In this series we’re putting StatSocial, our social media audience insights engine, to work.
We’re checking in on the audiences of some of those companies whose names will be familiar to any regular podcast listener, as they are among the most prominent sponsors of many of the most popular podcasts.
What are we trying to determine? Above all else, for which brands do the most passionate members of these podcasts’ audiences show the strongest affinities? StatSocial scores audience affinities for 1,000 top podcasts in every audience report. In this series, we’ll show you the top-five podcasts audiences that are best aligned to the brand in question.
For marketers and agencies looking to optimize podcast ad spend, StatSocialis an indispensable tool. StatSocial also works for podcast ad sellers and networks looking to best position their podcast properties to the right advertisers. This article is a window into what StatSocial can uncover for ad buyers and sellers of all sorts.
(You can check out parts 1 and 3 in this here and here)
Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace, built the service’s earliest incarnation in 2003, while still a student at the University of Maryland. The initial inspiration was simple personal need. Casalena desired a more design-conscious, attractive, and user-friendly alternative to the clunky, website building assistance tools and blogging platforms available at the time, such as GeoCities.
Squarespace was developed, at first, solely for the purposes of Casalena cultivating his own online brand. As time passed he began to give friends and family members access to his tools, as these people in his life were encountering the same frustrations that had given birth to his invention. As ever more people began to use the Squarespace service, Casalena found himself with a bona fide business on his hands. While the company continued to grow he remained the only employee for the first few years.
By 2007, when Casalena graduated college, the business was pulling in $1 million a year in revenues. He moved to New York City and began hiring. Fast forward to now and the website building assistance tool and web hosting service has published over one million websites.
Squarespace is a frequent sponsor of some of the biggest podcasts out there. They’ve also shouted their name for all to hear from the peak of the highest mountain top, with spots that have aired during the past couple of Super Bowls.
The below, which aired during Super Bowl LI in 2017, even won an Emmy.
StatSocial’s insights tell us that 42% of Squarespace’s audience are female and that 58% of their social media audience makes $50,000 a year, or more. The city most strongly represented among Squarespace’s fans is New York, with its residents accounting for a little over 9% of their social media audience.
As is the case with Dollar Shave Club, the podcast topping the list here pairs with the brand in question perfectly.
1) Design Matters
Debbie Millman is, according to her own bio, a “writer, designer, educator, artist, brand consultant and host of the podcast Design Matters.”Design Matters, of which over 300 episodes have been recorded since its launch in 2005, is described on its home page as “The world’s first podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture through wide-ranging conversations with designers, writers, artists, curators, musicians, and other luminaries of contemporary thought.”
These above-mentioned luminaries have included Massimo Vignelli, Steven Heller, Marian Bantjes, Tina Roth Eisenberg, and Stefan Sagmeister, Milton Glaser, Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Barbara Kruger, and Seth Godin.
Worth noting, Millman is a professor at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, where she co-founded the first ever graduate degree in branding.
Her podcast finds favor among Squarespace’s audience to a degree exceeding the average by a whopping 46 times.
2) Side Hustle School
Chris Guillebeau is best known for his The Art of Non-Conformity blog and best-selling book. The Side Hustle School podcast is for those seeking to “Make Money without Quitting” their jobs, and expounds on the principles laid out in Guillebeau’s book ‘Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days.’
There’s little question that Squarespace is a service employed by many trying to give their own “side hustles” a more professional and sightly online presence than they might otherwise have the resources to create on their own. Guillebeau’s podcast finds favor among those in Squarespace’s audience to a degree exceeding the average by 17 times.
Here, Ferriss is on the list of influencers who resonate most strongly with Squarespace’s social media crowd, finding favor among them to a degree notably four times the norm. The proportion of fans of his podcast among this group, however, exceeds that of the average social media audience by over 11 ½ times.
4) Radiolab
Once nationally distributed by NPR, Radiolab — now in its 15th season since officially starting in 2005 — is produced and distributed solely by New York public radio station WNYC.
While it is a radio show, the majority of its 1.8 million listeners access it via podcast means.
The show/podcast is the product of the unlikely pairing of NPR science correspondent (a role he’s held in the past for ABC and CBS) Robert Krulwich and experimental composer and sound designer Jad Abumrad. The two met while the latter was working for NPR and was assigned to interview Krulwich, who was working at that time as a science correspondent for ABC. While 25 years apart in age, the two discovered they had a lot in common which led to their collaboration on this experimental, hour long show. Each episode explores a theme — — sometimes scientific in nature, sometimes philosophical — through intricate sound collage, interviews, anecdotes, and thought experiments.
Squarespace’s audience contains 10 times the quantity of Radiolab admirers as you’d find on average around the social-media-sphere.
Just as a social media influencer Vaynerchuk finds a proportion of this audience in his corner to a degree four-times greater than the average. His podcast, however, finds fans among this audience to a degree just a bit shy of 10 times the average.
In this series we’re putting StatSocial, our social media audience insights engine, to work.
We’re checking in on the audiences of some of those companies whose names will be familiar to any regular podcast listener, as they are among the most prominent sponsors of many of the most popular podcasts.
What are we trying to determine? Above all else, for which brands do the most passionate members of these podcasts’ audiences show the strongest affinities? StatSocial scores audience affinities for 1,000 top podcasts in every audience report. In this series, we’ll show you the top-five podcasts audiences that are best aligned to the brand in question.
For marketers and agencies looking to optimize podcast ad spend, StatSocial is an indispensable tool. StatSocial also works for podcast ad sellers and networks looking to best position their podcast properties to the right advertisers. This article is a window into what StatSocial can uncover for ad buyers and sellers of all sorts.
(You can check out parts 2 and 3 of this series here and here.)
Dollar Shave Club offers razors and blades via a monthly subscription / membership model. There are three different plans ranging from $3 to $9 a month. Applying this model to the personal grooming sector was devised to address the issue of what the company — and evidently quite a few shavers — perceived as ever-pricier and needlessly higher-and-higher-tech shaving products.
The company was founded by CEO Michael Dubin in 2011. They first launched their website in beta-mode in April of that year. It was a video uploaded to YouTube in March of 2012 that put them on the map overnight.
Dubin, in addition to being an entrepreneur, had studied improv comedy at New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. In March of 2012 he put this comedy background to use to write, produce, and star in a 90 second YouTube clip.
The same day the video was uploaded, it went massively viral to a degree that even the confident CEO could never have anticipated. Early that day the company’s server crashed from an unexpected deluge of traffic. Once they got their site back online, they received 12,000 orders during that first 24 hours.
Unconventional marketing has been a cornerstone of Dollar Shave Club’s success, and sponsoring a number of popular, carefully selected podcasts has been part of their strategy from early on.
They stress that their products are unisex, and StatSocial reveals that a not insignificant 21% of their social media audience is female. Still, they have launched a male-oriented online magazine (again NSFW) called MEL, in keeping with their intention from day one to grow into an all-encompassing, one-stop lifestyle brand. While not to be found listed below, they do indeed even have their very own podcast.
1) The Art of Manliness
Four years before Dollar Shave Club stormed the internet with its brilliant product launch on YouTube, the The Art of Manliness blog posted an entry educating its readers on “How to Shave Like Your Grandpa.”
One of the most memorable and frequently quoted moments from the initial Dollar Shave Club video comes when Dubin insists that viewers stop paying for “shave-tech you don’t need.” Posing the question, “Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back-scratcher, and ten blades?,” adding,“Your handsome-ass grandfather only had one blade… And polio.”
The The Art of Manliness multimedia lifestyle brand — with such elements as the blog, podcast, and multiple books — was founded by Tulsa native Brett McKay as an antidote to the bro-culture oriented “lad mags” still in fashion during the noughts. Sharing an aesthetic and ethos, It made perfect sense that Dollar Shave Club chose to advertise its back to basics, subscription-model razors to Manliness’ millions of monthly visitors.
Our insights show an affinity for the Manliness podcast impressively exceeding the social media norm by very nearly 20 times. Indeed, this is about as natural a marriage of sponsor and podcaster as you might find.
2) The Tim Ferriss Show
Tim Ferriss is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and probably best known for the extraordinarily popular podcast being highlighted here, as well as his best-selling series of ‘4-Hour’ books (such as ‘The 4-Hour Workweek,’ ‘The 4-Hour Body,’ and so forth).
The Tim Ferriss Show finds affinity among Dollar Shave Club’s enthusiasts to a degree approaching eight-and-a-half-times greater than that of the average social media user. Not only that, but Ferris himself finds favor among DSC’s fans to a degree approaching three times that of the norm.
3) The GaryVee Audio Experience
Dollar Shave Club’s crowd digs Gary Vaynerchuk — the self-described, “dude that Loves the Hustle” (capitalization his, although it’s not clear that he’s not referring to Van McCoy’s 1975 number one hit, or for that matter the dance it implores its listeners to do) — to a degree exceeding social media’s general hoi polloi by three-and-a-quarter times.
The Belarusian-American went from managing his family’s liquor store in suburban New Jersey, to becoming arguably YouTube’s first wine guru and vlogger. From there he’s grown into an all-around digital marketing and social media titan, as well as angel investor and public speaker. Vaynerchuk’s social media-focused VaynerMedia has numerous Fortune 500 clients, and is a heavy-hitter in the digital marketing world.
His The GaryVee Audio Experience podcast finds seven-times as many listeners among Dollar Shave Club’s audience as it does among social media’s users as a whole.
4) The Adam Carolla Show
The former co-host of MTV and syndicated radio’s ‘Loveline’ and Comedy Central’s ‘The Man Show,’ Carolla blazed major trails in terms of revealing just how big a podcast could be. He left terrestrial radio in February of 2009 and almost immediately began releasing a daily podcast. By 2011 his ‘The Adam Carolla Show’ had been downloaded 60 million times.
On the back of his early success, Carolla quickly spun off other podcasts, eventually launching what was initially called the ACE Broadcasting Network, and is now called Carolla Digital. During his early months as a podcaster the outspoken powerhouse of the medium paid for the venture out-of-pocket, covering what he disclosed were $9,000 a month in bandwidth fees. By September of ’09, Carolla started to take on sponsors, providing brands with the added value of spots read by the host himself.
Dollar Shave Club has been a sponsor on Carolla’s network for some time, and Dubin has even been a guest on ‘The Adam Carolla Show.’ It is small wonder then that for as popular as Carolla’s flagship podcast is, affinity for it is shown among Dollar Shave Club’s fans to a degree seven-times greater than the average social media audience member.
Unfolding like a murder mystery, the investigative piece suggested that Syed might have been wrongfully convicted. To date, the first season has received over 80 million downloads, to 14 million devoted listeners.
The hotly anticipated third season is said to be coming at some point this year.
While the podcast was initially funded by Chicago public radio station WBEZ(the NPR station from which This American Life originates), it has had sponsorship as well.
The Dollar Shave Club blog offered its readers advice on how to appear as though you are one of Serial’s listeners even when you are not. This advice may have been heeded by some, but has done nothing to keep Dollar Shave Club’s audience from getting swept up in Serial’s fandom to a degree exceeding the average social media user by nearly seven-times.
We analyzed the top advertising agencies on Twitter and ranked them by how influential they are on Twitter according to our Twitter Pull metric. Twitter Pull measures a Twitter account’s influence based on their follower’s followers, or second degree connections.
Ogilvy takes the top spot and Razorfish and R/GA are second and third, respectively.
We then analyzed the users that follow an ad agency to discover their demographic information and affinities. Among other brands, these users like H&M, Mercedes, Mashable, and Starbucks.
Today, Forbes published an article that reveals the dollar value of a Super Bowl ad has decreased again this year. As the cost to air a 30 second commercial rises, the Super Bowl is the most profitable sporting event.
The average cost for a 30 second ad this year is $4 million, making advertisers question if producing a Super Bowl ad is worth the investment when the audience per ad dollar is dropping.
USA Today’s Admeter is going a step further to evaluate the commercials this year. They plan to breakdown the audience by demographics, to evaluate which commercial resonated with each audience segment.
The saying “It’s not about counting the people you reach, it’s about reaching the people that count” could not apply more to the marketing industry today. There are multiple channels to reach consumers, a company has to choose which are the most valuable.
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