SpotsNow Launches the Advertiser Campaign Planner

SpotsNow today announced the launch of its campaign planner for podcast advertising, designed to solve one of the biggest challenges in media buying: building a high-quality host-read campaign has historically taken weeks of manual research, spreadsheets, and relationship-driven back-and-forth. With SpotsNow, what used to take a media buyer one to three days now takes under ten minutes.

The biggest single point of failure in a performance campaign is advertisers spending ad dollars on the wrong show for their brand. Everything else is optimization on top of that. This mismatching problem is likely costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year, as advertisers misread podcast performance and quietly shift budget back to mainstream digital channels.

Built on a database of 69,000+ shows representing Billions in tracked ad spend, the new planner evaluates more than 100 data points across more than 69,000 shows (every show with verified ad history), using sophisticated matching across advertiser renewal patterns, ad load, expected share of voice, and proprietary signals drawn from the strategies of top media buyers. Advertisers and agencies can go from blank brief to a fully built, network-ready media plan in minutes, and download the result as a CSV.

“These aren’t decisions that are easily computable from the human mind. There are too many layers. We’ve built the planner to handle the matching work that buyers have always wished they had time to do properly, so they can spend their judgment on the creative and the strategy instead.” — Cam Pritchard, Founder and CEO, SpotsNow

Cam Pritchard, Founder and CEO of SpotsNow, came from one of the most successful marketplaces in the US - Thumbtack - where matching the right customer to the right professional was the foundation of the entire business. Bringing that same matching discipline to podcast advertising is the core thesis of the company.

How It Works

On the SpotsNow home page:

• Tell SpotsNow about your brand. Advertisers start by entering their website, the audience they want to reach, and key demographics.
• SpotsNow goes into deep research mode. The planner analyzes the brand against the full catalogue of more than 69,000 shows and carefully structures the campaign composition with the highest likelihood of performance. Each recommendation comes with estimated ROAS ranges and estimated benchmark pricing, giving advertisers a clear starting point on what to spend and what to expect from their show selection.
• Matched remnant inventory can be added to cart. Shows that list remnant inventory on SpotsNow appear in a dedicated section directly beneath the recommended campaign, surfaced only when the inventory matches the advertiser’s brief. This gives publishers a meaningful new edge: their open spots are placed in front of qualified, ready-to-buy advertisers at the exact moment of decision.

It is a clean win on both sides — advertisers discover relevant inventory they would never have surfaced on their own, and publishers monetize spots that would otherwise go unsold.

Built Agency Tough

The planner is purpose-built for agency workflows as well as for new advertisers, with granular sharing controls that let teams show and hide specific pieces of information at the proposal phase - pricing, alternate show options, or anything else that needs to stay behind the scenes. This has been transformative internally for the SpotsNow team with its own advertiser roster, and is now available to every agency on the platform.

“Planning a podcast campaign well has always been one of the most time-intensive parts of the job, and the tooling hasn’t kept up with the size of the medium. What SpotsNow is building gives buyers a much faster, more transparent way to evaluate shows on the things that actually matter. It removes a lot of the manual work without removing the judgment that good media buyers bring.” — Jess Robine, SpotsNow Advisor & EVP at ARM

Free to Use, Aligned Incentives

In its current state, the SpotsNow planner is free for advertisers and publishers to use. You just need to create an account to save your media plans.

SpotsNow monetizes in two aligned ways today: remnant spots sold through the marketplace, and managed campaigns run for early-stage advertisers who want hands-on execution. SpotsNow only earns when a campaign actually transacts, keeping incentives aligned with advertisers and publishers alike.

Availability

The SpotsNow planner is live today at https://spotsnow.io. Advertisers can build a campaign in minutes. Publishers can claim a free account to receive leads.