- Unwinding the Thread
- Posts
- Betterhelp Advertises on Every Podcast
Companies will do anything to get an edge on the competition. And increasingly, that means knowing the customers better than they know themselves. Back in 2012, the NYT published a story on Target's strategy for predicting which shoppers are on the precipice of major life events (particularly those which propelled consumers to spend more at Target).
Since pregnancy is a rather important moment in the lives of many, it was the perfect testing ground for this new tactic of hitting customers just when they're most "vulnerable to intervention by marketers." Utilizing all the data they could get their hands on, the team at Target searched for shopping trends common for pregnant women. Apparently, "when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date."
The system worked... probably too well.
A year later, an angry father marched into Target holding mail sent to his high school-aged daughter, full of coupons for baby clothes and cribs.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
The idea that consumers of ‘free’ media are the product — I.e. their data is being sold to advertisers — is nothing new. Despite the magnitude of personal privacy violations incurred every time we visit a website, click a like button, or buy something online, it’s quite clear that there is no real widespread resistance to this model… regardless of the fact that 79% of Americans reported concern over company’s use of their data in 2019.
Pew Research found that the same respondents were more likely (81%) to agree with the idea that the “Risks outweigh benefits” when it comes to private companies collecting their data. This is mirrored by the same percentage of people acknowledging that “They have little/no control over the data [collected by companies]”
Yet, this same study found that over 60% of American adults believe it’s impossible to go through daily life without having their data collected. Nearly everyone will register concern over this pernicious trend that has taken hold in recent years — particularly on social media platforms like Tik Tok and Facebook — but, this is nothing more than a performative grievance considering the accelerating rates of adoption across the platforms of many of the most glaring offenders.
A downstream effect of this mass gathering of data is the ability for the public to draw conclusions concerning themselves.
If I'm being shown this ad, I must be the kind of person who's supposed to see this ad...
This can reveal some worrisome trends, as we will see with respect to the prevalence of Betterhelp, a Tele-Therapy company, in podcast ads.
Though rarely included in this data privacy discussion, the surge in the popularity of podcasts has raised similar questions. In 2006, 22% of American adults had listened to a podcast. Today, that number has risen to over 78%, with 41% listening to an episode every month. The domestic market generated $2B in revenue in 2022 and is projected to double in 2024, with the majority coming from advertising.
In other words, that's a massive incentive to leverage data-driven strategies to identify, group, and bundle podcast listeners into neat little packages to be sold to advertisers.
Considering the money at stake, it's a wise assumption that media planners are exceptionally adept at extracting extensive knowledge regarding the various attributes of a particular audience to determine their susceptibility to their advertising.
As a result, it's reasonable to draw conclusions about large portions of the population based on statistics relating to the advertising spend of specific companies and industries.
Betterhelp has consistently been the top-spending podcast advertiser for a number of years. In 2022, it was the top spender every single month across hundreds of the most popular shows. Over the course of the year, Betterhelp spent over $91M — beating out companies with massive war chests like Amazon, Shopify, and Progressive.
It doesn't take an analysis of the podcast industry to declare we're in a mental health crisis, but it's important to recognize that a company that offers therapy and treatment for mental health issues has reviewed the data and essentially determined that the surging levels of depression, anxiety, etc. (which happens to be great for their business) is so ubiquitous that it pays for them to cast the widest net in the entire industry.