GoDaddy.com, known for its tasteful, chaste, kid-friendly ads is sponsoring over 50 podcasts on the PodShow Network, an aggregator of podcasts. GoDaddy's ads and sponsorship will appear in multiple podcasts and throughout the site. The press release is chock-full of zingers like "Advertising 2.0" and "the power of many voices discussing one brand." If podcasting sticks around, then certainly its monetized future lies in advertising of this kind - rolling out spots across multiple shows among a family of products and brands. It's the equivalent of sponsoring a night of bands at a concert, or a family of blogs all sharing money with Google Ad Words. At some point, NBC will have 70 podcasts (alright, maybe more like 7), and they will all have a coordinated ad campaign such as the one GoDaddy and PodShow are claiming to have done first. More power to 'em.

Of course, with all this new media being flung hither and yon, the bigger issue is "Why are these broadcast ads?" That is, why are all the members of PodShow's audience being given the same thing? Of course, it makes sense for a little minnow like PodShow to jump on a big fat ad contract, but this all highlights the fact that advertising is still delivered in a broadcast fashion but the audience is receiving content in a narrowcast manner. The audience is pulling down their podcasts, picking and choosing quixotically, but their ads are served from the same pool. Where is narrowcast advertising? Where are ad insertions based on individual users? THAT is the future: ads served in podcasts, webcasts, and digital broadcasts changed to suit each user.

[via Podcasting News]