What LegalZoom Learned Over 7 Years of Podcast Advertising

It’s become a larger share of our overall audio budget over the years. When we started in 2011, it was around 5% to 6%, but recently it's gone up to 20% to 25% of our overall budget.

Historically, we’ve been a heavy advertiser on terrestrial radio. When podcasts started emerging, we recognized they were a natural extension to radio. Both are driven by big personalities that have large audiences.

It was kind of the "Wild West" when advertisers started targeting podcasts. It was hard to find sales reps for each podcast—you had to do a little Sherlock Holmes work just to figure out who you could contact to talk about placing an ad. It was rare when someone reached out to you to offer advertising.

We’ve found that subject matter doesn't necessarily matter—it’s the mass scale podcasts that deliver better results. People like Joe Rogan and Adam Carolla get millions of downloads within a short time frame, and they dive into strange topics, but they have such large followings that by casting a wide net, we get our potential customers in the mix.

We’ve tested live reads vs. prerecorded mid-rolls, and the live reads perform better by far. It’s not in a cluttered commercial pod—it's in the host's voice, and it's directly adjacent to the content.

We do a lot of modeling, but podcasts are extremely hard to model because listening is delayed, and people are in environments like cars where they can’t immediately respond. We include a promo code in the script when we write audio copy and look at response metrics.