For any serious indie podcaster, Captivate’s dynamic content and ad platform AMIE has launched, and it’s a kick-ass addition to the platform.
First, a little disclaimer – I’m part of the Podcast Experience team at Captivate, but I was a very happy customer for over a year before joining them in September last year. As such, this overview comes from a podcaster perspective.
As well as offering the usual pre-roll and post-roll, Captivate’s AMIE includes support for mid-roll. Not only that, but if you have baked in ads from a previous sponsor that you need to replace, well, Captivate does this seamlessly for you as well!
So what is AMIE and why’s it so good?
AMIE – Dynamic Content and Ads for Every Podcaster
AMIE stands for Audio Monetization and Insertion Engine, which in its simplest form means you can use dynamic content as another monetization option for your podcast.
This includes:
- Dynamic ads
- Trailer swaps
- Internal ads
- Dynamic content
While these are the usual suspects when it comes to dynamic content for your podcast, really the only limitation is how you use it.
For example, if you want to get really creative, you could insert a mid-roll piece of content that talks to the topic being discussed. I did that with a snippet from my wife’s podcast when I talked about my mental wellness.
Let’s say you have an episode from a couple of years back that looked at a popular movie, and why it’s crying out for a sequel.
Low and behold, a sequel is announced but you don’t want to have to create a brand new episode just to mention it.
Instead, you create a snippet sharing your excitement that says, “It’s happening Movie X 2 is going to be lit!” and insert that at the exact point of that two year-old episode memntions how great it’d be to get a sequel.
Boom!
Contextual, updates listeners who find your episode, and keeps your content evergreen.
Better still, maybe you’re now partnering with a movie chain and that dynamic piece of content also has an offer and how to claim it.
Not only have you updated listeners with news of the sequel, you’re now earning revenue and your listeners are getting a special offer – all from a small, dynamically-inserted piece of audio.
Dynamic Content Insertion Without the Headaches
As cool as all that is (and really, it’s just the tip of the iceberg), AMIE benefits from the beautiful and clean UI that Captivate has become known for.
Thanks to the awesome design and developer skills at Captivate, using AMIE is as enjoyable as using the rest of the Captivate dashboard.
- clear instructions
- simple implementation
- clean, non-cluttered user interface
Because of this, podcasters everywhere can start inserting dynamic ads and content into their episodes, without needing advanced knowledge of having exact timing, where to add, how to add, etc.
As an example, take a look at how easy it is to add pre-roll and post-roll ads, as well as mid-roll.
As you can see, not only is it easy to add dynamic content at single episode level, but also bulk insertion across your whole library. Pretty damn slick.
And if that wasn’t cool enough, this next feature is for podcasters that have baked in ads. A baked in ad is an ad that’s part of the podcast episode, and lives in that episode continuously.
More often than not, it’s a host-read ad for a sponsor, and will appear in every episode. Because of this, it can be a major pain to replace these ads if you change sponsors due to the way they’re inherently a part of the episode audio itself.
Thanks to AMIE, this headache is no more. Using Captivate’s Ad Painter technology, you can take an old baked in ad and easily replace it with a new ad. Not only that, but – again – you can do this across your complete library if you wish.
For anyone’s that’s had to replace baked in ads, you’ll know how much of a pain this can be – timing of ad, new audio, replacement, multiple episodes to edit, and more.
Kiss goodbye to that pain. 🙂
Captivate’s AMIE is Free to Use Right Now
As cool as AMIE is – and it’s very cool – this is just Module One. The Captivate team are taking a three-pronged approach to AMIE, with modules two and three bringing ad partners, an ad marketplace to, campaign management and more to podcasters.
Better yet, AMIE is completely free to all Captivate podcasters right now, and can be used from directly within the Captivate dashboard.
As mentioned in my little disclaimer at the start of this post, yes I’m part of the Captivate team. But I’m also a passionate podcaster, as is everyone on the team.
With AMIE, just like every other feature Captivate has released, you can tell it’s been built with podcasters front and centre and top of mind.
By giving the serious indie podcaster the kind of tools normally reserved for “the big boys”, Captivate has opened a whole new world of monetization to everyone. Game on.