Acast’s Henrik Isaksson on fixing irrelevant podcast ads in Australia

In the latest episode of Zanda Wilson’s new podcast, The Silver Bullet, guest and Managing Director of Acast, Henrik Isaksson talks about how Acast is working on tackling one of the biggest issues in podcasting – irrelevant advertising. 

This is an issue, not only for listeners, but also for advertisers who pay good money for targeted advertising. 

As a result, Acast has launched “conversational targeting”, which “allows us to index the conversation in a podcast and then match that up with a brand message,” said Isaksson.

“So for instance, if you’re talking about a holiday or a trip. We can then connect an advertiser based on the metadata in the podcast and make sure that a relevant ad is served and this is something that I am so excited about. The response from the market has been phenomenal.”

Henrik also declared that “podcast discovery is broken,” and alluded to the vested interests of the big platforms and listening apps making organic discovery difficult. 

“The platform war going on today… with all your podcast listening apps. They all have different agendas which is to push shows that are owned or hosted by that company,” said Isaksson.

Through the chat, Zanda and Henrik also speak a bit about Acast’s mission to get podcast creators not just paid, but well paid.

Henrik spoke about a future where paywalled and subscription-based podcasting would become commonplace, meaning listeners pay to subscribe to a specific podcast rather than a platform and get an ad-free version of the podcast. 

”We want to make sure that our creators are getting paid for the craft that they put out, and we want to make sure that it’s done on their terms as well,” he said.

“There’s been some statements made that Australia isn’t big enough for paywalls in podcasting or subscriptions in podcasting, and I think that could not be further from the truth.”

The conversation provides interesting insight into the future of the podcasting industry in Australia, the new number one podcast listening country in the world.

The episode is available across all major podcast platforms.