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Data from Mattress Firm’s podcast campaign with iHeartMedia, which ran in 2022, shows that the medium is driving sales.
The retailer ran a branded podcast called “Chasing Sleep” with iHeartMedia’s Ruby content studio, which talked to experts and everyday people with unusual schedules, like ER doctors and ultramarathoners, about how to achieve good sleep.
The campaign, which Mattress Firm designed with agency Spark Foundry, also included ad placements across iHeartMedia’s network, the number one podcast publisher by U.S. unique monthly audience and global downloads and streams, according to Podtrac.
“It’s something that we would continue to invest in, even if it just connected at the brand level,” said Sam Bennett, SVP of marketing at Mattress Firm. “But of course, it becomes even more compelling for an organization if you’re both able to connect at this thought level and head and the heart level, as well as getting people into your shops to buy your products.”
Typically, podcast ads have included voucher codes as a way to signal attribution. “Podcasts came onto the scene and very quickly got adopted by folks who were doing direct response marketing,” said iHeart chief data officer Brian Kaminsky. “It worked very nicely, but that business doesn’t scale well. There’s this myth out there that you can’t measure podcasts,” he added. “It’s just patently not true.”
Mattress Firm worked with measurement firm Affinity Solutions to link podcast listenership to purchases. It found the campaign drove four times return on ad spend and a 45% lift in incremental sales, meaning customers who were exposed to the campaign spent 45% more than customers that were not. It couldn’t share more specific details, like how much revenue this drove. The typical incremental sales lift Affinity sees for a given campaign using this sales measurement tool, called Consumer Purchase Lift, is 5%-10%.
Mattress Firm is focused on being an authority on sleep, from having their sleep experts, or salespeople, conduct hours of training, to a website sleep.com which has information on sleep topics. An informative podcast was a logical addition to this mission, Bennett said.
