All iHeart stations have seamless, automatic ad insertion enabled for their POST podcasts.
Here's how it works:
- For all iHeart podcasts created in POST that are more than 20 minutes long, POST will automatically place ad markers in the content in approximately twenty-minute increments. The ad marker will be placed at the end of the segment following the 20-minute mark, so the placement is seamless and does not interrupt content.
- Users do not have to place ad markers manually. However, if a station or user does place an ad marker manually (e.g. at five minutes into the podcast) the next ad marker will automatically be placed approximately 20 minutes after the initial ad marker was placed. Manually placed ad markers will supersede automatically placed markers.
- The station will not visibly be able to see the automatically placed ad markers in the waveform of the podcast in POST. This is part of the automatic process benefit.
- Even though ad markers are being placed in all iHM long-form content, that does not necessarily mean all podcasts will have commercials inserted. If iHM Corporate Ad Ops doesn’t have a commercial to run, no commercials will play in the podcast. In this event, the ad marker is ignored and the content will continue to play.
- Pre-Roll is also automatically configured and added to podcast episodes without any action needed from POST users.