Summ’it aims to connect audiences through audio storytelling
María Jesús Espinosa de los Monteros is chief audio officer at PRISA Media, a dominant voice in the Spanish-speaking world. Drawing on a history of innovation, a clear vision and a canny ability to encourage people to get on board, Espinosa de los Monteros has created a versatile and forward-thinking team with a clear idea of the direction of audio consumption.
RedTech: Tell us about yourself, your background and your radio and audio broadcasting journey.
María Jesús Espinosa de los Monteros: I have a degree in audiovisual communication and a Ph.D. in film history, analysis and documentation. I got into audio purely by chance. While working at a cinema, listening to a lot of radio between movies, a vacancy came up at the Cadena Cope offices in Barcelona. I spent the following six years there as a producer and writer, learning design and scriptwriting — a little bit of everything. When I and many other journalists lost jobs in the 2010 economic crisis, I used my severance pay and crowdsourced funding with other journalists to set up El Extrarradio, one of Spain’s first on-demand native online radio stations. We won an Ondas Award for radio innovation, and it was a wonderful adventure. By 2016, I was running the Spanish podcast platform Podium Podcast. The PRISA group was innovating with Podium, and I became managing director of PRISA Audio in 2021.
RedTech: How is the audio environment in Spain different today from, say, five years ago and how do you see it changing over the next five years?
Espinosa de los Monteros: 2019 was a turning point, marking the beginning of the so-called “Big Podcasting Era,” which, in my opinion, ended in 2023. Over those years, significant players, technologies and platforms such as Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, YouTube Podcast, Himalaya and Podimo geared their entire strategies toward audio.
The past five years have seen an explosion in podcast consumption and production in Spain. In its Digital Audio Study 2023, IAB Spain stated that digital audio consumption is firmly established in the country, with 19.3 million listeners. Podcasts have gained ground (54%) and increased audience reach by 10 percentage points compared to the previous study. They now rank as the third most listened-to format, after digital music (77%) and live online radio (61%). In terms of investment, the 2023 Statista Market Insights study showed that while in 2019, Spain’s investment in audio barely reached €10 million, in 2027, it is expected to reach €40 million. So, in terms of acceptance, consumption and investment, growth has been remarkable.
There are several major challenges. The main one is getting podcasts accepted as a cultural industry and thus eligible for public aid and state, European and local subsidies, as well as access to the corresponding protection.
RedTech: What regulatory, operational or technical challenges are unique to your operating environment?
Espinosa de los Monteros: There are several major challenges. The main one is getting podcasts accepted as a cultural industry and thus eligible for public aid and state, European and local subsidies, as well as access to the corresponding protection. It’s also essential to establish intellectual rights protection mechanisms for podcasts. This will enable greater regulation of sales agreements and rights transfer for transformation into other media and translation into different languages. We also need tax incentives for podcast production. Finally, we need regulation for using generative artificial intelligence in the sector, which will improve and optimize production processes and provide better protection of employment and creation.
RedTech: With increased competition from big online audio streaming and podcasting players, how have you rethought your content and sales strategies?
Espinosa de los Monteros: For us, platforms are necessary allies for reaching new audiences. We have signed significant agreements with Podimo, Amazon Music, Spotify and YouTube Podcasts in Spain and Latin America in the past three years. Said agreements envisage original production with exclusivity windows for distribution and monetization with revenue sharing and amplification in our media. At PRISA Audio we are firmly committed to a multidistribution strategy and a specific advertising model to engage with and appeal to our listeners’ interests. Moreover, the strategy and advertising model must enjoy the backing of advertisers committed to garnering new audiences or who are present in our company’s more traditional media, El País, Caracol Radio, Cadena SER or Los40, and want to transform to the digital environment through audio.
RedTech: What is the one big challenge that keeps you up at night?
Espinosa de los Monteros: At PRISA we are at the forefront of WePod, a European podcast journalism project with nine participants from seven European countries. WePod aims to explore and, ultimately, answer the big questions, especially around European branded content, such as how European multilanguage co-productions are to be made. We seek to strengthen associative links by creating a European podcast association and a digital repository where professionals in the sector can access tools, information and training. Plus, we’re committed to an IP market that promotes moving content between languages and formats.
RedTech: Please explain your first-party data strategy at PRISA Audio and how you expect it to evolve over the next few years.
Espinosa de los Monteros: PRISA Media’s digital and technology department has developed PrisaID. This pioneering project unifies all the data and information about our readers, listeners and users to provide a complete picture of them. This enhanced knowledge allows us to make cross-recommendations, such as offering a reader of a basketball article in our sports newspaper a basketball podcast from our radio station SER. It enables us to increase personalization and, of course, monetization based on data. The PrisaID project focuses on boosting the power of first-party data and is a true pioneer in the media sector.
Our data shows that podcasts allow us to reach younger audiences with a greater proportion of girls and women, especially compared to traditional radio listeners or newspaper readers.
RedTech: How are you fostering a love for audio among younger listeners when all their go-to devices have screens?
Espinosa de los Monteros: Our data shows that podcasts allow us to reach younger audiences with a greater proportion of girls and women, especially compared to traditional radio listeners or newspaper readers. This is excellent news because it is a gateway for these users to other media when they reach adulthood. Meanwhile, as you know, 2023 was the year of the video podcast boom, an image-based format that allows us to viralize content and make it more “consumable” across social networks. Our catalog is broad enough to meet the demands of our listeners, for whom we produce audio fiction, daily news podcasts, specialized content and video podcasts hosted by younger talents who are not necessarily from the field of journalism but might have a background in communication and entertainment.
RedTech: PRISA operates in Spain and Latin America. How are these environments different regarding radio and audio consumption, and how does this affect PRISA’s content and sales strategy in each region?
Espinosa de los Monteros: The maturity of the podcast market in Spain is higher than in Latin America. However, the growth potential is undoubtedly greatest in Latin America, where creativity is abundant. Our stations in Mexico, Colombia and Chile are very strong and contribute our most significant sales. Colombia, for instance, is an amazing example since the first and third of the top three talk radio stations there belong to PRISA Media. In Chile, meanwhile, we have an enormously successful Podium Podcast division and have produced the three most important podcasts in the fiction (“Corderos”), journalism (“¿Quién mató a Anna Cook?”) and conversational genres (“Expertas en nada”). Finally, we are seeing notable growth in Mexico thanks to the strength of our radio business and penetration of the newspaper El País América.
RedTech: Are you experimenting with AI? If so, what are you doing, and what are the benefits?
Espinosa de los Monteros: In the area of voice innovation, coordinated by PRISA Radio’s Chief Digital Officer Ana Ormaechea and voice coordinator Ollala Novoa, we are working on two significant areas within AI: Distribution and voice application.
Audio is a highly complex format to distribute, so applying AI to transcription and tagging each episode is critical. This allows us to make recommendations and improve personalization and indexing. We developed a project called Tailorcast in collaboration with Google.
We have two voice application projects. The first is “Victoria, the voice of football,” a synthetic voice we launched at Cadena SER during the Qatar World Cup. It’s the first time a nonhuman voice has shared the airwaves with human announcers. The other project is VerificAudio, an internal AI tool created with Google and Minsait that allows us to detect fake audio. This will prove vital in 2024 with elections in half the world and a genuine risk of substantial disinformation.
RedTech: How do you recruit new talent, and what skills do you look for now, compared to what you would have looked for five years ago?
Espinosa de los Monteros: I have the best technical and creative audio team imaginable. We strive for excellence in every project, whether it’s an original project or content made for a brand or a platform, audio-only or with video, a one- or two-person project or involving a hundred people. I’ve been lucky enough to hire every one of them and watch them grow in their respective positions. For me, the primary skill is an attitude or disposition: A willingness to learn, knowing how to work in a team and being enthusiastic. They then become audio experts. What I’m looking for now is basically the same as five years ago.
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