Haymarket Media, of the UK, has bought Podcast Awards with its awards events in UK, Ireland, Australia and becomes a partner within Podcast Day 24 which operates a continual live podcast conference. The company launched in 2017 with the British Podcast Awards, before taking on the same event in Australia in 2019 and launching the Irish version this year. The acquired company will be integrated within the marcomms portfolio of Haymarket Business Media and the deal is expected to lead to further launches within the audio market across Haymarket’s B2B verticals.
Haymarket, which now has 15 separate B2B podcasts (with three in the pipeline) generating almost 20k monthly listeners, says: “Audio is very important to us. We see podcasts as a key audience engagement tool, especially in B2B, and as we continue to move away from print in some areas, it’s a perfect medium… Like magazines, podcasts are episodic, finite and have clear structures. Having frequent podcasts gives our audiences new, regular ways to engage with our brands and creates new platforms for advertising and sponsorship as well as a new medium to cross-promote events, subscriptions and other products.”
None of the company’s podcasts yet have an audience as large as the main print or digital brands, although the largest is that produced by the company’s Campaign flagship. But average audio engagement times of 15 minutes per episode per week compare with just a few minutes on a content site. So it must be only a matter of time before some B2B brands come to regard audio as their primary outlet. In some ways, the potential for podcasts in B2B has been neglected amid the explosion of B2C audio activity. How long before a B2B major – say in financial services, retailing, or construction – launches a Monocle-like “radio” channel, essentially a schedule of podcast programmes?
