What you need to know:

• Explore Worldwide last month sidelined brand safety fears to put the True Crime podcast category to the test.
• A newcomer to the Australian market, the small tour operator needs to drive forward brand awareness, and with relatively tight budgets. 
• Podcast specialists Earmax Media reckoned the oft-blacklisted True Crime podcast genre could hold the key – reaching an audience of more than one million Australians who skewed close to Explore's target demo, women 40-to-60-years old.
• In theory, the category would present an opportunity to reach an untapped audience, and effectively "own" a category for the same CPMs as a run of network buy.
• In practice, the campaign exceeded all expectations, delivering a response rates of 7 per cent via one of the brand's audio network partners – seven times the typical podcast benchmark.
• The trial ran through January, with contextually relevant creative to match. The True Crime category accounted for 80 per cent of the campaign spend – the remaining budget going to a run-of-network buy. 
• The same month, Explore saw a 23 per cent year on year increase in global web traffic, and a 25 per cent YoY increase in booked revenue in ANZ.

The research shows that True Crime podcasts are well placed to overdeliver on advertising effectiveness – with an audience that significantly over-indexes on purchase intent for categories like travel, furniture and white goods.

Per last year’s Crime Pays study published by IAB Australia and Neuro Insight, the category reaches more than one million Australians every month, with a skew to the valuable 25-54 female demo.

But the biggest opportunity was the said to be that the genre’s above-benchmark engagement was maintained right through the ad break – attributed to the True Crime listener’s curious, problem-solving motivations. Ads that managed to tap those motivations in a contextually relevant way performed higher on memory encoding – and were even more effective.

As Neuro Insight’s Peta Pynta put it, “any other genre or media channel would probably kill for that stickiness”.

The problem, according to the report, was that brand safety fears had turned advertisers right off – only 22 per cent of agencies had directed ad dollars into True Crime in 2023, versus the 63 per cent that invested in the Entertainment and Lifestyle categories.

But slowly, that’s changing. Advertisers, like UK-based small tour operator Explore Worldwide, have been dipping a toe in the water in the hopes True Crime’s on-paper opportunity will ring true.

The outcome? Per Explore, a 7 per cent response rate to the True Crime ads run with one of its network partners – meaning, 7 per cent of all unique listeners went on to visit the website, as measured with pixel-based tracking.

It’s a result well above the industry benchmark where a response rate above one per cent is considered a success – and that's for podcast ads using a discount code.

The response to the True Crime placements, which accounted for 80 per cent of podcast spend in the brand's January campaign, contributed to a 23 per cent year on year increase in global web traffic for the month, and a 25 per cent YoY increase in booked revenue across Australia and New Zealand.

Top of funnel 

Explore Worldwide set up shop in Australia at the beginning of 2023, under the leadership of ANZ director Ben Ittensohn – previously working out of the company’s UK headquarters as global sales director.

While the brand has long been represented in this market by other travel firms, it’s not had the presence it enjoys in the UK. And with major competitor Intrepid Travel playing with a home advantage, growing Explore’s local brand awareness has been an uphill climb.

But it’s gaining altitude – thanks to a digital first push across both consumer and trade channels, per Ittensohn. He says pay-per-click (PPC) – i.e. the likes of Google and Meta – has played a big role in Explore’s Australia growth to date.

“We were looking for mediums that we could really gage performance on and really target our demographic.” That being 40-to-60-year-olds, and skewing female.

While Explore’s brand advertising had typically fallen to global, early successes in the Australian market unlocked the budgets required to broaden the local team’s marketing remit.

Over the past year, that’s enabled the travel company to run several regional podcast campaigns via specialist agency Earmax Media. Late last year, the brand’s risk-appetite was tested when the podcast agency suggested they trial True Crime.   

Untapped opportunity

At first glance, True Crime’s audience has an obvious synergy with Explore’s target demographic. Plus, with few advertisers willing to go there, the competition for share of voice is low – translating to bang for buck.

“Really the rationale for us moving into True Crime, into this category, was that it really indexed well for our demographic – it aligns perfectly to that audience demographically and we get good value because a lot of brands wanting to steer clear of true crime,” per Ittensohn.

"We think our customers understand that by advertising here, we're not endorsing crime by any means. But, we get to talk to really intelligent, interested people, and as a result we get some great value and ,in some ways, get to own this category."

As Earmax Media co-founder Andy Maxwell explains, Explore pays the same CPMs to to reach its audience via a standalone True Crime buy, as it would in casting the net wider to target females 40-60 across the piste. The big upshot for the True Crime buy, he says, is that advertisers can craft contextually relevant – i.e. more effective – campaign creative. By contrast, a multi-category buy by nature sees ads appearing across more a more fragmented range of content. 

In putting the theory to the test, Explore agreed to redirect the majority of podcast spend for its January podcast campaign into a True Crime buy, with the final 20 per cent left for a ‘run of the network’ buy across categories like travel, food, and culture. In total, the campaign spanned seven creative iterations, five depicting local tour guide’s intimate connections with destinations in South Africa, India, Italy, France and Japan. The latter two destinations were reworked into creative made specifically for True Crime – you can check one of them out in-situ below.

Contextually relevant

“The [creative] framework that we've created for Explore is really involving the listener,” says Ralph van Dijk, Earmax co-founder and the creative brain behind audio advertising shop Eardrum.

“You are painting the pictures as a listener, and because of the nature of the way you listen to podcasts, you're leaning in, you're engaged, and you are participating.”

“Taking that to a true crime environment was a relatively straightforward step, because we just needed to acknowledge that the listener is in a certain mind frame and listening to a certain thing… You're taking the pictures that the listener had been forming in their minds during the [podcast] – it could be an intense, dramatic, violent scene – and you're replacing it with this equally interesting picture of being in a vineyard, having a glass of sémillon next to a dog who's going truffle hunting.”

“Suddenly, the drama is out of your head, and you're now imagining you’re on this holiday… It's just a matter of acknowledging the listener’s environment, the context, and then taking them on a journey and replacing that picture with another one – and that takes like five or seven seconds at the beginning of the ad, and then you've got them.”

He says the brand safety fears purported by the market are largely unfounded – "they're just not trying hard enough".

"It's not like we watch a TV show and when the ads come on we go: 'I can't possibly watch this Toyota ad because I'm still thinking of the thing that I just saw two minutes ago' - of course not. We jump all the time. We're very adept at it."

"I just think it's through a lack of attention and investment in the creative to actually make it work in that environment, because the audience is there. They're smart, they're curious, and they're engaged."

Hypothesis proven

With January “a really important month” for Explore globally, from both a booking and consideration perspective, the campaign’s key objective was to drive traffic to the website – and that they did, driving it up 23 per cent year on year.

“We did have a have a sale running for a period of it, but not for the entire month. So, for us it was about getting customers to the website and interacting and seeing the breadth of product that we have globally,” says Ittensohn.

“I won’t go into the specifics of the networks, but one of the networks had response rates over seven per cent, and as I understand, that's considerably higher than the industry benchmarks.”

They also used tracking pixels to measure purchases and leads attributed to the campaign – and with “really impressive results”, per Ittensohn. Overall, the ANZ business saw booked revenue lift 25 per cent in the month of January.

Earmax’s Maxwell is optimistic Explore will be keen to go even bigger on True Crime next time round.

“It was really important for us to first prove that this works. Now that it has, our recommendation would be working with a host and finding a way to do something more integrated.”

Which means further proof that true crime pays is likely incoming.