Reach German ecision-makers in their own language

Our ad spots are usually around 40 to 60 seconds long – our Story Ads are sometimes a little longer. Our credo: better concise and relevant than long and uninteresting. Because our top priority is that the target audience actually listens to the ad.

For our regular podcast advertising, the client sends a briefing (here is our template for it) explaining how the product should be presented (pronunciation, USPs, landing page and so on). We then script an ad spot and record it. The client can of course listen to the spot beforehand and, if desired, ask for revisions. After that we agree the publication dates and the targeting and go into publication.

Our premium ad format “Story Ad” is an ad format with an interactive feel, for which the client also sends us a short briefing, after which we send them three or four questions. The client answers these questions as an audio recording (e.g. as a voice message or voice memo), and we then record our question part in the studio and edit it together with the answers. The result is an entertaining, interactive spot that is more interesting for the listeners and involves hardly any effort for the client.

Our advertising is “host-read”, which means it is recorded by digital kompakt founder Joël Kaczmarek. This is an advantage for several reasons: the advertising comes across as very native, Joël’s credibility rubs off on the content, and at the same time the client has hardly any work with producing the ad material. Win-win!

This is what a regular podcast ad sounds like:

This is what a Story Ad (our premium ad format) sounds like:

• Here you will find further information on podcast advertising.
• Here you will find more in-depth knowledge about podcast advertising
• Here you will find further examples of and background on Story Ads.

Yes. We build your spot into the episode itself (“baked-in”): it is part of the episode and stays there for at least a year – including when someone listens to that episode months later. We no longer use dynamic ad insertion, where a server drops in changing spots at playback time.

The reason is our video format: we now produce our episodes as video as well. So we produce your ad as video too and run it alongside the episode. The same message therefore runs in sound and in picture – not just on the audio track.

These are the ad slots within the podcast: Pre-Roll is an ad placement at the beginning of the podcast, Mid-Roll in the middle and Post-Roll at the end. digital kompakt offers all three of them.

Which of them is best depends somewhat on your own strategy: the Pre-Roll reaches the most listeners, while attention is higher in the Mid-Roll. We recommend a mix of the different positions in order to reach listeners at different points.

Our listenership is consistently a high-quality business audience – mostly decision-makers from the German Mittelstand, the digital economy and startups. You get that quality in every episode, wherever your spot runs.

In terms of subject matter, you can steer the direction through our three formats: Money Monday is about growth and business, Wisdom Wednesday about personality and leadership, Feelgood Friday about health. Targeting individual listeners – by gender, age or location – is no longer available.

A Story Ad is our premium ad format, for which we edit questions recorded in the studio by digital kompakt together with answers recorded by the client on a smartphone to form an ad break. For listeners this ad format feels like a mini interview and is therefore more interesting.

Here you will find further examples of and background on Story Ads.

We plan a campaign around the number of ad impressions, meaning the number of times your spot is played. When we talk about 30,000 ad impressions, the ad is played to listeners 30,000 times. These are not unique listeners – listeners hear the ad several times, which is intended, so that it is remembered. Since the spot sits in the episodes themselves, we choose those episodes so that the booked volume is reached.

Our minimum order volume is 10,000 ad impressions, so that we reach as many different listeners from our subscriber base as possible and create a certain level of recall through repetition. Most clients book 30,000 to 50,000 ad impressions per campaign.

An ad impression means one playback of an ad spot. However, this should not be confused with unique listeners. Ten ad impressions are not ten people reached, for example; as a rule, listeners hear an ad spot five to seven times.

This is also intended, so that the advertising message sinks in. For large bookings, however, we always produce several versions of the ad at once in order to avoid listeners becoming used to it.

No, that is not the case with us – on the contrary: for most podcast episodes, 90-93% of listeners (!) really do listen to an ad. Our skip rates are at most 15%. Compared with other advertising categories, these are extremely good figures. Or who could claim that 93 out of 100 website visitors look closely at a banner?

If awareness, branding, thought leadership and high-quality leads are relevant for a company or product, podcast advertising is very well suited. digital kompakt offers this for a digitally minded B2B target group with a high proportion of decision-makers. In our experience, practically all products and services can be positioned well – the clearer the USP and the benefit for the listener, the better. This also works for products that need explaining, provided that care is taken during the creation of the ad material to choose a smart approach, for example via content marketing. The only type of client we have so far found difficult to stage are agency offerings that are not clearly differentiated. Here, too, it is worth putting plenty of time into the conception of the ad material.

We don’t think so. Podcast advertising clearly has its strength in building awareness, branding and thought leadership, but it also delivers very high-quality leads. Above all, the retention of this advertising format is very, very high. The art lies rather in making these leads measurable, because there is a certain media break between the podcast app and a click in the browser. Even so, podcast advertising is not performance marketing. Anyone expecting control down to the cent for each individual user will tend to be unhappy with podcast advertising.

Our CPM (the price per thousand ad impressions) is 350 euros net. The more impressions are booked, the lower the price becomes, while specialisations such as Story Ads, several ad versions, longer spots and the like raise the price slightly.

Included in this price are a preliminary call, the creation of the ad, one round of revisions and a report.

We are also always happy to give information about our prices in a personal conversation, because prices on a website simply go out of date regularly and because they sometimes also depend on the type of client, the implementation and the current reach. If we should have a chat, you will find our contact form right at the bottom of this page 😉.

For our clients the effort involved is minimal: all they have to do is fill in a briefing at digitalkompakt.de/briefing. For this we need the key information about the product (USPs, pronunciation, landing page and so on), the desired focus (target audience) and the contact person for the collaboration. A suggested wording for the podcast ad is particularly helpful on top of that.

On the basis of the briefing we script an ad spot, send it over for approval and then record it. The client can listen to it once more, and our server then places the spot in those podcasts we agreed on in an introductory call and via our briefing form. So in parallel with the briefing being filled in, we put forward suggestions as to when and where we would recommend placing the ad. Equally, a client can simply give us a period of time and we plan the publication. Around three weeks after the last ad placement there is a joint campaign review, at which digital kompakt also provides a report on the performance of the individual episodes.

It is very simple: audio recordings containing the answers to a dialogue agreed in advance. These can be recorded as a voice note on a smartphone and then sent to us. digital kompakt takes care of the rest by editing the studio questions and the voice-note answers together. An example: the client tells us that they would like to communicate the free trial of their product. digital kompakt then texts them the question “Is there actually a way to try it out first?” and the client answers by voice message. digital kompakt then records the question in the studio and edits the two together.

You can find further examples of and background on Story Ads here.

You give us a time frame and a rough thematic direction – the fine-tuning is on us. In an introductory call and through our briefing form we clarify your objective and the audience you want to reach beforehand.

We then decide which episodes carry your spot so that time frame and direction fit together. We do not commit to individual episode titles in advance.

As we sometimes produce up to six weeks ahead, it is advisable to allow for a certain amount of lead time. We can often accommodate placements at short notice as well, but in order to avoid stress and uncertainty an enquiry should reach us three to four weeks before your preferred period.

This is possible, but it creates a great deal of work at digital kompakt's end, which is why we charge a late-change fee of 250 euros for unscheduled changes that reach us after a spot has been approved.

Of course. We handle it in such a way that we send our podcast ad to the client once more before publication. Should there be any change requests at that point, we revise the ad again and send it over once more to be listened to before publication.

Clients should be happy with their ad spot and get the maximum benefit from it. That is why we ask them to put forward a suggested wording in our briefing form, on the basis of which we then script the spot. The script can be revised by the client, and with the audio spot too they have the opportunity to request revisions, for example if a word has been pronounced differently than intended or a phrase does not fit. At every stage, then, the client has the opportunity for an approval round. Entirely new revision requests that come after this approval are charged at a flat rate, provided they are not connected to the previous change to the spot.

For a campaign we sometimes use several versions of the ad, so that the message does not wear thin with repeated listening. An ad once built into an episode, on the other hand, is the same for every listener – it is part of the episode.

Yes, that can happen – if a recording is delayed, for example, or a publication date moves. We try to avoid such shifts, and we let you know in good time if anything does change about the agreed period.

Indeed we do. As our reach is mainly in the DACH region and the language of our podcasts is German, English-language ad spots would probably fail to have much effect anyway.

On all the common podcast platforms, that is Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music and Deezer. Via RSS feed, our podcasts can also be subscribed to in all the popular podcast apps such as Castro, Pocket Casts, Overcast and the like. SoundCloud, on the other hand, is one we no longer actively serve at present.

We are very transparent about the number of our listeners and subscribers, but since we would rather not publish outdated figures here, we are always happy to tell interested clients the number of our listeners in a personal conversation. A look at our guests, partners and advertising clients should, however, make it clear that we know how to attract and inspire large numbers of listeners in a very high-value target group (see the following point) over the long term.

Our target group is around 70% male, covers an age range between 20 and 50 (with the focus between 25 and 35) and lives primarily in German metropolitan areas. Surveys among our target group tell us that it consists of 60% decision-makers (managers with staff and budget responsibility), 20% junior decision-makers (managers without staff and budget responsibility) and 20% service providers, agencies, founders, students and employees. Thanks to our various formats, we can specifically address individual focus areas (e.g. e-commerce, fintech, SMEs or technology), which is explained in more detail in the following point.

You do not have to think much about the audience itself: our listenership is consistently a high-quality business audience – mostly decision-makers from the German Mittelstand, the digital economy and startups.

In terms of subject matter we steer through our three formats: Money Monday for growth and business, Wisdom Wednesday for personality and leadership, Feelgood Friday for health. You give us the time frame and the rough direction, we handle the placement. Targeting individual listeners by gender, age or location is no longer available.

Our podcast can be received all over the world; our main reach lies in the DACH region, with Germany as the clear main market.

Yes, all clients receive a written quote with advertising proposals by email and can sign it digitally.

digital kompakt can be booked either way, and each route has its own advantages:

• Those who book directly with us usually get better terms, our processes run more smoothly and we are able to respond better to individual requirements.
• Booking through a sales house makes sense if further podcasts besides digital kompakt are to be booked from a single source.

Either on signing the quote or on submitting the podcast briefing.

The short answer is: yes and no. There are ways and means of bringing measurability into the subject (see the next question), but podcast advertising is definitely not performance marketing. We assume that around 20% of podcast traffic can be measured via landing pages, discount codes and so on, while 80% of listeners simply search directly in their browser.

The challenge is therefore to establish measurability despite the media break between podcast app and browser.

We use a range of different measures to assess the effects of our podcast advertising:

1. DISCOUNT CODE: If the client gives us a discount code, we read it out in the audio track, which often encourages listeners to act.
2. TRACKING URL: As the client's URL we always read out a digital kompakt address followed by the partner's name, e.g. “digitalkompakt.de/sevdesk”. We measure the clicks on these URLs and also allow our clients to point them at any URL of their own. This means a client can, for example, store a web address with UTM parameters and measure the traffic to that URL themselves.
3. LANDING PAGE: We set up a landing page for every client in our sponsors area, which is also read out at the end of the podcast ad, and from there we link to the tracking URL.
4. POST-PURCHASE SURVEY: We recommend that our clients ask listeners at the end of the process how they became aware of the offer, and include “podcast” as one of the possible answers.
5. GATED CONTENT: In some cases gated content can be a useful measurement tool, for example if a client refers at the end of their ad to a whitepaper or case study that listeners can download in exchange for their email address or similar.

A typical sign-off to one of our podcast ads therefore sounds something like this: “If that is of interest to you, just go to digitalkompakt.de/sevdesk and take a look at the details there. As always, you will find all the information on our sponsors page at digitalkompakt.de/sponsoren.”

Yes, that is standard practice for us. When submitting their briefing, the client simply sends us the code in question and tells us what it does, and we build it into the spot accordingly.

We always recommend two things here. First, the discount code should be easy to remember, for example “kompakt”. And second, it should grant a noticeable discount, but not too large a one. For instance, 10 to 15% can be a good approach, or a free month or extra features. If the discount is too small, the incentive to enter a code is too low. If it is too large, it could distort the picture and may well be picked up by bargain-hunting sites.

Yes, that is no problem. The simplest option is for the client to supply us with their landing page together with the briefing. As a rule, we work in such a way that the URL we read out is always a digital kompakt address followed by the name of the client or the product. For example “digitalkompakt.de/sevdesk”. We measure the clicks on these URLs and allow our clients to point them at any URL of their own. This means a client can, for example, store a web address with UTM parameters and measure the traffic to that URL themselves.

In theory this is possible, but we would not recommend it. It is conceivable to structure an advertising campaign so that a certain number of ad impressions run in a version with one URL and a further number with another – an A/B test of sorts. Experience shows, however, that the effort and the return are often out of proportion here. And reading out two URLs within one and the same campaign tends to confuse listeners rather than help them. It is possible to add a deep link in the show notes (to a whitepaper, for example). The main address, though, should be a single URL.

No, in essence the use of these measurement methods is already covered by our podcast prices. Costs for these services only arise in the following circumstances:

• If a discount code is supplied significantly too late or is only requested after the first spots have been published – in this case a flat handling fee of 250 euros is charged
• If more than one URL or several discount codes are to be used in different spots – this too is charged as a flat handling fee of between 250 and 350 euros, depending on the scope

Yes, three weeks after the client's last ad spot we hold a 15-minute review call with every client, in which we go through a report sent out beforehand and gather feedback.

Yes, that is possible at any time. We know the burning hoops our clients are often expected to jump through for their accounts departments, and we are always happy to help – provided we know about it in good time 😇.

From the point at which digital kompakt incurs costs, which as a rule means once the ad material has been produced – in other words, once the ad spot has been recorded, a lovingly designed invoice makes its way to you.

Our payment term is 14 days from receipt of invoice.