• by Joe Mandese , January 2, 2008

Wizzard Media, a leading advertising and content aggregator for the burgeoning podcast marketplace, today will unveil a technological breakthrough allowing advertisers to "dynamically" insert advertising messages into breaks in both audio and video podcasts. The breakthrough, which will enable ad messages to be placed organically within the natural programming of the podcasts, is expected to expand the market beyond the kind of "pre-" or "post-roll" spots that now appear at the beginning or the end of programs.

The breakthrough is part of a series of technological innovations Wizzard Software has been developing to enhance the placement of advertising within podcasts and to make them easier and more efficient for advertisers and agencies to buy. Other developments include a "keyword" advertising feature that would enable ad messages to be placed adjacent to programming utilizing key words or phrases associated with a brand. Another big development expected later this year is a new "dashboard" system that is expected to bring the kind of automation and ease of use to the podcast marketplace that Google's Ad Words program brought to the search advertising marketplace, enabling advertisers and publishers to automatically negotiate placements for ad messages dynamically within content.

An important aspect of Wizzard's dynamic ad insertion technology is that - unlike ad insertion systems developed for most media - it will give control of the placements to the publishers, not the advertisers. While it would enable advertisers to dynamically change their copy and messages on the fly, the goal is to give publishers and program creators the ultimate control to ensure that the ad messages are in keeping with the integrity of their programming.

"We're giving them a lot of control," says Chris Spencer, president-CEO of Wizzard. "You have to work with how the advertisers want it, but at the same time, you have to work with the podcasters. They want to maintain a lot of control, because they work hard to grow their audiences."

Spencer says that shift in control is critical in the podcast marketplace, where audiences are attracted by the sensibilities of content creators, but ultimately he expects actual placements of ad messages to be a give-and-take process working back-and-forth between publishers and advertisers, which is why the new dashboard system will be critical to its success.