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February 17, 2021 | 4 min read

With the trajectory of podcasts continuing to grow, Slate’s Senior Director of Ad Operations Jen Castillo explains the importance of performance data and how regulations will play a big role in the quality of podcasts in the upcoming year

With the trajectory of podcasts continuing to grow, Slate’s Senior Director of Ad Operations Jen Castillo explains the importance of performance data and how regulations will play a big role in the quality of podcasts in the upcoming year.

What is your current day job?

Jen Castillo: I am the Senior Director of Ad Operations at Slate. My day-to-day consists of managing everything that is ad and ad tech related which is monetization of our audio, and digital properties including programmatic.

What gets you excited about the podcast business today?

JC: What gets me excited is the trajectory of which the podcast business is growing. We are seeing a lot of momentum since podcasting started. When podcasts started, the tech and advertisers were far and few. Now we are seeing a lot more buy in from advertisers which has correlated to the audio space expanding over the past couple years. We are also seeing the tech become a growing part of the podcast industry as people are interested in the audience and understanding the analytics behind the podcast. I'm excited to see where this business will be two years from now.

What new and exciting trends are you seeing in podcasting?

JC: More regulation of the quality of the podcast is a trend that could help out the podcast industry. The medium itself is really growing and you are seeing a lot more podcasts being created. There is a saturation in the industry and not everything that is created is good content.

What keeps you up at night in the podcast business?

JC: With more entry from advertisers that are not direct response, access to data becomes a huge part of the conversation and the business model. It is important for the industry to start seeing this maturity. For me and what I do on a daily basis, the lack of access to data is always on my mind. In our world, everyone is listening to podcasts within the big companies like Apple and Spotify, smaller companies like Slate have a disadvantage in understanding the performance of ads as this information sits within their platforms. We want to understand more in terms of the analytics side to be able to compete against these bigger companies and make better decisions around what works and what does not for our advertising partners.

What are some of your personal favorite podcasts?

JC: I was really into the New York Times "Caliphate" podcast. Then once news broke about the ethics of the podcast, it put everything into perspective because something that is appealing to you might not all be true, which was a sad moment. On a better note, one of my favorite podcasts is "In the Dark" - the reporting they do is very interesting.

What has surprised you about the podcasting business?

JC: One thing we have identified since COVID started is that the advertising space in audio is a lot more resilient than the digital space. For example, digital advertisers that were running against COVID content were paused or cancelled, but in the audio space we didn’t see that much concern about adjacency. We think that is due to the nature of the majority of advertisers in the audio space being performance-based. If the relationship between the audience and the host is still there the listener is still likely to purchase even if the content is not “brand safe”.

Are there any big lessons or observations from COVID19?

JC: Content has definitely changed in general. My commute was a big change to my life as it was a place where I would spend time reading or listening to material that was related to the industry. Now that I don’t have a commute, my audio consumption has diminished a little bit. This was a big realization to figure out how I fit reading and listening to podcasts into my current day-to-day where I don’t have that commute time to catch up on what is happening within the industry.

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