In 2025, RedCircle launched Mic Check, an AI that ensures host-read ads meet the advertiser’s talking points and compliance requirements. Mic Check transcribes the read, checks it against the script, flags issues, and suggests improvements — all in seconds. In the first three months after we started using this automated quality tooling, RedCircle reduced its host-read ad errors by 75%.
Today, we’re pointing that same technology at a problem that podcasters have lived with for years: miscategorized programmatic ads.
The Problem: Inappropriate Programmatic Ads
With billions of programmatic ads inserted over RedCircle’s history, we’ve seen it all: political ICE ads snuck into adjacent categories to avoid blocks on “politics,” or ad creative from a sex toy brand coming through as “Shopping.” When the label is fuzzy, misleading, or just incorrect, a podcaster who wants nothing to do with a type of ad has no reliable way to keep it off their feed. It’s a real cost; it’s the difference between embracing programmatic revenue and avoiding it entirely because you can’t trust what your audience may hear.
Our solution: Mic Check for Programmatic Ads. Mic Check provides instant AI-powered ad content review, helping to ensure that programmatic ads are properly categorized to respect your filters.
How Mic Check for Programmatic Works
Host-read ads are personal to the podcast creator, but programmatic ads are not. Each individual podcast play receives ads from various programmatic sources in real time, and often the ads have metadata that’s incomplete, inconsistent, or just plain wrong. The metadata — information like the ad category, who the advertiser is, and more — is exactly what podcast publishers rely on to make sure that ads they don’t want won’t play on their content. Publishers want to ensure that an ad will be excluded if it doesn’t align with their content, their values, or their audience.
The second we see a new piece of ad creative, Mic Check transcribes the audio and runs through its checks. We ensure:
- Proper metadata. We store and build keyword lists, ad descriptions, a full transcript, a score of how accurate the existing categories are, and more.
- An accurate advertiser. Demand platforms can misidentify the advertiser, or list the agency making the buy instead of the actual brand. Mic Check ensures we have the right advertiser so that specific brands can be blocked as needed.
- The right advertising category. Mic Check evaluates the supplied ad category for accuracy. If the category is inaccurate or a controversial category is applicable and isn’t applied, Mic Check adds that category to the ad’s metadata, ensuring the podcaster’s preferences are respected.
With these features, ads for political issues, sexual content, tobacco, gambling, and the like will never slip through. All of it happens within a few seconds of when we first see a unique ad. No manual review. No revenue lost waiting on it.
Why It Matters for Podcasters
Accurate categorization gives you control. When the metadata is right, you can confidently exclude the categories that don’t fit your show or your values — and you can trust that the exclusion actually works. Setting a proper advertiser on every ad means you can shut out specific brands, and it gives our team the visibility to catch bad actors before you ever have to.
The result: you get to lean into programmatic revenue without the worry that something off-brand will sneak onto your feed. You can monetize without compromise.
Industry-leading publishers like PodcastOne are already benefiting from Mic Check’s new programmatic features. “In running a large-scale podcast network like ours, we need to be sure that our creators’ preferences are being respected, and that we’re maintaining proper competitive separation,” says Michal Ksepko, SVP of Operations at PodcastOne. “Mic Check is a huge step forward for us to build confidence in our programmatic demand.”
Built on One of the Largest Advertising Datasets in Podcasting
Like the original Mic Check, Mic Check for Programmatic is powered by one of the deepest catalogs of podcast ads in the industry. We’ve tuned our AI with hundreds of mislabeled examples flagged by our customers, data from billions of programmatic ad impressions, and eight years of practical experience working in the podcast ad tech ecosystem. That scale and experience are what let Mic Check tell the difference between “Herbal Remedies” and marijuana. We’ll get the call right the first time.
How to Get It
If you monetize with RedCircle, you already have Mic Check’s protection. Mic Check for Programmatic is now on automatically for all of our programmatic demand, at no additional cost — every new piece of ad copy is reviewed the moment we see it.
And if you monetize elsewhere, we’re already working with publishers to bring this technology to their other demand sources too. If that’s you, drop us a note — we’d love to talk.
Curious what trustworthy programmatic could look like for your show? Get started with RedCircle.