Listeners to the Acast podcast network are set to receive real-time news headlines from news.com.au. AI will create content marketing placements from news.com.au website content, to be inserted into Acast’s catalogue.
Acast hosts and distributes some of podcasts across categories including Sport, Business, and Lifestyle.
The initiative is a collaboration between Acast, news.com.au, Creative Fix, and Audiostack, and will use Audiostack’s scalable AI audio production to convert news articles into audio while also augmenting the voiceover with music and sound design.
Aaron Matthews, head of creative at Creative Fix, said “This is the next step towards a truly integrated and tailored content experience where listeners receive relevant news updates, in real time, about topics of most interest to them.
“It also overcomes the traditional barriers faced by audio producers, with most audio ad production being time-consuming, making this ideal for productions with tight timelines.”
Gina McGrath, head of marketing for news.com.au, said “This activity embodies our brand promise to ‘be on it’, delivering the news that matters to our audience in the way they want to consume it.”
Dr Timo P Kunz, co-founder and CEO of AudioStack.ai said: “We’re really excited about the massive innovation Creative Fix has brought to the audio advertising sector. Using news headlines is exactly the type of use case we built AudioStack for: creating audio fast and at scale.”
The news audio ads will be delivered as 30-second news bulletins across Acast’s full network, which started on November 13th, 2023.
Last week, The Triton Digital podcast ranker – released by CRA –revealed that Australians downloaded 1.03 billion podcasts in 2023, up 26% for the year.
The annual data coincides with the release of the December 2023 Podcast ranker. The top five podcasts for December 2023 were, in order: Casefile True Crime, Mamamia Out Loud, Hamish & Andy, Shameless and The Imperfects.
See Also: Podcast Ranker reveals downloads surged 26% in 2023, with over 1 billion in total