What you need to know:

• Nova Podcasts is flipping the narrative and leaning into its small stature - 'significance over scale' is the core message it's taking to market.
• Chief commercial officer Nicole Bence says clients have "matured beyond" scale as the default. "They want to know the impact you can create for their brand.”
• Cue the network's latest trade campaign, which taps into the narrow but deep appeal of their podcast offering and the deep trust hosts have built with their listeners. 
• Nova is going after the "harder to reach consumers" with predominately host-read campaigns - Bence says the split sits somewhere between 50 to 60 per cent in the favour of integrated campaigns versus dynamic insertion.
• It's also finding traction with a new performance product that sells on cost per lead rather than CPMs.  For those with a strong call to action, Bence says it's working.

Per December's podcast ranker from Triton Digital, Nova, as a publisher, had a fifth of the listenership of ARN’s iHeart. It puts Nova in eleventh place, also trailing SCA, the ABC and Nine. When partner content is wrapped in, Nova was in third place, with roughly a third the audience of frontrunners ARN and SCA.

But does size matter? Chief commercial officer Nicole Bence reckons otherwise. 

“I think clients have evolved and matured beyond just scale. I think they want to know the impact you can create for their brand.”

Hence Nova pushing deeper impact, or "significance over scale" and vanity metrics as its key prop.

“Scale is always important; but we don't believe it's the number one thing in podcasting. We believe having a significant talent who's got a significant connection [with their audience] is more important for a brand, and equally, that talent being able to work with brands.”

Brand safety is not always a given within Australia's audio ad market. For Nova, "it's about working with talent that are accessible to brands, who know how to work with brands and are able to craft that sort of authentic messaging.”

Bence argues that's an even greater priority in the podcast space given the “intimacy” between host and audience and the opportunity for Nova is therefore to package up deeper niches of "harder to reach" consumers that are missed by broadcast channels.

“It’s almost custom build, the audiences that we want to go after. [We’re] using the talent, the genre and the content to be able to attract them,” per Bence.

Buyers are buying it, with with Nova considered by some as leader among local players in its ability to deliver bespoke and integrated podcast campaigns.

Bence says the numbers back that view with integrated campaigns now the majority of podcast sales.

“I think everybody understands the secret sauce is having the host read your content and whatever message you want to get out,” she adds.

Driving the message home

Pushing that message into the market more broadly has been the task of the ‘Homegrown Conversations’ campaign launched by Nova Podcasts in August.

Developed by Nova’s in-house team, the trade campaign spotlights 12 of Nova’s best known ‘homegrown’ podcast talent – names like Chrissie Swan, Joel Creasey, Brittney Saunders and Casey Donovan – and the ‘community’ of listeners that feel connected to them.

“We wanted to create talkability. We wanted to cut through. We wanted to get a different message out there, compared to some of the other podcasters and how they talk about their network,” says Bence.

“It was very much about tapping into the intimacy and the environment that that podcaster creates with their audience.”

The initial push ran for eight weeks across various trade titles, with campaign assets also rolling out across owned assets and organically on social. A second burst kicked off in November, shouldering the messaging-heavy weeks of the upfronts season.

It’s one part of a growth strategy that Bence hopes will kickstart conversations with strategists and decision makers further upstream and educate “those that are really close to clients’ objectives” on the kinds of formats and products that sit within the podcast offering.

Appointment viewing is one of the topics she says has been particularly impactful in the last year.

“If I'm partnering with a podcast that's [running] 40 or 45 weeks a year, I now have a regular occasion to talk to a group of people that I'm interested in communicating with, week after week after week, in a really consistent way that allows me to build a story arc over a period of time for my brand,” says Bence.

Audience fragmentation means that opportunity “doesn't exist in a lot of other media channels anymore".

Months on from last year's campaign launch and accompanying national roadshow, Bence says Nova has seen an increase in year-on-year podcast revenue growth from both new and existing spenders, with radio advertisers pushing greater budget into podcasts and more creators and partners joining the network as a direct result, "which was an unexpected but very welcome bonus”.

Cost per lead

Per the latest SMI figures, podcast ad growth continues to outstrip more mature media. But that's off a low base and convincing advertisers to embrace an emerging channel takes time and hard evidence. Bence said that comes down to proving performance beyond reach, which means Nova has to walk the talk.

Hence last year launching a performance product that swaps out the typical CPM rates for cost per lead. Bence said it gave advertisers an opportunity to find proof points that connecting talent, inventory and audience "is driving something meaningful" in terms of hard ROI.

CPMs remain the default for buyers, but Nova will keep selling on cost per lead where advertisers can realise – and measure – the upside.

Per Bence: “It’s got to have creative that has a call to action, and [it has to be] within a category where you've got a performance metric you're trying to drive, like [traffic to] a website or something like that.”

Still evolving 

To that end, Bence acknowledges Nova must continue evolving post-campaign reporting to prove performance and build advertiser confidence. There's also work to do with agencies given podcast ads are not yet owned by specific teams and functions.

“Sometimes you'll get a brief from a content team, sometimes you'll get it from the investment team, and sometimes it's via a digital-only team. It's not yet embedded in the [agencies'] day-to-day routine,” said Bence.

“I think it's up to all of us in the industry to really reach as many as we can next year and create more advocates for the channel.”

Then it's a case of packaging up those niches.