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Horizon Media is expanding its audio practice with a new team specifically dedicated to podcast advertising.
The media agency’s audio practice has been around for more than a decade, according to Maria Tullin, its SVP managing director of performance audio. But the team has become a lot more focused on podcast-specific planning, buying, and measurement strategies in the past few years, she said, so they decided to make some changes to their structure.
What’s new: Horizon is introducing what it’s calling the “Center of Excellence” to its audio practice. That podcast-focused team will sit within Horizon Next, the division of Horizon Media that’s focused on performance-based marketing and “clients who have lower-funnel KPIs,” according to Tullin.
The Center of Excellence team will take “more of a significant role in the planning process” for podcast buys, Tullin said, as opposed to having more general strategy teams handle it. The team will also hammer out some best practices for podcast advertising in order to let “clients know what to expect from us,” she said, though those practices will be customizable based on the brand.
Critical mass: Some existing Horizon Next clients, like eharmony, Sleep Number, and car-sharing company Turo, are already working with the Center of Excellence on podcast advertising, according to Tullin, who said Next has increased its podcast clients’ investment in the channel by 70% over the past 10 months.
She noted that the new offering is an effort to get more clients spending on podcasts through Horizon. Those could be brands that don’t currently do any podcast advertising at all, or clients who invest in podcasts through different agencies. Horizon has “acquired quite a few” of those clients over the past nine or so months, according to Tullin.
“I think we’re at a critical mass right now,” she said. “We’ve had a bunch of major acquisitions that we’ve taken on from other agencies…and as a result, we’ve hired some new people. We have some new faces on the team with various experience levels, and I think when you get new people and you get new clients, it’s the moment where you need to make sure everything is standardized and everybody’s working in the same way and giving the same quality of work.”