I get most of my news from podcasts. They’re very convenient; I can load them up on the iPhone, and listen when I’m driving, walking the dog, riding the stationary bike, whatever.
One of my favorites is PBS’s NewsHour. They break up each of the news segments in an individual file. It really fits with how I want to consume news.
Over the last few months, Intel has started advertising on the NewsHour podcasts. A short commercial is run before each segment begins.
I applaud Intel for supporting podcasting, but they’re doing something very stupid. The commercial is simply one of their television advertisements. Unfortunately, these are not video podcasts, so the ads often make no sense with just the audio.
C’mon, Intel. Crack a little out of the budget to rework the ads in audio only versions. Or better yet, create new ones just for this media.
I hear this a lot on my podcasts and it is such an amazing waste of marketing $$. The opposite happens even more often where an advertiser puts an audio ad onto a video podcast with a still picture for the video. This is at least functional, but I bet most people have no appetite to consume that ad either.
A great number of video podcasts have no upside to the video portion and when riding a bike or walking a dog, these podcasts are still informative without looking at the screen. This creates the Intel problem you described even when the advertiser correctly adds video ads to video podcasts and audio ads to audio podcasts.
The most ideal solution is to create video ads with audio that works as stand alone but is enhanced by the video layer. This solves all of the problems and also works when a user listens to a video podcast without actually watching the video. Of course that is probably easier said than done.
Madison Avenue isn’t going to like the idea of making an audio layer to the ads that work without the video; I’m sure they’ll want to do versions unique to the medium.
I think back to the Real Men of Genius series, however, that worked very well in either version. Nicely reenforcing.