Sounder Is Using AI To Decode The Contextual Nuances Of Spanish-Language Media

When you hear the word “crystal,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

For some, it might be healing and chakras. Others might think of the champagne brand or the Chilean pilsner Cerveza Cristal, a popular beer in many Spanish-speaking countries.

Semantic analysis is challenging enough for AI when dealing with online display, let alone in audio and podcast advertising. But when you layer in cultural differences, it’s that much more difficult to accurately categorize content and context from a brand safety perspective.

On Wednesday, Sounder, an AI-powered audio intelligence platform that operates under iHeartMedia-owned Triton Digital, launched a new version of its brand suitability and contextual targeting tool for podcasts that can understand the nuances of Spanish-language audio content.

The tool, which uses the IAB’s brand safety and suitability framework, is Triton’s first foray into Spanish language analysis.

Mexican media and broadcasting company Grupo ACIR recently adopted Sounder’s new technology to find the most relevant advertisers for its podcasts.

Grupo ACIR, which is iHeartMedia’s exclusive partner for digital distribution in Mexico, is hopeful that this new depth of insight into understanding content will improve both direct and programmatic sales, Manuel Pérez del Castillo, the company’s IT and quality director, told AdExchanger.

Listening vs. understanding

Sounder’s AI isn’t just trained on direct translations but on the context of a given word.

For instance, someone “gunning” for a promotion at their job would be a very different podcast topic than someone bringing a literal gun to work.

But brand safety and suitability tech also has to account for cultural differences, as well as contextual ones.

Take that Cerveza Cristal example.

“If we were just using an English pipeline and someone said ‘Cristal,’” Taylor said, some brand safety tech might peg it as a reference to gemstones or a woman’s name.

Sounder’s tool accounts for cultural elements, so it should be able to recognize that, in certain contexts, “crystal” (or “cristal”) is likely referring to the beer brand.

But Sounder also employs “human annotators,” who are native Spanish speakers, to make note of slang terms and product names in context so that it can train its AI models, Taylor said.

Sounder uses multiple different AI models for different tasks to improve precision and analysis, rather than relying on a single model, including OpenAI’s Whisper for speech recognition and BERT and its multilingual counterparts, mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa, for content comprehension.

Building trust

Since Sounder can understand when specific topics and themes are being discussed, Grupo ACIR expects the platform to be especially useful for advertisers who want to target by episode and not just by genre, according to Pérez del Castillo.

For example, one of Grupo ACIR’s podcasts features cartoons and animated movies, Pérez del Castillo said, so if one episode is discussing the DC cinematic universe, an advertiser promoting a new movie or comic book might want to reach people listening to that specific episode.

But Grupo ACIR could also use the tool to help monetize shows that have historically been seen as less brand safe. Grupo ACIR airs an educational podcast hosted by a sex therapist that some advertisers have shied away from wholesale.

Now, advertisers can choose to run ads in certain episodes of that podcast covering subjects they deem safer, or cherry pick episodes that do or don’t include specific keywords rather than ruling out whole shows entirely.

Which is important for podcasters, who are in dire need of ad spend.

In 2024, audio accounted for 25% of media engagement in the US, but only 8% of ad spend.

Comparable research isn’t available for the Mexico audio market, but Pérez del Castillo says this discrepancy is also pronounced in Mexico, where audio advertising is still in its nascency, making it even more challenging to convince advertisers to enter the space.

But ads read by podcast hosts can be uniquely effective, according to Pérez del Castillo, because the listener is already engaged and paying close attention to the speaker.

And as podcasting and audio prove that they have the same caliber of brand safety tools that advertisers have come to expect across other mediums, Taylor added, it will become “a lot easier to grow.”