Hello and welcome back to News Weekly. I'm joined by one of our best friends on the show. His name's Ross Adams. He's CEO of ICOs. Ross, hello, How are you? I'm good. How are. You? I'm very good. Very good indeed. Now. And cos busy as always. They've come out with a new report. What's this one about? This is basically about another big research for us looking at one of our USBs, which is international and approaching the space on a global basis. We are different from many of the players out there, but for us it's about providing a global perspective on the podcast industry, especially for international podcast. So you've split this report into both emerging and established markets. Let's define what you call the emerging market, what you call the established market, which countries cover which. That's correct. So we selected kind of the countries based on where we see podcasting continuing to grow in popularity with new content being created and large audiences consuming that content and podcaster has helped us with some of that data. But if we look at the emerging markets, we've got India, Brazil, Singapore, Italy, Japan, Indonesia, the Netherlands and Spain, an only established side, and that's Canada, the US, Sweden, Australia and the UK. We divided those into emerging and established categories based on ad spend and market maturity for each of the regions. So overall I think the report which you did on 13 countries is, as you say, has said that the amount of time people will spend with podcasting is going to increase. Is that just something that we're now seeing, the popularity of podcasting coming back? Or is there another reason why people are spending more time with podcasts? Yeah, I mean, I think it never went away. I think, you know, I think podcasting is in that kind of another growth curve, in my opinion. I think because podcasting exists across platform to different channels, from video to audio, I think there's more and more audiences that are discovering podcasting continually. I think if you look at the US as a market and you have hundreds of just over 100 million uniques listening to podcasting on a monthly basis, the market is 350 million plus in population size. So a lot more have got to discover it. So we're still in that kind of growth curve in my opinion. But yeah, things like video help that we kind of discovered was more than 50% of podcast listeners from emerging markets and almost 40% in established markets plan to spend or increase their time spent with the medium in the next kind of six months, which is a really good signal for podcasting. Is TV and radio the loser? And we only have finite attention as humans. So if we're spending more with podcasting, w must be spending less somewhere else with the mediums. So is it radio or is it TV that's losing out? I think so. I think it's a blend here. I think TV, radio, I think press as well. I think now that a lot of publishers are putting out audio in terms of news and people can catch up in that way. And the good thing about an audio led medium is that in carrier anywhere you want and not just in the commute, but actually if you're working out or walking the dog, etcetera, etcetera. So I think that is an advantage for this medium. But I do think there are traditional mediums like linear TV, like radio. The hours will be spent less. It doesn't make them any less effective as a medium for hours were definitely spent less on those channels. Now, one of the things from the report, it talks about engagement and oddly, the emerging markets are more engaged with podcasting than the existing or traditional markets. Is that because we've got more distractions in these markets where we are here in the UK, US and less distractions? Or what is it that you think might cause the emerging markets to be more engaged? Yeah, I think it's a good argument now. I think if you look at the maturity of content in certain markets, it's a busier market. There's more to engage with, as you said, and therefore there's only finite time to consume that. And also these this medium is becoming fairly prevalent in these emerging markets. So as a newer medium, people want to spend naturally a bit more time with that as they're starting to discover it. But I do think you're right there in the fact that existing established markets do have a lot of content being produced in a multitude of mediums and therefore it's the busier markets, the time spent will naturally be slightly less. And one of the things that jumped out from the report is the level of trust that people have with the podcast as they listen to. In fact, they follow them on social media. Is that one of the reasons why your highlighting a higher purchasing rate from podcasting than from other mediums? I think so. Podcasting is, I think, the relationship with the host. If you think about audio first as a medium, yes, there's video and that's kind of engaging as well. But I think the core of what podcasting is is an audio format, and the relationship you have with the host is incredibly close versus any other medium. And I think that carries across onto social platforms. And so I think the engagement cross-platform and how you're engaging with that influencer, that creator creates a very close relationship which has an advantage over the other mediums for sure. One of the things that you highlight is 46% of the audiences in the UK, 53% in the US, but a whopping 68% in India. Discover new content on YouTube. Now we've seen the rise of YouTube over the last couple of years, and this is obviously the rise of video podcasting, and I've given up on saying it's an audio podcast or video podcast. It's just podcasting. Now how you consume it is up to you lean back, lean forward. But what we are seeing is that it's a younger audience is going towards that YouTube market rather than the older audience. Is that going to cause any difference in the way that people consume the content, as in trust in content? Now they can see the people or is it just the young people like to watch and all people like to listen? I think there'll be there'll be differing trends, and I think it's up to the creators to know, to surface that data and them to segment how they put that content out. I think video since you've got the video in front of yourself, that kind of narrative slightly changes when it's just audio based. But the younger audiences that are used to the likes of reels stories or short form content, so they do have a shorter attention span. Those dopamine hits, right? So I think naturally, if you look at podcast clips on the likes of Tik Tok or podcast clips on YouTube in forms of reels that the younger Gen-z audience engages massively with it. But it is short form. It's up to us how we find formats that effectively work there for an advertiser. But I do think that younger audience will engage with podcasting in a different way and and that will kind of evolve the medium over time. But I do think audio is still going to be incredibly powerful for them. It's yet may be a frontier that they need to kind of get across. Well, I mean, I agree that the younger audience likes that dopamine hit the Tik tok video and reels market. But if I watch my 20 year old daughters, they basically will cook dinner while having their favourite podcast on YouTube and watching it. And they will treat it like we did radio, which is they will have it on in the background for 2 hours, 3 hours, and they will just turn their heads towards it. When there's something that's being said. Again, I wonder if this is the Gen-z new radio, the longform podcast. Yeah, it could well be. I think the trends are there to be discovered and I think it's too early to say what the future of just audio podcasting will be. But video's definitely going to have to grow and definitely play a part in that. And I think that younger audience across all the social platforms, they engage on videos inherently the the kind of initial format they focus on, but they will engage in all platforms. So they are almost platform disloyal, but they are creator loyal. So they'll engage with the single creator regardless of what platform they're on, which is interesting. So what does this all mean for ICOs? Does this mean that you're going to be spending more time in emerging markets? Does this mean that you think you're going to be doing more video advertising? Does it mean what to the acast user and customer? I suppose. Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at kind of a cast, 90 plus percent of our revenue comes from advertising. So for us, it's about those advertising solutions with our podcast creators, as you said earlier, podcast or podcasting as a format is changed beyond just audio now and video is here and is established as part of the kind of ecosystem. It's then up to companies like ourselves. When you have creators who put content out on a multitude of platforms in the likes of video format, short, long form audio to how do we engage with those audiences and connect those audiences with our advertisers. So I think it is a real opportunity for companies like ours, and we've seen a huge trend in cross-platform omnichannel platform campaigns being delivered. So that's a big opportunity for Acast. One of the things that we've talked about on putting is weekly for quite a few weeks now is first party data, which Apple, Spotify and YouTube tend to get from listener behaviour. How does Acast get that data? Because we know that the download now is becoming a secondary metric. It's in effect, not a listen. You can't say a download equals listen and listen to an advert is different to a download. So how are you now trying to inject yourselves into the stream in order to get that first party data? I mean, I think when you think about first party data, it means really age and gender. That is the kind of the cool part. But nobody has all of the data of podcasting because the video podcasts will go across tens of platforms and therefore the audience is incredibly fragmented. However, understanding pockets of first party data allow you to extrapolate from that on to what in general is happening. So kind of it's an even playing field. So whilst they want an advantage from a platform, having some first party data, as long as you have a section of first party data, you can extrapolate from it as the tools you build around that. So I believe contextual targeting, as we've kind of made it based on have quite a few years ago, is going to be the way that people are going to be planning their media and making sure that the advert is not only targeted towards the right audience, but mainly within the right context. So I think that's inherently a big advantage for podcasting. You know, we transcribe all of our content is hosted on a cast, we run it through natural language processing and then we can look at what conversations are being had, what keywords are being mentioned, and then what areas around that would it make sense for an ad to fit around that content, to cut through that much greater and be that much more relevant? That's a real opportunity for the entire long tail of of podcasting. So it doesn't worry me that we don't have first party data on all the streams. As long as you have some, it allows you to extrapolate with 90 plus percent accuracy for advertisers. And contextual advertising was great when you came out with I don't think many people fully understood what you were doing when it first happened. I mean, now in hindsight it's a very logical step. Transcribe everything, look at the content, do some matching it without me having to say to listeners Drink. Is there any element of air involved in this? Because, oh my God, everyone has to have an air strategy. So is this a US air strategy now? We've been using air for a long time and you look at machine learning and how that works is the same principles attached to that. So definitely air is involved in air demographics, how we analyse content, how we segment that data, and then how we use air to segment that content in the right buckets and collections is really important. So air runs through everything that we're doing has done for a very long time, but it is kind of a buzzword right now. So yes, I definitely is involved in that. Okay, there you go. Everyone drink. Now, the last question I've got for you is you've got this bucket of wonderful data and you've been doing it for a few years now. Will you ever release the transcriptions back to the actual creators so they can put them in their RSS feeds? Because you're one of the massive sources of this, which, by the way, we are nudging Apple to do exactly the same. They transcribe everything. We know why you want to transcribe it. Yours is a business reason for advertising. Theirs is probably for Apple intelligence. We don't know. It's just one of those lovely opportunities you have, but you don't actually release that transcription anyway, from what I understand. Yeah, I think that's more of a question for our product team and road map, but I think if you look at what transcriptions do, it's for us, it's about what data does that enable and how can that data help a creator understand their audience in a better way and understand what content and what parts of their content is working in a more effective way. So that's a roundabout way of not answering your question, but answering your. Mean When are you going to be my local MP? No, that's fine, Ros. Look, if I wanted to read the full report, where would I go and get it? You can access this on advertised or acast dot com. That's where I will go next. Thank you Ross, so much for this report. Again, great insights. I'm look forward to the next one for make us Speak Soon. Appreciate being on the show. Thank you so.