The influence of media context on the effectiveness of podcast advertising

Abstract

Advertising in Audio Podcasts has gained huge popularity in the last years. However, education on how to advertise effectively on Podcasts is still at an early stage. A high effectiveness of advertising is only achieved when an advertisement is placed and consumed in the appropriate media context. The placement and its effectiveness are a topic that still needs to be researched intensively in this regard. The ad-context congruence, the correspondence of theme and image between a brand being advertised and a podcast episode are explored more intensively in this work. These are common criteria used for the selection of advertising contexts. For the purpose of a deeper investigation of this topic, two experimental online surveys were realised. Here, either the thematic congruence or the image congruence and their advertising effectiveness were examined. Audio sequences of German podcast episodes were played to the panel participants. Fictitious podcast advertisements were inserted into these. These advertisements contextually fitted the episode either very well or not at all. After participants have been exposed to one audio sequence, advertising effectiveness was measured by the variables brand recall, brand recognition and attitudes towards the brand.Brand recall and brand recognition were higher in percentage terms for the thematic and image congruent condition. However, the study did not yield statistically significant results for these variables. Nevertheless, experiments demonstrate that thematic but also image congruence had a strong and statistically significant impact on attitudes towards the brand. In both experiments, the congruent condition was able to trigger a much more positive evaluation of the brand than the non-congruent one.

Date of Award	10 May 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Eduardo Cintra Torres (Supervisor)