Acast’s AI-powered podcast planning tool helps advertisers find hidden gems
Acast, has recently launched Smart Recommendations. Smart Recommendations is an AI-powered media planning tool designed to help advertisers efficiently find suitable podcast audiences using natural language prompts. By leveraging OpenAI’s large language model and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the tool is able to interpret the intent and context behind advertisers’ descriptions of target demographics, to deliver precise podcast recommendations. This enables streamlined media planning, reducing planning time by 92% across 200 tested campaigns and helping 80% of advertisers uncover new shows that may have otherwise been missed.
The Smart Recommendations tool has been built using over ten years of Acast’s proprietary data combined with more than five million data points from Podchaser. It not only suggests podcasts aligned with advertiser goals, but also provides explanations for its choices, improving transparency and trust.
Smaller podcasts are seeing notable benefits too, with a 14% rise in purchase rates, proving the tool’s capacity to enhance discoverability and revenue. This marks the first innovation under the Acast Intelligence initiative, which aims to integrate AI into both advertising and content creation tools.
The introduction of Smart Recommendations is highly relevant to the Irish podcast advertising market, which is growing steadily as podcast listenership expands across the country. Irish advertisers, especially small to medium-sized businesses, can benefit from this tool by gaining efficient access to hyper-targeted local audiences without any high resource costs.
Furthermore, as Ireland boasts a large independent podcasting scene, smaller creators stand to gain increased visibility and monetisation opportunities. With Acast already having a presence in Ireland, the tool could accelerate the development of more effective, data-driven podcast ad campaigns tailored to unique Irish demographics and interests.
