Barometer and Oxford Road Roll Out Two New Brand Safety and Suitability Solutions for Audio Advertisers

Barometer, an AI company building a brand suitability and contextual targeting solution for audio, and Oxford Road, the leading independent advertising agency for audio, today announced two new milestones in their strategic partnership – the launches of Barometer Host Intelligence™, a new host-specific brand safety and suitability intelligence solution for audio advertisers and Barometer’s Podcast Suitability Spotlight™, a free monthly listing of podcast content scores that all advertisers can reference.

Both solutions were designed to help audio advertisers align their media investments with their purpose and give them greater intelligence and control over advertising choice, brand safety, suitability and outcomes.

Time savings is another key benefit. Prior to the development of the new solutions, advertisers had to do an incredible amount of manual work listening to episodes and researching each host. Solutions like Barometer Host Intelligence™ and Barometer’s Podcast Suitability Spotlight™ save brands hundreds upon hundreds of hours of manual work through the combination of nuanced content analysis and host reporting.

About Barometer Host Intelligence™

Like with any influencer, as negative news about a podcast host begins to trend, brands who advertise on a host’s show are often concerned that the perception of their brand will be negatively impacted due to association with the sentiment of the news cycles.

The Barometer Host Intelligence solution provides audio advertisers with:

• AI-driven, always-on, broad monitoring and intelligence so they can detect challenges and address them at the ember-level before they become brand wildfires, which are much more difficult and costly to control.

• Powerful insights that go beyond the transcript level to ensure brand suitability and safety and drive superior outcomes when engaged in podcast advertising.

• An omniscient-like view of how the hosts they invest in are aligning with their brand purpose and values.

Powered by natural language processing, the host-specific intelligence solution is built for the needs of today’s media buyers. Prior to its general release, it was tested by four of the nation’s top 10 podcast advertisers based on August 2022 audio ad spend. Collectively, those brands represent over $80 million in annual podcast spend and are now filtering their shows through Barometer in order to see their scores, prior to deciding what shows are worth their investments.

“Vetting hosts is an important part of the process of picking a new show to invest in because consumers associate our brands with the voices, topics and content they are exposed to in audio,” said Sarah Marini, Senior Manager, Audio Partnerships at Athletic Greens. Barometer Host Intelligence™ gives us the depth of cross-audio insights we need about hosts to inform the most suitable brand decisions.”

About Barometer’s Podcast Suitability Spotlight™

Barometer’s Podcast Suitability Spotlight™ free list scores, which will be published by Podnews, the leading daily publisher on the podcast and on-demand industries, align with common criteria and standards many advertisers lean on to inform their ad decisions, including the Global Alliance for Responsible Media’s (GARM) Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework standards. The scores map to five different podcast episodes, four of which are recruited from Edison’s top 50 list of podcasts and one highlighting a host or show that reaches a smaller, more niche audience.

“The goal of the free listing is to remind all advertisers that, contrary to the past, it is now easy to advertise within the parameters of their own brand safety and suitability standards,” said Barometer founder and CEO Tamara Zubatiy.

Beyond Keywords

Both new solutions Barometer and Oxford Road are introducing go beyond keywords, intelligently analyzing entire episodes in context, interpreting each utterance, and assigning a concrete risk score based on each component of the GARM standards. Furthermore, the Host Intelligence TM solution brings in insights from beyond the transcript through real-time news analysis. During this process, sentiment about hosts is assessed across over 50,000 print and digital news providers, including auto-generated articles based on social media content. As a result, in addition to transcript-level brand suitability and safety data, advertisers also have host-related news and sentiment data going back over time. The data is also accompanied by links to the articles or media directly for advertisers to access efficiently within the platform.

A Purpose-Driven and Growing Partnership that Benefits the Audio Industry-at-Large

“Oxford Road initially invested in the development of Barometer to benefit the brands we serve and to shift the value of content away from the loudest voices and toward content of the highest quality,” said Oxford Road founder and CEO Dan Granger.

“While we’re excited about the benefits our clients receive from these new solutions, Barometer and Oxford Road are not limiting use to our own agency or those who do business with us. This is a critical movement for the podcast industry as discerning brands desire to scale their values-driven messaging and to raise the bar on content deserving of monetization. We are happy to be the first, and are excited for all the others who are joining us,” said Granger.

To learn more about Barometer and Oxford Road, the new solutions announced today, or their shared commitment to advertising in-the-brand-interest, please visit www.thebarometer.co and www.oxfordroad.com.