New York, NY, February 9, 2021 – Kantar, the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company, today announced it has partnered with podcast platforms Megaphone, Acast, and Midroll. Alongside existing relationships with Pandora and Spotify, Kantar is now able to measure and analyze the effectiveness of podcasts ads within popular publishers, such as The New York Times, iHeart Media, Cadence13 and Conde Nast.
Podcasts have been particularly effective in reaching consumers, with revenues reaching $708.1 million in 2019. In Kantar’s latest Media Reactions study, for example, podcast ads topped the US ad equity ranking for online channels, as consumers found the ad environment on podcasts less cluttered and more trustworthy compared to other digital channels. In turn, 36% of marketers plan to increase budget for ads in podcasts in 2021.
These partnerships give Kantar clients exclusive access to podcast advertising metrics, building on Kantar’s broad range of rich and traditional ad intelligence insights. Kantar clients will be able deterministically associate exposure to panelists, gain access to more granular creative results, and optimize their existing media plans to identify new ways to engage podcast listeners. “The addition of Megaphone, Acast and Midroll to our already existing podcast partner roster further bolsters Kantar’s ability to measure podcasts across media plans and offer marketers a better view of their marketing mix,” said James Jarzab, Vice President, Partnerships, Kantar. “As these are direct integrations, with multiple platforms, we can be even more accurate in exposure ID for dynamically inserted ads of these podcasts – especially critical as we enter a cookieless world.”
The partnerships are part of Kantar’s continuing effort to represent 95% of global digital ad spend by integrating 250 publishers into cross-publisher measurement by the end of 2021. Through Project Moonshot, Kantar aims to help steward the industry from cookie-based measurement to direct publisher integrations. Spotify and Pandora are among the audio partners announced in 2020.