Acast, the world’s largest independent podcast company, announced Thursday the launch of Smart Recommendations, an AI search engine that allows advertisers to find their ideal podcast audiences in seconds, simply by describing who they want to reach. Its aim is to supercharge how podcast advertising is bought and sold, making campaign planning faster, smarter and more effective, Acast says.
Powered by a decade of Acast’s data and experience, and using OpenAI’s LLM technology combined with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Smart Recommendations acts like an AI media planner, turning a simple prompt like “I want to reach women in Canada interested in investing” into a curated list of high-fit podcasts. It’s designed to surface the right shows, faster, using natural language and advanced search to deliver precision in audience targeting.
Smart Recommendations is the first release from Acast Intelligence, a new core capability from Acast dedicated to using AI to enhance its product suite for both creators and advertisers. By blending human expertise with intelligent data processing, Acast Intelligence unlocks the potential of Acast’s dataset to drive smarter discovery, planning and performance in podcast advertising, according to Acast.
“The podcast landscape is vast, and finding the perfect audience can be time-consuming and challenging,” says Matt MacDonald, chief product officer for Acast. “Smart Recommendations solves this by harnessing the power of Acast’s decade of proprietary data combined with Podchaser’s insights, and providing a ‘second brain’ for advertisers. This empowers them to discover hidden gems and connect with ideal audiences with unprecedented speed and precision. It’s about moving beyond guesswork to truly understand and reach the right audiences.”
EA and Caddle power data collaboration options for brands
Environics Analytics (EA) is expanding its partnership with Caddle, one of Canada’s largest and most diverse consumer panels.
Known for its app-based surveys, receipt capture and consumer review capabilities, Caddle helps brands (particularly Consumer Packaged Goods organizations, or CPGs) collect data. EA and Caddle have worked together previously to leverage Caddle’s Prizm segment-based panel surveys to inform several of EA’s data products.
Under the terms of this expanded partnership, EA will add Caddle data – including transaction-level detail through uploaded receipts – to its suite of data collaboration services, helping brands make better decisions, faster, according to EA. Adding Caddle’s capabilities and panel data to EA’s solutions expands the options available to clients for quick, cost-effective insights.
These options include identifying purchase-based audiences, augmenting seed audiences for scale and activating digital campaigns.
“The addition of Caddle’s receipt-based data and the speed with which they are able to respond to brands’ needs are excellent additions to EA’s existing data collaboration services in Canada,” says Jan Kestle, president of Environics Analytics. “They have been a fantastic partner to-date, and they continue to help us move the needle when it comes to campaign and media optimization for clients.”
