Individual Media Dependency Types and Their Relationship to Podcast Advertising Engagement

Podcasting is not a new vehicle, but interest and investment in advertising via this medium has been growing recently along with the growth in popularity of podcasts. Is there a relationship between an individual’s media dependency, their overall podcast use, and their engagement with advertising that appears on podcasts? If so, marketers would have a better idea of the type of ways people depend on their phones that may lend them to be better targets for advertising over podcasts, and/or ones they should avoid. Using Ubiquitous Media Dependency and Calder and Malthouse's Engagement framework as theoretical bases, globally we find that those individuals exhibiting Action and Social 1 dependencies tend to dis-engage with advertising over podcasts; moreover, the interaction of these two dependencies significantly increases perceptions of advertising's interference with podcast content. Additionally, users of specific podcast genres display other relationships between various dependency types, usage, and ad engagement. Results/implications are discussed.