By Rob Greenlee, VP, Content and Partnerships, Libsyn.com
You might be asking a simple question of Why? Yes again, we have been here before and it was called the Association of Downloadable Media (ADM). It was a grassroots started organization formed by some of the larger players in the podcasting space back in 2008.
Now ten years later and much maturity in the market has occurred, but most new people to podcasting will not have known this history. It is also true that it does not matter now much what happened in the past, but what we do now going forward. I agree with that thought, but some lessons can be learned from that experience to make an organization work this time.
The ADM was mostly a failure by most measures with group in fighting and backroom closed door communications in efforts to control the efforts of the group, but some good came out of it and we did set some very basic measurement standards that has carried the overall podcasting industry till the more recent efforts by the IAB Podcast Metrics Working Group to establish v.1 and more recently IAB v.2 Podcast Metrics Standards.
The thought is to create and industry group that can collaborate to create more standards in the industry around advertising formats, best practices around dynamic ad insertion and programmatic ad buying. The large brands and agencies need some whitepapers with examples of successful advertising campaigns.
As we see host/talent read ad spots converge more with programmatic buying platforms we will see revenue grow in the podcasting medium.
Clearly we also need to keep working on audio playing client side metrics to realize the complete picture of listening from downloaded podcast audio files.
This new unnamed podcast industry association would enable everyone to come together around growing the listening side of the podcasting industry with the potential of co-op online and offline marketing and promotion.
I have a proposed name for the new association and that might be “Professional Podcast Association” (PPA) or “Global Podcast Association” (GPA). Please reach out and let me know if you have any other ideas about this proposal – rob at robgreenlee dotcom.