What is the Smart Recommendations tool?
Smart Recommendations is Acast’s AI-powered media planning tool designed to help advertisers find the perfect podcasts for their sponsorships. This feature analyzes thousands of podcasts across millions of data points to match your brand with shows that align with your target audience and content preferences.
Discover Hidden Gems: Find high-performing podcasts that traditional search methods might miss
Confirm Audience Alignment: Validate your assumptions about shows you're already considering
Save Time: Quickly identify the most relevant options without manually researching hundreds of shows
How It Works
Unlike browsing methods that rely on keywords or categories, Smart Recommendations uses advanced AI to understand the nuances of your audience targeting and content requirements. Simply enter a prompt describing who you want to reach or what type of podcast you're looking for, and the system will generate a tailored list of podcast recommendations.
To navigate to Smart Recommendations: Click "Create campaign" from your home screen, then select "Start campaign" under the Host-read sponsorships option
Important notes:
This is not a conversational tool. Results to any kind of prompt will always be a list of podcast recommendations relevant to the input.
Budget and CPM prompt analysis is not supported in this version. However, you will see the weekly spend and CPM for every podcast in the results list.
Recommendations are currently limited to shows in English only.
Crafting Effective Prompts
The quality of your results depends greatly on your prompt. Here are some guidelines for creating effective prompt:
Focus on your audience: Define your target audience by demographics, interests, and behaviours.
Example: “I want to reach millennials aged 30-40 who drink wine.”
Example: “I want to target women aged 18-30 who are into fashion and beauty”
Include content preferences: Specify topics or themes that align with your brand, audience or campaign.This could include podcast genres or podcasts that discuss particular topics.
Example: “I want to reach men interested in fitness and health”
Example: “Suggest shows that cover technology and finance topics.”
Find similar shows: If there’s a show you know is a good fit and you want to find more like it, ask Smart Recommendations to find similar shows.
Example: “Find shows that are similar to Giggly Squad.”
Example: “Find podcasts similar to [specific show] with audiences interested in sustainable living.”
Combining prompts for more specific targeting:
Combine both elements to create prompts that guide the engine to identify the right podcasts for your campaigns:
“We are targeting male fitness enthusiasts interested in supplements”
“We are targeting women 25-35 interested in affordable fashion”
"Suggest shows reaching tech and finance business decision-makers."
"Find podcasts similar to [specific show] with audiences interested in sustainable living."
What to Avoid
To get the most relevant recommendations, avoid these common pitfalls:
Asking multiple questions: The tool is not conversational and will only generate podcast recommendations. Questions like "What shows are popular and how much do they cost?" won't provide useful responses.
Asking to allocate a budget for you: While we plan to incorporate this into future releases, the tool does not support budget allocation yet and will ignore this portion of your prompt.
Vague prompts: "Good podcasts" or "popular shows" don't provide enough context for the engine to generate meaningful recommendations.
Overly narrow criteria: Extremely specific requirements (e.g., "podcasts about underwater basket weaving hosted by left-handed people") may yield limited or no results.
Formatting issues: Using bullet points, special characters, or complex formatting in your prompt may affect results.
Expecting real-time dialogue: Don't phrase your prompt as if having a conversation with the tool. Instead, focus on clearly stating your audience and content requirements.
Understanding Your Results
Every query you run will result in a list of podcast recommendations. Each recommendation has two components to it - the podcast’s reach and cost, and an explanation of why it is relevant to your prompt.
Reach and Pricing:
Listeners per week: Shows the podcast's reach
Cost per week: The standard weekly rate
CPM (Cost Per 1000 Listens) : Most shows will display a CPM but there are some shows where this is not applicable, either due to fixed prices or a weekly floor price.
Content Analysis:
Each recommendation includes custom analysis paragraphs (typically three) explaining why the show is a good match for your criteria, covering:
Audience Alignment: How the podcast's demographics match your target
Content Relevance: How the podcast's topics align with your requirements
Community Engagement: Insights into listener behavior and interaction
Additional Factors: Unique elements that make the show valuable for your goals
Submitting A Proposal
To select a show for your campaign, you can click on the “+” button on the upper right side of the show card. This will open up the show’s booking calendar, where you can see which weeks are available for booking.
You must select at least one week that you would like to sponsor the show for in order to move on to the next step. Once you have done this for all of the shows you would like to advertise on, you can move on to the booking process.
Before Acast can contact podcasts on your behalf, you'll need to provide information about your company and campaign. Podcasters approve every advertiser that wants to sponsor their show, so providing detailed information will help them approve your campaign quicker.
Include the following details:
Campaign name (recommended format: [What you're promoting] + [Start date])
Brand name
Campaign goals and description
Campaign timeline
You can find more information about the host-read sponsorship process here.