Acast, the world’s largest independent podcast company, has announced the addition of Keyword Targeting to the Acast Marketplace, unlocking more contextual opportunities for advertisers and increased revenue for creators. The new proprietary capability follows Acast’s launch of Conversational Targeting earlier this year and is the second of several tools to be released from the suite.

Despite macroeconomic uncertainties and shrinking marketing budgets globally, podcast advertising remains a growing industry and is still forecasted to surpass $4 billion in value by 2024 in the US alone. With advertisers continuing to flock to the space, Acast’s insights and innovation-led approach creates opportunities for brands to scale their messages  across its network of 88,000 shows.

Now, with Keyword Targeting, advertisers can align their message with the most contextually relevant content spoken being about within an episode. This significantly increases targeting relevance, reduces wastage, and results in a more contextually relevant advertising experience for listeners.

Take for example, a guest and host of a comedy podcast record an episode about cooking disasters in the kitchen. By using advanced speech-to-text transcription technology combined with artificial intelligence and natural language processing,  Acast can now identify key words and phrases spoken within that episode. This effectively enables an advertiser, for say, a new cookbook or perhaps kitchenware utensils, to reach new audiences by targeting contextually relevant conversations within shows that may be from a completely unrelated category.

Not only does Keyword Targeting enable more precise, privacy- safe targeting than ever before for brands, as the technology evolves it will be further incorporated into Acast’s existing brand safety capabilities.

“We’re on a mission to ensure advertisers can be as contextually relevant - and effective - as possible in podcasting. With Keyword Targeting brands can be part of the immediate conversation, whether that’s a major calendar event, breaking news story, or even something as quirky as an interviewee’s favorite meal,” said Chris Wistow, Acast VP of Advertising Product. “Furthermore, Acast podcasters of all sizes will benefit, with Keyword Targeting surfacing new shows to advertisers who might previously have made decisions based on podcast category alone.”

As the latest development in Acast’s mission to revolutionize conversational targeting in podcast advertising, Keyword Targeting can be bought either directly or programmatically. Both Keyword Targeting and IAB Category Targeting, which launched earlier this year and enables advertisers to target on the episode level, are now available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch, with more languages to be added in the near future. 

Acast is a global leader in podcast advertising that works with more than 2,400 advertisers each year. Some of the biggest brands partnering with Acast include Amazon, State Farm, Macy’s, Ikea, Klarna, Ulta, and more.

For more information on Keyword Targeting, please contact [email protected].