Why AI Brands Need Audio: Insights from Our New Study

Welcome to the Media Roundtable, where we explore the business of trust in the new media economy.

I'm somehow your host today, Tucker Palousis of Oxford Road.

Today, we're going to talk about AI, but in a way that's hopefully different from the million or so other AI conversations that are out there right now.

This week, in partnership with our friends at Cumulus Media Westwood One and the research firm Quantalope, we're releasing a new study on AI that tries to answer a deceptively simple question.

How are everyday Americans actually using AI? And then pairing that with how does that compare to the people who market AI for a living? The results paint what the survey calls a tale of two cities.

On this one side, you have marketers and media agencies who use a ton of AI and are super excited and optimistic about the possibilities.

On the other side, in the other city, you have average Americans, half of whom use AI weekly, but are still pretty guarded about AI as a whole.

There's another intriguing narrative in this study, one that matters a lot to this specific audience is heavy podcast and heavy AM FM listeners are more aware of AI brands and more frequent AI users compared to the general population.

In other words, AI and podcasting and audio might be on this collision course in a way that might actually be good for our industry.

We're going to dig into all of this with our guests, both of whom spent a lot of time thinking about how and why we consume media and how that impacts brand building.

So first up, we have Pierre Bouvard.

He's the Chief Insights Officer for Cumulus Media and Westwood One.

Joining him, my colleague, Neil Lucey, EVP of Strategic Planning at Oxford Road.

Pierre, Neil, welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

I'm really excited to have you guys too.

I know that this has been a long time coming.

I won't spoil it with my anecdotes or any of the findings.

So we'll get right into it, Pierre.

I know you've put this thing together.

You've had time to distill it and get in deep.

Can you talk about some of the key findings from the research? And then from there, we'll kind of dig into a few more of them.