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New initiative pushes brands to support civility in media

Dan Granger, Oxford Road CEO, joins Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous to discuss managing misinformation and disinformation in podcasts.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: The podcasting industry is booming. And it looks like advertisers are taking notice, allocating more of their ad budgets to this $1 billion industry. But advertising on podcasts comes with its own challenges and pitfalls.

Here to talk about it is Dan Granger, CEO of the ad buying agency Oxford Road. Dan, thanks so much for being with us. Why should podcasts be a part of a brand's mix going forward?

DAN GRANGER: Podcasts are really the evolution of radio. It's something that's on-demand. Consumers can get it where they want, when they want. But the real renaissance that happened in the podcast industry is that the barriers to entry came down. And so now we have programming that was never available to the masses before. In the same way that the internet ushered in amazing new opportunities for content, audio did the same thing with podcasts.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: Podcasts can sometimes be a challenging place for advertisers and rather overwhelming. You have lots of different voices. They can sometimes be polarizing. What are some things that brands and marketers should be looking out for when they're considering spending their ad dollars in podcasts?

DAN GRANGER: Well, of course, most of the advertisers want to make sure they get a good return on their investment. And that's always our primary focus. But one of the things in the pursuit of that, we've learned working with our clients since 2013 in the space, is that sometimes you can get a good result followed by a very bad result when you find yourself in the middle of a lot of controversy or associating with content that doesn't reflect the values you hold as a brand.

So one of the things that we're doing with the media roundtable is helping people advance truth and civility through the things that they sponsor, particularly in podcasts, and to look at things like reliability and bias in what they're putting their ad dollars behind.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: You mentioned the media roundtable. You guys are doing some interesting work there. You just released your podcast bias credibility chart. Tell us a little bit about the takeaways there. Who are maybe some of the big offenders? Or conversely, who's doing it right when it comes to keeping people informed the right way with a podcast?

DAN GRANGER: Sure. So what we did with the media roundtable is we partnered with a group called Ad Fontes Media that made the media bias chart which hangs in thousands of classrooms across the country to teach media literacy. And we worked with them to develop this for the podcast industry, specifically in the news and opinion genre.

And what it's allowed us to do is give real metrics and hard numbers to advertisers so they can draw some lines in the sand and say, we really don't want anything that is at a polar extreme on the political bias side. And We. Want to make sure that we're supporting content that does fact reporting, sometimes original fact reporting, and analysis that doesn't use things like ad hominem attacks, of course, steers away from misinformation and disinformation.

And so there are a lot of brands. We've got over 140 different podcasts that are now rated on this chart. And what we're doing with the media roundtable is we're trying to focus on moving up, not down. So I don't want to call out the people at the bottom of the list. But the ones at the top, NPR News has done a great job. "The Wall Street Journal" does well, of course. The Dispatch Podcast Network has been really effective. "Post Reports" and "The Daily" as well--

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: Where can people go to find all of your findings from the media roundtable?

DAN GRANGER: So if you go--

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: Is there a place where they can go?

DAN GRANGER: Absolutely. Go to mediaroundtable.com. And of course, you can also listen to our podcast every week, wherever you get podcasts. It's called "The Media Roundtable Podcast." You can also go to Ad Fontes Media to actually get your own access to the full media bias chart.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: What are some examples of brands that have come under fire for being, I guess, inadvertently associated with hot topics, cancel culture? Can you share some of those with us?

DAN GRANGER: Sure. I know through the grapevine that Harry's razors ran into an issue this week with one network. We know that last week, it was David Dobrik lost a bunch of sponsors, included in that, I think, Seatgeek and Dollar Shave Club. A number of brands fled from that property. And controversy can come up for a lot of different reasons.

And sometimes, our position is that some things should be canceled. Sometimes there does need to be accountability. But one of the things we see missing is any sort of due process or any evaluation structure so that advertisers can say, OK, let's pause, let's take a breath, and let's get all the facts and make sure that our next steps allow us to live out our values and reward our stakeholders in the best way possible.

So the media roundtable is providing tools and resources to help facilitate that. And as somebody who runs an ad agency, works with dozens of brands, I'm talking to CMOs and CEOs every day. We've created the solutions that we wish existed when we got into this business. And we're very happy with the enthusiasm behind it. And we think it's going to make a big impact on the industry and actually on the country as we change the nature of discourse that we put out through sponsored media.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: All right, Dan Granger, CEO of Oxford Road, thanks so much for being with us.

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