Adopter Media SVP of Client Services Adam McNeil on the Math Problem Behind Podcast Ads

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives, we're diving into the business of podcast advertising with Adam McNeil of Adopter Media.

Adam McNeil: If YouTube was gonna change podcasting, it would've happened years ago.

Jeff Umbro: Dynamic or baked in podcast ads?

Adam McNeil: Baked in ads, all the time.

Jeff Umbro: This is the episode that explains what's really happening with the money behind the mic. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Adam McNeil: It's so good to be here. Thanks for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: So I wanna start just by defining who you are.

What is Adopter Media? Name some of your clients, that kind of thing.

Adam McNeil: My name's Adam. I am the SVP of Client Services at Adopter Media. We're a podcast advertising agency. We've been doing podcast ads for nearly eight years. We've spent around a hundred million dollars over the course of our time in this space on podcast ads for mostly direct response, D2C focused, Shopify like brands in which they expect us to get performance outta these dollars for them.

I've been doing this myself for almost five years, since my time formally working at a D2C brand called Füm. We represent actively about two dozen brands at any given time. BlueChew, Füm, Lumen, countless others. I think we've had some 50, 60, 70 clients over the years and just, yeah, very grateful to have the opportunity to grow some crazy cool brands.

Jeff Umbro: You said D2C, you said DR. Direct to consumer brands and direct response, meaning you will help to buy ads on the Joe Rogan Show, where you're promoting Magic Spoon cereal. And me as a listener goes and buys the cereal and hopefully enjoys it and buys it a lot more and, and that. That is success for you guys.

Is that accurate?

Adam McNeil: Yeah, and, and actually D2C and DR are not necessarily the same thing. You can have a D2C brand, which constitutes a brand that ships direct to the consumer that isn't doing a direct response campaign 'cause a direct response campaign is typically a campaign that has a call to action that you are measuring the impact of.

You could be a D2C brand doing a brand awareness campaign in which there is no call to action. But our bread and butter is D2C brands predominantly, though some of them have retail footprints that are doing direct response campaigns. So we wanna measure and we like working with e-commerce brands.

It's our niche. I dunno, I, I grew up in the Shopify world. It, it was just what I love.

Jeff Umbro: In my mind, there are two big kinds of campaigns and podcast advertising. There's direct response and brand awareness. Would you say that there's a third or fourth category there?

Adam McNeil: I wouldn't say there's a third or fourth category necessarily. I think those are two ends of the spectrum of what a brand is looking for. They both generate a return on investment for the brand. So I, I don't want to confuse people to think that DR oriented campaigns are the only ROI focused campaign 'cause a brand awareness campaign has an investment objective to it.

The Harmon Brothers, if you're familiar with them, they're an ad agency that works in the creative space. They're the guys behind Squatty Potty, Poopurri, and all those old commercials that were these amazing unicorn sitting on a toilet showing how, you know if you sit on a Squatty Potty, you're gonna have a better shit.

Can I say shit on the podcast?

Jeff Umbro: You sure can.

Adam McNeil: Amazing. Okay. Those commercials are the perfect depiction of what a brand awareness, a direct response campaign looks like, because they're not just over trying to sell you on a product. 'cause when I think hardcore direct response, I think of those late night TV commercials or infomercials selling me Slap Chop. It was just like, get a Slap Chop. Buy two of them, buy three. Look at the way that this can slap. Chop your food again. That commercial, that is what I would call like hardcore direct response. It's purely bottom of funnel focus. You have 30 minutes to call in and order your slap chop at a 40% discount, whatever it is. That is hardcore DR.

On the other end of it, I think of the way that Apple advertises, apple doesn't do direct response. They build brand, they show stories. They show people in movement and in action, and they allow their product to speak for themselves. It still has ROI. It still drives a shit ton of conversions for them. They're a multi billion dollar company. Nearly a trillion dollar company. So something's happening there. They're doing something right.

What we try to focus on in the middle and what I would call the third campaign is when you can bridge brand awareness with direct response. What is a DR oriented ad that you can put out, that you can measure that also pushes brand forward?

I think one of the greatest DR brand awareness campaigns that exist currently is Shopify. The fact that they add that little cha-ching to their ads is a little bit of brand awareness building that they're allowing to, to, to seep into the back of your head of, oh, if I just start a Shopify store, I could hear that cha-ching every day.

And yet they have a call to action.

Jeff Umbro: So can you break down the difference between just a dynamic ad insertion campaign and a baked in ad, and when each of them makes sense?

Adam McNeil: If I say dynamic ad insertion right now, depending on who's listening to me, they have a different idea of what I'm actually saying. So maybe to pull everybody back for one second, and to give you my definitions of how I look at it, there is insertion type, there is the read type and there is the, the ad type within that at some level.

So when we talk insertion type, there are really only three types of insertions. There is baked in and live read. That is an ad that is directly tied to the audio, the RSS feed, it will then get uploaded to your hosting platform and then distributed elsewhere from there, that's on the audio file. Can't really be easily removed.

Then there's dynamic insertion. You got your hosting platform, your Megaphones, your Simplecast, Omny. It doesn't matter. Your hosting platform. That's where dynamic ad insertion comes in. You can still run an episodic buy, which people might call baked in or faked in, or episodic where you're doing an ad that way, but it's dynamic ad insertion, even if it facilitates the same.

Jeff Umbro: It's dynamically inserted, but specifically to each episode that we're talking about.

Adam McNeil: Precisely, right. So you could in theory tell me, oh, we sell a baked in ad, but you use dynamic ad insertion and as long as you never remove that ad from the content, it's as though it was the exact same thing as a baked in ad, but it was through dynamic ad insertion. So that's where I like to differentiate and make sure we use the right terminology.

Lastly, the only other insertion type that currently exists is streaming ad insertion through platforms like Spotify, which is through the listening app of the consumer.

So we got the RSS feed, which the download exists on the hosting platform, which you can do DAI on, and then you have the listing platform like Spotify, which streaming ads can be inserted on. Those are the only three insertion types that currently exist, aside from if you wanna call product placement or sponsored content or segments, et cetera. But those all fall under baked in.

Jeff Umbro: Streaming you'd, you'd put as like the same or similar to programmatic?

Adam McNeil: Programmatic is a methodology of buying more so than it is a specific way because trade desk and buying through Spotify Ads Manager are technically in process the same, but the insertion is different 'cause streaming happens at the listen level. That ad is preloaded 15 seconds before I get to that point in the episode, like a YouTube ad while I'm watching Mr. Beast, whereas programmatic is inserted when the download occurs at the beginning of the episode, regardless of whether or not you get to that point in the episode that the ad is there.

So it's attached to the download, not the unique listen. So the unique listen is like a guaranteed, that person actually listened to that ad that you put in that content, which sets it apart in a really different light from everything else that exists currently.

Jeff Umbro: I know that you prefer baked in, and can you walk us through why you prefer that?

Adam McNeil: I'll retract the term baked in to say I, I prefer episodic. And so that can take shape in the form of using dynamic insertion to then episodically insert our ads into the newest episode four, call it thirty, sixty, ninety, or in perpetuity days of being in that content here.

Here's the real reason why, and some of them are selfish for sure. I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna lay it all out there. We love buying baked in and episodic because it incentivized me to be better at my job.If I can predict the growth of a podcast, I can buy in at whatever the current rate is now and have my own biases that say, I really think the MeidasTouch Podcast is gonna blow up in the next couple months, because who, you know, Trump just won the election. Now all of a sudden the Democrats have far more to attack. There's gonna be more content. If I make a buy now, I might gain the benefit of this three months from now because I bought it at 100,000. It's now doing 200,000 per episode or whatever that growth is.

With I buy dynamic ad insertion, full catalog, I am no longer incentivized to think ahead. I'm only thinking about today because I don't get to plan in advance for virality. Virality is a great way to buy and optimize campaigns. It's a thing that makes me better at my job. Secondly, I. On a new episode that's coming out, the listenership that is tuning in to that newest episode is a far different listener than someone who is listening to the back catalog content.

I send people a random episode from a podcast that I've listened to, to go and listen to that specific episode. That doesn't mean they're a fan of that show, I just think that they should listen to that one episode. So if that host of that episode is now telling them about why they should buy the product that they're recommending to a new audience that is just getting sent that one episode outta the blue, there's not as much inherent influence there, generally speaking.

Now that's not all back catalog listeners. Some of them are really loyal. Some of them are just going and re-listening to content. I can't tell you how many times I've listened to the Shia LeBeouf interview on Jon Bernthal's Real Ones, one of my favorite episodes of podcast history and I've sent that to so many people. So to me that can be a reason why it doesn't perform as well.

Lastly, the reason that I really like baked in is because it's easier to show a client the impact of what's going on. The episode drops on a day. You see the big bump on Shopify. You see the big bump there. It's easier to attribute. Coupon code recollection is much higher because your coupon code is typically going to then be in the show notes. You can then track it there. People might click through the UTM.

If you do a full catalog. Dynamic ad insertion flight. You don't get the coupon code attribution at the same level that you do on a baked in or episodic buy. You don't get the UTM attribution nearly at all because people, for the life of them cannot remember how to spell a UTM or like a URL. Head to trifum.com/jeffumbro to get 10%. By the time that I finish that I'm done, like I don't remember what, what the website was, but I know what I'm looking for, so I'm gonna go to Google and search that product, and then hopefully I have attribution through either Pixel or maybe I remember the show so I put it in the post-purchase survey, but I forgot the code. I forgot the UTM. I'll take whatever the welcome offer is on the website. Attribution is just worse on that catalog.

Lastly the data just proves it. When you look at the Podscribe performance benchmark report from any quarter over the past four quarters, episodic, front to catalog content performs better than back catalog.

Everything that I've just told you is a little bit of my bias and my assumptions, but the data would still show that the per impression conversion rates are better on front to catalog episodic than they are in back catalog, full catalog.

And then back catalog, there's so many nuances because that data is a conglomerate of all the different ways that people are doing it. Some of that's with really shitty frequency capping. Some of that is with. Inflated downloads. There's too much nuance to throw at it.. All I can tell you is I, I've bought a lot of both and I consistently see better performance, better attribution, and it incentivizes me to think harder about where I can find virality.

Those are the reasons I like it.

Jeff Umbro: What do you think about personal experience or personal endorsements within the ads?

Adam McNeil: I think PE can take form in a couple different ways. I think nobody's gonna tell you that having personal endorsement is going to make your ad worse unless they're just really bad at endorsing your product in a way that makes it sound awful. But personal endorsement almost always is going to elevate the listener's experience. It's gonna make it feel more real, more attached and, and more influential.

I don't buy impressions like I'm never looking at impressions. Impressions aren't what I'm buying. I'm buying influence over those impressions because I'm not a programmatic buyer. I don't buy programmatic ads. If I was a programmatic buyer, I'd buy impressions.

But what I play for and what the game that I've look to do is where can I find the highest amount of influence that will generate the highest return for my ad spend that I'm putting on that? And sometimes that means spending a lot of money for that. We pay premiums on some content to get that endorsement from maybe it's your Joe Rogans of your world, or your Alex Coopers or your Pods of America hosts, you name it. We want that influence because that influence is going to exponentially increase the opportunity to convert those listeners.

I can tell you I've been buying Warby Parker glasses for nearly 10 years because I listened to a podcast ad that wasn't a personal endorsement, but it was a personal experience like read. It was on Adam Grant's podcast Worklife from years and years ago when I was in college doing my undergrad, and he did an incredible ad back then where he, instead of doing a, you should buy Warby Parker glasses because blah, blah, blah. They are the best, and they're only 2 99. If you head to Warby Parker, doc, whatever it is, he didn't do any of that.

What he did was he took a three minute segment in the show. He interviewed people from Warby Parker about their work culture and what it's like to work at Warby Parker because his whole show was about organizational workplace culture, and so he did that. I didn't get any sales pitch on Warby Parker, but I was like, wow, this company just seems awesome. This is a cool story. I'm gonna go buy their product. And I've been a fan ever since.

And that influence of me trusting someone to give domain expertise over something, it wasn't about the product itself, but it was about the brand, and so it was such a unique way to get me to buy their product. It's worked and it's continued to work on me for 10 years since.

So I think personal endorsement is far more memorable, far more influential. It will exponentially raise your opportunity to convert per impression on the show, but there's a price that comes with that. Sometimes that price is not worth it. If you are a product that can sell an exponential amount of product without having to do that, then buy programmatically and scale the shit outta your company. It's cheaper to do it and you can go wider.

But I think a lot of brands and the brands that we work with are soon to grow and soon to boom e-commerce brands that require someone to help elevate them for themselves.

Jeff Umbro: Whenever I hear you speak about this, I view it as you're talking about a math problem, it's an input and an output system. Can you walk through your thinking on, on that?

Adam McNeil: Sure. My job's really easy. When a client comes to us and they say, here's our true north. We need to hit a $100 cost per acquisition on our campaign. That is my only true north that I have to get to at some level. They might gimme other things that I have to hit. Oh, it needs to be brand safe. It needs to be to these things, and the copy needs to include X, Y, Z. All of that is secondary to the true north. If I can't hit a hundred dollars cost per acquisition, they are not gonna be my client for very long. So if I can find a different way to do that, I would do that. If there was programmatic options that got me to that consistently, that were cleanly attributable, et cetera, I would do that.

And sometimes that is the case I, I'll give great credit to my own change of mind on some programmatic and run of network buys. Wondery has a great true crime run of network that I really enjoy buying for some of our clients because it's an easy way to tap into some of the best produced true crime content out there at a really low cost CPM without having to pay for an endorsement.

And if we have a good enough ad creative that performs on that, we've actually seen better returns on that than we have from some host reads on the same content, because the price gap between those two points was maybe a, let's call it a 15 or $16 CPM versus a 26 or $30 CPM. If we can perform better at the 16 through our own ad creative and get on the same content, why wouldn't we do that?

That's the math problem that I go, yeah, if, if it works better, I'm gonna keep funneling money there. And when I find those opportunities, I do. But generally speaking, I have just continued to find that the math shows me to keep going down the road of doing episodic host red, highly influential buys at as low of a cost CPM as I can find for my clients and negotiate for in an equitable way to the podcaster as well.

So it, it is always a math problem at some level. I don't have a lot of pixie dust added on to the way that I buy podcast ads. It's, does this work or does it not work? If it doesn't work, let's cut it. If it continues to work, I'll dump money into that show like crazy.

Jeff Umbro: When you're talking to a brand new client, I assume there's some kind of education that goes into that conversation where you're trying to explain to them how they can reach their ROI. What does that look like? What do you try to encourage them to pay attention to?

Adam McNeil: Jeff, great question. Whenever we launch a brand, I think the first thing that a brand always wants is like, can you guarantee you're gonna hit us what you need to hit? And I, I go, no, I can't. We're going into a testing period. If you've proven out that you've done podcast advertising or even radio or TV or something like that, that's a pretty good barometer that you probably could do well in podcasting.

If you've only performed on TikTok or Instagram influencers, I don't know if that's the greatest correlation, but it can help. So the first couple data points that we'll ever look at whenever we do a campaign, you know, we'll build together a a, a flight plan of all the shows we think would be a good fit for them based on their target parameters. We've tested these shows before. They have proven track record success. We wanna come out swinging with our best at bat, and so we send that out.

Once that's all live, our episodes have gone live. So with pixel based attribution, there's three data points that we're gonna look at when we launch a campaign. And it has nothing to do with the spend that we put on the show. It has nothing to do with how many impressions it's been served. It has nothing to do with any of that.

The three data points that we care about are the visit rate, the onsite conversion rate, and the total conversion rate. These are the only three metrics that matter for us to indicate how to go forward with what's working.

I'll break down what each of these mean if you're unfamiliar, you don't come from an e-commerce background. This would be the simple breakdown. Visit rate or visit conversion percentage refers to the rate in which people from the download of the episode make it to the website of the brand. So. Jeff, I am gonna run a little ad here for you and run an ad for AHA beverages, and this went up to a thousand people, and we can track via pixel that a hundred of them made it to the website through the pixel tracking capabilities.

So we have a 10% visitor conversion rate of getting people to the website or visitor rate. Then we have what I call onsite conversion rate, or just the conversion rate of that customer. So we had a hundred people make it to the website. How many of them do you think bought the AHA sparkling water beverage?

Five of them maybe. So they got a 5% onsite conversion rate. The total conversion rate, then is that five out of that 1000 original? So for every thousand downloads that we're getting, we have five conversions for that campaign on Adam and Jeff's podcast that we just ran. That number is the number that we really wanna optimize around totally. And sometimes we can do that through the conversion rate onsite. We can go, oh, overall, our whole campaign is at a 3% onsite conversion rate. Some shows do a little bit better. Those have really hot audiences. The audience coming in from Adam and Jeff's podcast, they really like sparkling water, so whenever they get there, they buy at a really high rate.

But you know what? Adam and Jeff's ad wasn't that great, so not that many people made it to the website. So really strong audience, bad ad read. Sometimes the opposite happens. Maybe Adam and Jeff have a great ad read. We drive a lot of people to the website, but none of them buy because maybe our audience isn't sparkling water drinkers.

They're still water drinkers. For whatever reason they were interested because we did such a good job selling them on the product, but they didn't buy when they got there. Or we sell really bougie sparkling water, so it's way too expensive. So they get there and they don't buy, we don't have a high enough income audience.

Jeff Umbro: Or the landing page doesn't look good and people think it's a, a scam or something.

Adam McNeil: Precisely. There's so many different ways to slice and dice, but do you see how you can start to make so many judgements and decisions just off of those three data points, within that third data point, that total conversion rate kind of being the true north of the campaign to say overall conversion rate, how is this campaign doing relative to everything else?

So I might have my 10 shows that we booked. This show's at a 0.5% conversion rate. This one's at a 0.8. This one's at a 0.2, and this one's at a 0.1, it's really bad. Well, I can pretty quickly go, well, this type of audience is doing much better than this. This one's doing much better than that. This one's just really bad. Where can we make judgment calls based on that data?

Again, this has nothing to do with how much we spent on those shows, has nothing to do with how many impressions we've served. It's really easy and fast calculation to pull through pixel data to then start to make leading decisions off of. That's how we would initially launch and then back everything off of that because if I know that on average I can convert across my campaign, call it five people for every thousand, which would be a crazy good rate, by the way. That would be like unreal for a brand, and I'm paying a $25 CPM, that means I have a $5 cost per acquisition on those impressions. That's the way that I begin to backwards calculate, and if I know my average is going to be whatever, a $5 cost per acquisition and that's what I need to hit, then I can start to negotiate and build up my campaign around those parameters.

And then when I find outliers that convert at an even better rate, those are the ones that I can go, oh yeah, we can pay way more for that content because it converts at even double the rate of everything else. So that's where all of the CPM conversations and the flat rate conversations come in. And even then, that's where like my baked in virality planning comes in where I go, okay, this show costs me a $20 CPM, but if it over delivers and every third episode seems to go viral, then it's kind of like I'm buying it at a $15 CPM.

When those episodes hit or whatever it is, then does this math out and work? Sure. We can make that buy. That's the way that I break it down.

Jeff Umbro: Are there instances where you think a brand should not be buying podcast ads? And I assume that you might know that after you've run a bunch of these tests, but are there ever any instances where somebody comes to you and you're just like, Nope, we should not do this?

Adam McNeil: Yeah. Uh, there's probably three cases that that immediately come to mind. Maybe more. One, if you're trying to come into the space as a therapy product directly competing against BetterHelp, I'd probably tell you to go kick rocks 'cause I'm just not up for that challenge personally of having to, you know, crawl back and dig back.

All of this closed off inventory that's already been taken up. So highly competitive products to brands that are already in the space are really hard. Because podcast advertising when it comes to host read ads is kind of like fixed real estate. You can really only have one owner in that house for that domain of content, be it supplements, therapy, shaving, whatever it is.

So if a brand has come in like Athletic Greens, they've dominated the green supplement space, it's a lot harder for another supplement brand to come in. There's only so much real estate to own, so it's fixed generally until new real estate opens up and we have a new talk to a podcast that pops up or something that then grows the audience. Whatever. That's one category.

The other category is if you are a really low margin product, you have razor thin margins, you are barely making it buy on e-commerce, on very infomercial type ads. You're hard selling people. You don't really have much of a brand behind you yet where you can grow that profitability. Probably not ready for podcast advertising either. It's just is too expensive of a medium. $25 CPMs is not cheap by a brand standard. That is an expensive CPM to reach an audience. So if they cannot convert at an effective enough rate, this isn't gonna be a good space for them. Brands that typically fall into that bucket would be early stage D2C products that have not found their footing, anything that's drop shipped, because those margins are usually really small. I don't know any product that would fall in that category. I don't think I have another example there.

And then lastly, brands that have not figured out who they are yet. Podcasting is a more permanent way to advertise. It's offline media, so once you start putting ads out there, they live out there for some time.

If you're the type of brand that wants to change up your offer every other week, if you're the type of brand that changes what product you're promoting every other week, if you change your entire brand image every three months, podcasting's probably going to be a frustrating space for you because podcasters hate that change,

listeners hate that change, and it's just not an effective playground to do that testing and do that on Facebook. You can change your ads every day on Facebook without consequence. You can't do that in podcasting as easily. So if you want really dynamic change, don't do podcasting yet. Save that for when you're really confident in who you are.

Jeff Umbro: Just imagine if MailChimp became like an e-commerce brand, and then every time somebody listened to Serial, they just hear Mail Camp. So those are great examples by the way, and, and not ones that I would've considered. So thank you for that.

My only other question is everything that you've given examples of today are bigger shows. Alex Cooper, Joe Rogan, MeidasTouch. At what point do you determine if it's worthwhile to test out a new show? And to take it one step further, perhaps a show that is a lot smaller than some of the examples that you've given.

Adam McNeil: Yeah, I, I love this. So partly because I'll take it personally. I used to run a small podcast about a little niche. Japanese balling Cup game called Kendama. If you knew this about me, and I had like a thousand downloads at peak. That was like the, the most pre episode I would get, and it was awesome. That was like 10% of the active Kendama community.

I was like Super tap. I was famous there and I, I finally got a sponsor on my podcast and I generated them a shit ton of revenue, like five grand a month of coffee sales for this coffee company I was working with. I love that brand, I love them. I begged them. I said, Hey. Sign me up for your affiliate program. I'm gonna sell you guys so much coffee, you're gonna wanna pay me flat rate. And I did. I sold five grand of coffee. We were gonna work out a deal, and then I stopped the podcast. But regardless, I got paid more than a $100 CPM based on my downloads in affiliate sales and so on. That is still a lesson to me today that small podcasters with niche audiences can have great impact on a brand, especially a smaller brand.

I'm gonna split this into two sides. One side is from Adam, working at an agency that represents mostly brands that are looking to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on this medium, it is difficult to look at small podcasts because the amount of time, energy, and effort that goes into onboarding is the same for a show that does 500 downloads as it is for a show that does 500,000 downloads.

Jeff Umbro: It's probably a lot harder for a show with 500 downloads 'cause they've never done it before.

Adam McNeil: Sometimes it is. Exactly. And so there is this barrier to entry from the, the franchised ad buyers like myself and Oxford, Veritone, Ad Results, where the effort to output ratio is not very equitable there for us, so we often overlook it. Not always, and the way that it stood out to me was recently with a podcast that I just did a buy on. I even made a LinkedIn post about how we paid this podcaster, a well over $100 CPM. It's like nearly a $200 CPM. They do about, you know, 5,000 ish downloads per episode. That's kind of below the normal threshold of about 10,000 per episode we would normally look at. The way that we got ahold of them or was because they originally organically mentioned our brand's product on their podcast we saw the post-purchase survey for their podcast show up and we're like, what the heck is this podcast? I've never heard of this, this podcast, I'm keeping their name private 'cause I really like them and I'm trying to keep it closed to me. But I had never heard of them and they sold like a decent bit of our product without ever us knowing about them or paying for it.

And it was an organic mention. So we reached out and we were like, Hey, seems like your audience really likes our brand's product. Would you wanna do a sponsorship deal? And so we, you know, paid them x whatever for the first campaign. It sold better than when they organically mentioned it. So then the next buy, we tripled their rate and we were like, look, I know you guys aren't very big, but this is a great opportunity for our client.

We love the content, we love this fit. Let's raise this and just set it, forget it. Love what you're doing.

Jeff Umbro: Did they ask you to raise that or did you just suggest it?

Adam McNeil: It was a mutual conversation where we said, Hey, we can definitely go up on rate. They wanted to go up a little bit higher than what we wanted to go up on, and we met somewhere in the middle on it, so it was mutual. I, I'm really in favor of raising rates when I can for podcasters. A, because then the amount of times that that's benefited me where they then go, Holy shit, no one's ever told me I'm worth more than what I am, than what I thought I was worth.

They go above and beyond to to work with us after often. And rarely have I seen it backfire, where if I do it with a network, sometimes, I'm trying to think if I have a, an exact story, but I do recall one or two times where I told the network, this show did really good. And they go, okay, let's raise the rate on that.

And then I go, yeah, but these other three shows did really bad. Can we find a middle ground there to get those down? And they go, Nope. Let's just not renew those and raise the rate on this show. And I'm like, okay. So now you've, you've, you've ruined my trust where I'm, I'm compromising with you to say, Hey, I'd love to raise the rate on this show to then hopefully get a better deal on this other show so we can grow this entire campaign together.

But they just wanted to raise the rate on the one show and then kill everything else soft. And I'm like, okay, fair enough. Do what you gotta do. But it was just kind of petty to me.

Jeff Umbro: This is capitalism. You have, you have two sides that want different things and hopefully they can coexist. I, I, I always love the line where it's like the best contract negotiation is when neither side is happy at the end of it. And I have found that to be true.

Adam McNeil: Really?

Jeff Umbro: Usually. Like I, I mean, not always, but, but often, yes, like long term.

I find that to be like the best situation.

Adam McNeil: I guess it's kind of the same, two negatives as a positive at some level, but I've always tried to to work out negotiations in a favorable way that it's hopefully positive for both parties at some level. Maybe you sacrifice a little bit here and there, but ideally I want the other party to be really happy that they get to work with me on this campaign and that it's a good win for both parties.

I hate lose, lose. Lose, lose sucks.

Jeff Umbro: So I wanna spend a minute talking about YouTube. Of course.

Adam McNeil: As does everybody.

Jeff Umbro: It's been the only thing I've talked about for a long time, but it is important. Have you bought any YouTube ads recently?

Adam McNeil: Lots. We, we buy YouTube. Can, can I, can I initiate this conversation with what I think is a bold claim?

Jeff Umbro: Sure.

Adam McNeil: I hate the YouTube conversation as it currently exists in podcasting. We're, podcasting is so boring right now that we're making up shit to talk about in our industry, and YouTube is becoming this big deal to everybody.

It's really not that big of a deal. There have been YouTube ad buyers around long before the podcast advertising industry, and yet we're trying to reinvent their wheel. We don't need to do this shit. Just adopt what they've been doing. It's been working for brands for a really long time. Don't mess this shit up.

It's not complicated.

Jeff Umbro: I think that's correct, and we've talked to a few people about this, but ultimately when somebody's buying ads on YouTube, they're generally taking the average viewership of the last dozen episodes or something and taking a conservative estimate of what that will be, and then they're selling that on a CPM basis at the same rate generally as what you would buy on an RSS podcast. It's becoming a bigger topic of conversation and a lot more brands are moving into the space and, and I think frankly, like a lot fewer publishers have sold YouTube ads before, and so maybe on the buy side it's very normal. But on the sell side, I think it's kind of new.

Adam McNeil: What's complicated about selling YouTube from the publisher side?

Jeff Umbro: I don't think it's necessarily complicated, but it does add some administrative overhead. You have to actually like produce the ad for video as opposed to just for audio. You have to bake it into the episode. You have to come up with some kind of forecasting for what you're selling. I think it's ultimately a good thing.

It's a new process for many people, and we've sold very, very limited YouTube ads for years. We have a few shows that have been big on YouTube for a long time. I think it's a win-win all around.

There was a rumor recently that YouTube was going to implement dynamic ad insertion on their platform. Let's pretend for a minute that that's actually gonna happen.

How do you feel about that?

Adam McNeil: They were beta testing this some time ago with some channels like The Young Turks. I remember when The Young Turks came to us and pitched doing this where it would be a host read, but it could be inserted across all of their content through this new beta of their product. We never did it and never saw it come to life.

'cause I guess on the same principles that I, I look at baked in on podcast, it's someone listening to an old episode of The Young Turks as influenced as someone listening to the newest episode, do I care about that listener as much or that viewer back then? It ruins my ability to buy virality, which is half of what YouTube is.

You're taking a risk on content, on YouTube. YouTube CPMs are really high, generally for integrated baked in content, anywhere between, you know, probably the low end is like where the middle ground of podcasting begins, $25 CPM. That's kind of the low end of what an integrated YouTube ad would be, maybe lower on a news and politics show or something, but all the way up to a hundred dollars to $150 for an integration on some of this content. It's super expensive because it's really highly influential. But half of it is, the reason they can charge those CPMs is because every YouTube buyer is hoping on that one video that's gonna blow it up and knock it outta the park, because that's how a lot of those campaigns are built.

I can tell you firsthand from my buying of YouTube, some of our entire YouTube performance on some of our clients came out of one really good campaign. We paid maybe five to 10 grand for an integrated piece of content. That video has now done 5 million, 10 million views. It's a beautiful piece of content.

Neither party knew that that was gonna happen. It just happened. We covered all their production costs. We were super happy with the deal. It went viral. We have now booked a shit ton more spots on that content. None of them have done nearly as good, but that one video has now propelled the entirety of our campaign with that content creator.

That is still satisfying to the creator where they still get that net benefit. The brand is beyond stoked, beyond happy. They have a permanent investment that they can continue to pour into, and they're just hoping that maybe another video will pop up someday. You can justify much higher CPMs on YouTube for that potential virality that you can't easily do on podcasting 'cause we don't get that same virality because of lack of discoverability on audio, which is the biggest YouTube problem from the creator side, where they go, oh, I need to create a YouTube version of my show so I have discoverability. Most podcasts don't need to be on YouTube, in my opinion, because most of them don't do it very well, and then they complain. It raises their production cost. They think that they need to charge a higher CPM to cover it, and in reality, they should have stuck to audio 'cause it was easier, lower cost, and a better medium for their content.

Jeff Umbro: I love that. I'm, I'm gonna clip that you're gonna land the plane.

Adam McNeil: I'm gonna land the plane and, and say if YouTube does dynamic, it's just gonna cause the same problems that are happening in podcasting where we'll get to this in our latter part of the conversation of where I think podcasting is going to divide into two different really big segments of both buyers and publishers.

And it's going to crater part of our industry that I don't think many people are thinking about. I just don't see it being that fruitful. YouTube already has YouTube AdSense. Why would they add on another form of dynamic ad buying into the system. YouTube has zero incentive to do that. They're giving you money as a publisher when they can already make all this money by doing their own dynamic ads through the YouTube AdSense platform, which is a multi-billion dollar platform.

Podcasting is pennies to them right now. Why would they care? They can just do the AdSense as the way it is. There's no reason for them to do it, in my opinion. So I, I don't, I don't see the, the justification for it.

Jeff Umbro: And that does dovetail into my next question. What do you think is being under-discussed right now that more people should be paying attention to?

Adam McNeil: If we take a look at what's happened in the other ad, buying mediums, Meta ads, Google ads, and we look at the trajectory that those went on, it began with a few people like myself or you know, people like me, they knew how to buy podcast ads and they built agencies around it, and it was a very agency dominated space.

It was a publisher dominated space and so on. Now. Most brands are bringing everything in-house because it's all data analytics. Why would I outsource my Facebook advertising to an agency? I can maybe outsource my creative development, but the ad buying itself can be done in-house. It's all numbers, it's all data.

If we go down the programmatic route too far down the trade desk route too far down the Spotify route too far, we will kill most of our industries like middlemen, which are the you and me of this world that have built our entire economy, our entire wellbeing off of selling and buying host read endorsed ads or programmatic.

Eventually Spotify is going to open up or another platform is going to open up a much more simple way for a brand to easily go, oh, I know how to buy ads like this. It's just like Meta. You're gonna see videos pop up on YouTube within the next three to five years of some e-comm bro in the his basement and rural Wisconsin saying, here's how I grew my e-commerce brand using podcast advertising on Spotify Ads Manager with $5 a day. That video is gonna hit 500,000 views and all of a sudden people are going to start flocking into that. They're gonna start placing their own ads and it will cut out you, me, Oxford, Veritone, Ad Results, and everybody else that's overindexed on trying to sell our ability to do that because they can just hire people in house to do that. Agencies will cease to exist in the future for programmatic buying, for streaming ad insertion, buying in general.

The only people that will remain, generalization obviously, are people that do host our partnerships. Because you can't replace relationships, you cannot replace my relationship that I have with Steve-O's ad buyer to get a great deal with Steve-O because we've worked with him for a decade now, I know that relationship. I have trust in that relationship. I have trust in that, and the brands hire us for our trust in those relationships.

They don't need me to buy programmatic. They could log into Acast, do that themselves. It's not that complicated.

Jeff Umbro: I think the truth lies somewhere in between. There's a stark contrast on both sides of that, and it is something I've thought a lot about. What you're talking about is kind of the race to the bottom. The more inventory that's available, the more opportunity for brands. The lower the CPM, the less money people can make, the less resources they'll have to put into their content and, and I hope that like we get to avoid that, but there will be some version of that for sure. What do you think then is being overused right now in the podcast ad space? It sounds like YouTube is your answer to that.

Adam McNeil: YouTube and what is a podcast? Are you telling me that 10 years into this industry or more that we don't know what a podcast is, that we have to have a key, sorry. I love Dan and I love Oxford. I just, the, the concept of having to have a panel at a podcast conference or a conversation around what is a podcast drove me insane.

We should know the answer to that.

Jeff Umbro: Yes, we know the answer to that, and yet, there's just a lot of new, because I, I think about this all the time. I'll ask you this question. If you see a 20 second MeidasTouch clip on Instagram or TikTok or something, did you just watch their podcast?

Adam McNeil: Yep. I did. A little bit of it. For sure. Absolutely, because again. We get here. Okay. Here's the, the real, the real key. We are so focused on the medium of podcasting that we are losing sight of the purpose in which it, it functions. It is a means of communication and influence. Podcasting has inherited the influence of things like radio and YouTube and all these other places that people used to go for content and used to go for information. It is the new thing.

And is it going to be the new thing forever? Ah, probably not. It might be another thing. We need to focus on who the influence is and where that is being driven and the monetization that can occur between those two points if we're gonna be capitalistic about the place. We have to stop sparsing everything out and trying to slice and dice and put labels on everything because that's, that's degrading the actual exchange of information between the creator and the audience. I don't care if Jordy from MeidasTouch is selling the product to his audience via Instagram or via his TikTok or via his whatever. I'm buying Jordy's influence at MeidasTouch over his audience, specifically in the channel of podcasting, 'cause that's where most of their influence is. But their influence might transition. It might be an article, it might be a newsletter. That's the way I buy. Maybe I'm different. I'm not a podcast ad buyer. I buy podcast ads. But I buy influence fundamentally, and I just know how to do it on podcasting.

Jeff Umbro: I'll take that. I accept it. So I want to talk to you, you just mentioned Dan Granger, about the Oxford Road-Veritone One merger that happened last year. Can you give us 30 seconds on what that merger was and how you think it's gonna impact the industry moving forward?

Adam McNeil: I think the, the heartbeat behind it is consolidation for higher profitability. If they can leverage a smaller buying group for the breadth of what they were both serving, pull that revenue together, and trim out maybe the employees that weren't doing as well for them and just keep their top performers, they can potentially build a super agency and dominate the space from an economic perspective.

Almost historically, if you take an MBA program or you study mergers and acquisitions, rarely do one plus one equal two. They're usually one plus one equals 1.3, maybe 1.4, and I think we're seeing that currently. I can tell you many of their clients have looked around at other opportunities since that merger. Some of their large clients, are they feeling that rockiness of that merger? Potentially.

Do I think it's a good thing for the industry? The way that it was framed to me was this will give us more consolidation of our voice to then be able to enact what the buying groups need to the industry. Because right now, prior to that, most of the buying groups were pretty spread. Our independent influence was low so if I can spend all my time talking to you, Jeff, and talking to Audioboom and whatnot to try and make something happen, but I'm only one small part of the ecosystem. And now with Veritone and Oxford coming together as one solidified voice, they represent actually quite a large percentage of the ad buy market between their two respective amounts of spend.

Jeff Umbro: Can you estimate what you think that portion of the market is?

Adam McNeil: Yeah, so if we look at podcasting, I think it's like what, 2 billion right now? And about 30 to 40% of that is direct response advertising. The rest of that's programmatic and through like hold goes, if we separate that part out, we have about 800 million to just maybe about a billion dollars of podcast ad buying of people like me and people that are actually buying podcast ads specifically in the industry, generally speaking.

Of that, I think Ad Results, I don't know what their numbers are, it's not public. Veritone was between 200 to 300 million, give or take in the last 2024 SEC filings. Oxford was a private company, so I have no idea. My understanding was they were probably a little bit behind where Veritone was in terms of total overall size.

So maybe pulled together, there's somewhere between three to $400 million and they would be overtaking Ad Results in terms of people's estimations of what they're being spent there. So between those two companies, that makes up nearly 50 to 70% of most of the revenue of the DR based podcast ad buying groups.

We do anywhere between, you know, 30 to $40 million of, of gross spend to podcasts between a year. I think we come in about fourth or fifth place of overall media spend, maybe third place now, if you call Oxford Veritone together, we're right in that realm. So we have a decent voice, but not the biggest voice by any means.

So again, the way they are pitching it, to me, is that it's a consolidation of voice to enact better change for the buying groups In, in podcasting, it's also a merger and acquisition for profitability sake. It's a lot of money in that. So there's good profitability. We're capitalistic. It's the way this industry works.

You wouldn't do it if you weren't gonna make more money.

Jeff Umbro: Do you think there's gonna be any like downstream impact on publishers or other agencies or the DR brands that are, are working with these folks?

Adam McNeil: Yes and no. So. I'll pose you a question, Jeff. Say, I managed $40 million a year of potential spend. Oxford Veritone manages 400 million. You know that if you gimme a discount on a show that I'm probably going to ask for that same rate across the rest of my brands. That is, you know, somewhat impactful.

But if you then have to give that same rate and same discount to a buying group that represents 400 million, do you have as much leverage? No. You're gonna probably hold them to a higher standard of a higher rate, 'cause you can't risk giving them that low of a rate to that much of the industry spend, potentially.

Jeff Umbro: Devil's advocate though, is they could bring us more brands if we did give them that discount.

Adam McNeil: Yeah, and the flip side also can occur. So their argument on both sides, they have leverage of buying power for impressions, influence. So I would say if you are a brand that wants to do lots of full catalog, programmatic run of network type buying, they actually might have more leverage than I have on some of those pieces.

When it comes to, I think mostly host read episodic, generally speaking from the conversations that I've had with networks, we tend to have more leverage because there's less risk in giving us a really reduced rate on a campaign because we won't give that same rate to a myriad of brands like your Shopify's, your Quinces, your whatever, and then crater that show's overall CPM. So we can keep that balance pretty well.

But outside of that, I don't know if there's a ton of trickle down. I think some of the brands from those companies are gonna leave. I predicted that and some of 'em have already been shopping around, and that's probably due to during a merger, everything feels shaky. Like people lose their jobs, nobody's really sure what's happening. The brands that are being represented there may feel that same thing and may just go, Hey, ah, maybe this is the time we move on. If you're a really small brand at one of those two agencies independently, and now they merge, now you're a really, really small brand, are you going to get the same level of service now when you're the lowest on the totem pole? Maybe, maybe not.

So those would be the really skeptical concerns I would pose and why my conclusions would be they're gonna lose some clients. They're likely gonna be laying off some people. Those are all normal things that happen in a merger and acquisition. It is not me wishing ill on them. I hope they succeed. I hope that this is a good thing for the industry, but gives me lots of opportunity. I get to, I get to pick up the things that fall off and, and hopefully take on some more.

Jeff Umbro: So I want to end this just by talking about you. You recently were promoted and you had told me recently that you were doing a lot of the on the ground buying, and now you lead a team that's doing the buying, and it has been a little bit of a shift for you in terms of how you're actually operating day to day. Can you walk us through a little bit of what that experience has been like?

Adam McNeil: Doing the work is way harder than teaching the work is something that I've learned. I'm a pretty independent person with how I operate, and so I've built a lot of my own methodologies of how I look at data and whatnot. And one of the greatest challenges that I faced in the past two years is now transferring what I've learned about podcast advertising to my team.

And so my number one priority now at Adopter Media is our client growth and our media buying team's growth. How do we make the best media buyers in our industry the most competent, the most influential, and and the ones that are the most respected by brands around the world? And if I can continue to do that, we'll have a really good team.

So my role has shifted a little bit away from media buying. I've been dropping some of my client load as much as I can, transferring a lot of my relationships off to other media buyers on our team, and now prioritizing my position more as guide and coach while still being, I think I'm still the largest or second largest media buyer, at Adopter currently of actual media placed and spent.

And so I have not been perfect at that transition yet. I still have a long ways to go of passing off more, but predominantly my, my role is to oversee the overall internal growth of clients that we currently manage and their success through our media buying team.

Jeff Umbro: Delegation I have found is, for me personally, one of the hardest things that I've had to learn to do. Nobody's ever gonna do it the same exact way that you would do it, but for you it's, it's a unique circumstance because there's actually math behind everything that you do. So I wish you all the luck in the world with that.

I'm positive that you are gonna be extremely successful, and thank you so much for joining us.

Adam McNeil: It is been absolutely a joy, Jeff. I love these conversations. Thanks for having me on.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Adam for joining us.

You can find him online at Adopter Media. You can check him out on LinkedIn where he shares a lot of really great takes, or you can check out his newsletter, The Roast, where he shares a lot of really interesting points that really expand on the things that he talked about in this episode.

For more podcast related news, info, and takes, you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of The Podglomerate.

If you're looking for help producing, marketing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at Podglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com, or follow us on all socials at @podglomeratepods. 

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello, and myself, Jeff Umbro. This episode was edited and mixed by José Roman. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Perri Gross. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

Thank you for listening and I'll catch you all in a few weeks.