Cumulus/Westwood One Chief Marketing Officer Pierre Bouvard, who has been on a mission lately to promote U.S. commercial radio and enhance awareness in the advertising community of its reach, turned his attention to the podcasting channel recently. He previewed findings from a report called “The Westwood One State of American Podcasting” in an article by Advertising Age.
The study focused on the demographics of the audience who listen to podcasts, which was covered in detail at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s podcast upfront event held Sept. 10. In the article, Bouvard explained that the aim was to answer, “How many, how often and how long” people are listening.
-Listeners’ median age is 30
-61 percent work full or part-time
-55 percent have some college education or a bachelor’s degree
-Half of time spent listening occurs on smartphones; one-third is played on computers
-The majority of listening occurs during the work day or in the evening
-Personalities/talk shows are the most popular format at 66 percent
Westwood One used several sources, including an Ipsos custom study as well as Edison’s “Share of Ear” quarterly study and another custom-designed Edison cross tabulation of 500 podcast listeners using three recent studies; this information indicated showed the audio source, time of day, demographic profile, devices used to listen and types of content used by consumers. It is also intended to fill in the gaps that can’t be answered through data about iTunes downloads.