I've been talking about this for a while now, but there are some *major* issues with podcast advertising that the pod industry is just plain ignoring. For a start, ads in podcasts aren't regulated like ads on radio, they're not under the FCC. So...propaganda galore

For another, advertisers self-select their categories. So if you want to get around the block on political ads that *most* podcasters have in place...just don't categorize as political!

Thanks to @Naparstek I realized that an ad was running on one of ours today pushing voter suppressing ballot measures in NY. But...I have a block on political ads. Well the NY State Public Safety Foundation, a front group for the NY police union, just "forgot" to categorize

There is absolutely no reason for podcasts to be regulated differently than broadcast, or social media to be regulated differently than media esp once they decided to compete with publishers. These "new media" channels have provided major new ways to disinform

Newsletters, social, and pods represent the lion's share of disinformation from the fossil fuel companies these days (ya know, when the NYT and WaPo aren't making it for them), and it seems like a pretty simple fix to just regulate them the same as every other media

In the absence of that, I would really love to see podcast companies get a fucking ethics policy. But even the big ones don't seem to bother? When I asked NPR why they'd let ads into podcasts that would be banned on radio they said: "because it's not illegal." Do better.

If we had a functioning FEC, seems like this instance of forgetting would be an expensive one.

I've been listening to the John Carreyrou Theranos podcast and hearing him read the scammy-sounding wellness industry ads himself has been a little jarring.

Gahhhhhhh!!!

I think podcast listeners also have no idea how ads and podcasts work including ad targeting etc. Podcast ads may even seem MORE credible than most ads bus listeners may assume the podcaster chose the ads specifically whereas you'd never assume that about your local TV reporter.

The first time I heard an ad from the WA dept of health I thought, "weird that they'd advertise on a podcast and hope that someone in WA would hear it." More recently after I got back from a trip to AZ I heard some AZ ads in the podcasts that downloaded while I was there.

My brain still has this "the podcast episode is an audio file that I downloaded from the podcaster and everyone gets the same one" framing, which is obviously not the case.

It is very much not the case! A nice feature Overcast put in their app was information about how ads work with that particular podcast but also ... a person has to know to look for that!

curious do you know if this is consistent with other countries?

I don’t! Will see what I can find out though

I was wondering how that works and how much autonomy podcasters have. Listening to Drilled on Spotify, I recently heard an ad for diesel 😑

It’s wild how Facebook is one of the biggest Vox advertisers, yet most of their podcasts that discuss Facebook do so in a very negative light. It’s jarring, frankly

I was just thinking about this! @nytimes The Daily gave me a Chevron ad, where Chevron called itself “the human energy company” lol. No humans in Ecuador?

Hey @amywestervelt! You’re 100% right about the category issue. If I can help with anything you’re working on related to this, definitely let me know.

Aren’t they regulated by the FTC? Enforcement is pretty non-existent though.