The broadcaster is strictly non-commercial – yet ads, including for a TAB subsidiary, have been appearing on its podcasts. Shanti Mathias investigates.
“I was listening to a longform interview with Lisa Reihana about installing her art in Singapore, then there was a jarring cut to a laddish ad for a gambling site – it was such a juxtaposition, it just doesn’t fit with the show,” says Joseph, a fan of the Culture 101 RNZ show, which talks to artists about their work. Last Sunday, he was listening on Apple Podcasts; like most RNZ productions, the show’s interviews are portioned into individual podcast episodes and loaded on to podcast platforms like Apple and Spotify. The ad, for the younger-people focused TAB subsidiary betcha, seemed out of place, as did ads on an RNZ podcast at all. “They don’t have ads on RNZ usually, because being a non-commercial station is part of its character, so I thought it was weird that they had ads on their podcasts,” Joseph says.
On being contacted by The Spinoff, RNZ said the gambling ads should not have aired during its podcasts, and did so due to an error on the podcast provider’s part.
Most adblockers don’t stop podcast advertising – making it attractive to businesses as their ads are hard to skip or ignore. The podcast advertising market was valued at $US10.9bn in 2022, and is expected to keep growing as audiences increase for the audio medium.
Joseph has been hearing ads on RNZ podcasts for a while, mostly for perennial podcast sponsors like digital therapy offering BetterHelp. But because he often listens to RNZ shows, like Culture 101 and Charlotte Ryan’s Music 101, alongside podcasts from other providers, it took a while for him to realise that the ads he was hearing were actually on RNZ products, not from the start of the next show. “One podcast can kind of blur into the other,” the dedicated listener says.
Gambling ads have been frequent lately, he says, with the TAB launching the “Get Your Bet On” campaign in June and sponsoring the Game of 2 Halves reboot, while overseas gambling companies can take advantage of New Zealand’s minimal requirements around digital advertising. Joseph has certainly been hearing a lot of TAB ads, “maybe because I watch lots of sports coverage, and I’m a man in my 30s with disposable income”.
While third-party ads are placed automatically, and somewhat targeted to the user, the person uploading the podcast can choose to exclude categories of advertising, as this page on Spotify explains. An RNZ spokesperson told The Spinoff that after being made aware of Joseph’s experience, the organisation confirmed that gambling advertising was already turned off in its podcast distributor, as is lottery advertising. The issue was with the podcast distributor allowing gambling ads to be placed, not with the public broadcaster allowing these ads in the first place. “We will be following up urgently with the provider using the information you’ve provided about this,” they said.
But the advertisement Joseph heard during an RNZ show wasn’t a one-off; after interviewing Joseph, this reporter also heard an ad for betcha while listening to the excellent RNZ podcast Nellie’s Baby, about the life of a woman institutionalised in Porirua Hospital, on podcast platform PocketCasts. Joseph doesn’t feel upset about the ad, and certainly plans to continue listening to Culture 101 – he was just confused about why it happened.
One aspect of the RNZ Charter is that the public media organisation must “ensure that it is not influenced by the commercial interests of other parties”. It must also “provide its services in a commercial-free manner”, “whether or not the delivery platforms are free to access”. Commercial-free means “free to access and without advertising or sponsorship” and delivery platform means “any method of transmitting audio, visual or audiovisual content”. RNZ must “exhibit a sense of social responsibility” by “having regard to the interests of the community in which it operates.”
By this measure, podcast platforms, free to use via RSS feeds, are “delivery platforms”. While RNZ emphasises that all podcasts on RNZ platforms (its website, app or on the radio) are ad-free, for many people, podcast providers will be the default place to engage with podcasts. RNZ’s chief content officer Megan Whelan told The Spinoff that some small commercial activities were permitted under the RNZ charter, “the famous RNZ cookbook being one such example”. While this may be the case, a cookbook sold in bookshops is clearly a completely different type of “commercial activity” than an advertisement integrated with a podcast.
Advertising gambling on RNZ products, specifically, appears to blatantly contravene the “social responsibility” aspect of the RNZ charter. Gambling is widely considered to cause social harm, as RNZ has reported on.
Ads have run on RNZ podcasts playing on third-party platforms, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, since 2019. That isn’t all podcasts; discretion is applied. “There are no ads on news or podcasts for children at this time,” Whelan said. The amount of money gained is small, and put back into podcast production. “For context, it’s about 0.00047% of the RNZ annual budget, akin to thousands of dollars rather than tens of thousands each year.” Given that the amount of revenue is so small, it’s hard to understand why the public broadcaster bothers switching the ads on at all.
The harm caused by gambling means that its advertising is highly regulated. The Advertising Standards Authority has a Gambling Advertising Code which deals with general principles, such as that it shouldn’t be targeted at children, and the Department of Internal Affairs deals with gambling advertising that doesn’t meet legal requirements.
RNZ’s focus on podcasts means that playing shows on third-party apps (with advertising) is firmly in place. Tim Watkin, executive producer of podcasts on RNZ, told the Public Media Alliance in 2022 that producing podcasts with smaller producers or specific communities in mind was a key “There’s a public good element of getting these stories out to our wide audience.” The organisation, which RNZ is a member of, has also pointed to RNZ’s The Detail as an example of how “podcasts are now an essential and established part of a public broadcaster’s response to news.”
RNZ emphasises that the gambling ads shouldn’t have been there, but it’s not clear why it happened. Perhaps the betcha ad had simply not been properly identified by the podcast platform. Nonetheless, the reality of widespread podcast advertising, targeted to individual users, makes the gambling regulations hard to enforce. If a child is using a parent’s device, for instance, they could easily be exposed to advertising targeting their parents. Hilary Souter, the chief executive of the ASA, said that podcast advertising would depend on the podcast content – if the host appeals to under-18s, the Complaints Board would consider this factor if a code had been breached. Ultimately, the advertisers themselves are also responsible for considering the audience to which they’re marketing.
“RNZ’s commitment to being commercial-free and independent is as strong as ever,” Whelan said, when asked about the ads on RNZ products. Nonetheless, there’s space in their podcast feeds for other companies’ commercial incentives to creep in.
The TAB did not respond to a request for comment.
9.40am, September 26: This story was updated to place greater emphasis on RNZ saying the gambling ads appeared due to an error on the third-party provider’s account, and should not have been allowed.