NEW YORK: Podcast advertising is a small, but growing, market and now podcast network Panoply is launching a new platform that says will improve ad targeting and measurement.

Panoply, which is owned by digital publisher Slate Group, has developed an ad insertion technology called Megaphone that will be made available to all its partner companies, including the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post.

Megaphone is supposed to help advertisers get round the problem whereby ads served in older podcasts may no longer be relevant when viewed months or years after their first insertion, Advertising Age reported.

By allowing for one-click insertion of ads into podcasts, Panoply expects advertisers will be able to serve more relevant and up-to-date ads. Its so-called dynamic inserted ads will also allow advertisers to place new ads in back episodes.

As well as including its current partners, Panoply is also licensing the platform to Gimlet Media and is reported to be in discussions about offering the same for other podcast operators.

On top of its ad insertion capabilities, Megaphone is also being promoted as a means of improving data measurement for clients.

Podcast ads are currently sold based on download totals, but this is an imperfect metric because not all users who download a programme will always watch it.

"We will be able to bundle like podcasts with like audiences to go scale against those like audiences," explained Matt Turck, chief revenue officer at Panoply.

"At some point we'll be able to project out demographics and target out those podcasts against specific demographics," he added.

Joel Withrow, Panoply's director of product, said the company is also looking to give advertisers live access to a progress report on their podcast campaigns and that this feature could be rolled out in the second quarter of this year.

Data sourced from Advertising Age; additional content by Warc staff