I'm currently aware of one podcast (risky.biz) where I don't always the ads; they have, per episode, one interview with an advertiser, with the following features:
* it's a different interview each episode
* many of the interviews talk about actual interesting stuff. For example, a thread intelligence company talks about some recent trends in phishing and credential stuffing they observed, not primarily about their services. It's still good advertising for them.
* I believe the host that he vets the advertisers and doesn't just let everyone sell crap products through his podcast
Now that is a lot of effort both for the producer and for the advertiser, but that podcast has been running for several years, so it seems to work.
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The first problem is: producing a custom sponsored interview for a single podcast episode isn't sustainable for any small podcast. You really need something bigger to make it worthwhile.
The second problem is, that is one example of Good Advertising. Maybe by thinking deeply about it, I'd come up with two more. Finding thousands of examples of Bad Advertising seems trivial.
What can be done to shift that balance? I honestly don't know, the incentives seem to point towards mass-produced, annoying ads.
Covid lockdowns shifted attitudes about wfh so significantly.
I wonder what would happen to society if we had a month where all advertising stopped. People would find new ways to buy things, and the economy would continue in new adaptive ways. Would be really interesting to see what would happen after the prohibition was lifted.
I'm currently aware of one podcast (risky.biz) where I don't always the ads; they have, per episode, one interview with an advertiser, with the following features:
* it's a different interview each episode
* many of the interviews talk about actual interesting stuff. For example, a thread intelligence company talks about some recent trends in phishing and credential stuffing they observed, not primarily about their services. It's still good advertising for them.
* I believe the host that he vets the advertisers and doesn't just let everyone sell crap products through his podcast
Now that is a lot of effort both for the producer and for the advertiser, but that podcast has been running for several years, so it seems to work.
---
The first problem is: producing a custom sponsored interview for a single podcast episode isn't sustainable for any small podcast. You really need something bigger to make it worthwhile.
The second problem is, that is one example of Good Advertising. Maybe by thinking deeply about it, I'd come up with two more. Finding thousands of examples of Bad Advertising seems trivial.
What can be done to shift that balance? I honestly don't know, the incentives seem to point towards mass-produced, annoying ads.