NumberEight & Katz Digital Partner to Scale Podcast Advertising with AI-Powered Lookalike Targeting
by on 12th Jun 2025 in News
NumberEight, the leading ID-less audience intelligence company, today (12th June, 2025) announced a strategic partnership with Katz Digital, one of the most influential media sales organisations in the US. Known for its deep roots in audio and expansive cross-platform reach, Katz represents the largest curated podcast supply globally, offering advertisers access to over 300,000 shows through its PodKatz network.
With a legacy of shaping media buying strategies for top agencies and national brands, Katz has long been at the forefront of audio innovation. Their approach goes beyond scale. Through expert curation and real-time market insight, Katz helps advertisers identify the right voices for their campaigns. With the integration of NumberEight’s Podcast Lookalikes technology, that global scale becomes even more valuable, enabling buyers to dynamically surface shows that mirror their target audiences and deliver performance across borders, without relying on personal identifiers.
Podcast Lookalikes allows advertisers searching for a specific podcast, such as SmartLess, to find other shows with similar audience profiles and content signals. So even if a flagship show is sold out, out of budget, or too limited in scale, advertisers can still reach the same type of listeners. More than a targeting tool, Podcast Lookalikes enables a new type of curation, empowering advertisers to discover untapped shows that resonate with their ideal audience.
The technology works in two steps:
Analyse the seed podcast
A) Audience understanding — Determine the podcast’s demographic characteristics using AI models trained on anonymised first-party publisher data and content metadata.
B) Content understanding – Advanced natural language processing models analyse content themes across the podcast’s episodes.
Matchmaking – Find other shows that are ranked based on audience and content similarities, surfacing the closest matches to the seed podcast.
This unlocks a smarter, scalable way to plan and activate audience-first podcast campaigns without relying on personal identifiers. Whether reaching listeners in New York, London, or São Paulo, advertisers can now tap into Katz’s vast supply with the precision and flexibility today’s campaigns demand.
"We’re excited to partner with Katz Digital to help advertisers better navigate and activate across all publishers," said Abhishek Sen, CEO and co-founder at NumberEight. "Together, we’re combining Katz’s unmatched inventory and scale with smart audience curation to drive better outcomes across one of the fastest-growing channels in audio—and this is just the beginning."
As privacy regulations reshape the digital landscape, this partnership offers brands a future-proof way to reach their audiences with precision, scale, and contextual relevance.
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