read ads are featured in podcast episodes, what a sponsor pays you to promote their product . You had record a host read ad where you are reading off all the glowing features of said product and encouraging your listeners to go and check it out. And then you would feature that in your podcast episode audio file. And that ad would be what they call the industry baked in. So someone listened to that episode three years from now, that advertisement would still be there. But dynamic ad insertion allows you to swap hosted ads without having to change the original episodes audio file. And there aren't a lot of solutions out there at the moment and there are none that are do it yourself. So if you went dynamic ad insertion, you have to switch platforms, you have to switch hosts more than likely. And so switching to a platform that offers dynamic ad insertion is a bigger decision than just, would it be nice to have this option at some point in the future. You want it to be a part of your, your larger strategy. Okay, so let's run through three scenarios where dynamic ad insertion would make sense. The first one is if you're part of a podcast network or you want to join a podcast network, because many podcasts networks will work directly with ad agencies and they want the ability to swap ad spots across all of their podcasts. So if you join a network that has 20 podcasts and they sign us a deal, a Squarespace square foot space wants their ads on all 20 podcasts, so your podcast network will want that flexibility of being able to swap out ads on the fly. And in this case, when you go this route, you have less control if any, over the ads that are featured in your podcast. But on the flip side, you don't have to hunt down your own sponsors. That's why you would join a podcast network. The second scenario is if you run a lot of time sensitive ads. Now, when you first start monetizing your podcasts , simple ad reads for affiliate products you recommend, or even selling your own products are relatively evergreen. And that word evergreen simply means that it doesn't matter if someone clicks the link today or six months from now, that product in that deal will still be there. They can still get that 30 day free trial. They can still go check out your book on Amazon, right? If, however you start doing a lot of product launches and promotions where you're promoting a product with a limited signup or purchase window, then you might want to consider doing dynamic ads because if you're going to work with somebody who's launching this new, you know, $2,000 course on how to create online courses, very meta, but those exist and the doors shut at a certain place. You don't want to continue to run ads for that promotion when it doesn't exist anymore. You want to be able to swap that out for something else that you can send your listeners to. Then the third reason, and this one's less compelling, but I've seen it, is that you aren't sure if you want to keep promoting a product into the future. And I've seen this happen with podcasters that aren't sure what their audience will respond to. So they try and just promote a wide range of products hoping that one will stick. Now if you have dynamic ad insertion, you can then replace all the ad spots with the product that your audience responded to. And while that's not the worst thing you could do, I would argue that it's better to promote products that you believe in and personally endorse over the ones that will get the most clicks. That'll serve you much better in the long run. So the question, should you use dynamic ad insertion? Probably nuts. So unless you're in one of the first two scenarios, you're in a podcast network or you're running time-sensitive ads a lot, then it's a lot of work for not much payoff . But if you are curious what solutions are currently out there, I will leave some links in the show notes for you to go and check out. Well, that wraps up our monetization series here on five minute Mondays. If you enjoyed it or you learn something new, it would mean the world to us. If you subscribe to the bus route YouTube channel or left a review for the show in Apple podcasts, and if there's something that you want us to talk about on a future episode, just click the link in the show notes and you could submit your topic or question. Thanks for listening and as always, keep podcasting.