The Week — a hugely popular weekly magazine presenting a fresh take on news stories around the world — wanted to drive subscriptions of its publication, and was running an offer promising new readers six free issues and a free notebook. 

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As a direct response campaign, it was important for The Week to be able to tangibly measure success using a redemption code — a tool often heard in podcast advertising, and one proven to be very effective in getting listeners to take action.

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Acast and The Week ran host-read sponsorships on a collection of political podcasts including The Rest is Politics, Reasons to be Cheerful and The Political Party, using the trusted voices heard on those shows to convince listeners to subscribe. 

Each podcast had a dedicated landing page at theweek.co.uk, with a shortened URL read out in the ad. theweek.co.uk/rest, for example, redirected to subscription.theweek.co.uk/restispolitics, for ease of discovery. For ease of redemption, landing pages also allowed visitors to input the promo code directly, rather than needing to navigate to another location.

Since the campaign started running, they have acquired a volume of subscribers far above and beyond the expected campaign goals. Perhaps even more impressively for The Week, the cost per acquisition (CPA) was a whopping 96% lower than its previous best podcast activity CPA earlier this year.

The campaign also had a significant impact on other channels, with a clear uplift in website traffic and on paid search activity as a result of the podcast campaign.It was also clear that there were spikes in orders and visits to theweek.co.uk on Wednesdays throughout the campaign — the day The Rest is Politics episodes air. For overall traffic, there was a significant increase — which ultimately impacted the organic traffic to the site and transactions.

So far, the trial take-through rate for these orders is almost 10 percentage points higher than the initial target.

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"The Week had been working with Acast on podcast activity for nearly two years, and over that time has seen significant increases in efficiency and more effective targeting. Such strong results show how finding the right audience can take your podcast advertising campaign to new levels — but they also show how long-term commitment to podcasts can pay off.Working with Acast on our latest campaign was great. We were delighted with the creative execution, the process and most of all the results. The campaign clearly highlights the importance of matching audiences to relevant messages and offers, which the podcast medium allows us to do effectively." Ed Craggs, Head of Marketing, UK Superbrands (The Week)