Audacy Head of Podcasts Leah Reis-Dennis on Making Major Deals in Audio

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: Today on Podcast Perspectives, we're joined by Leah Reis-Dennis, head of podcasts at Audacy.

What's one myth about podcast business development?

Leah Reis-Dennis: We need a show in X category by next week. It's not gonna happen.

Jeff Umbro: We'll dive into her early career, how Audacy is navigating a rapidly changing audio landscape, and what the future holds for podcasters and podcast business models. Welcome to the show, Leah.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

Jeff Umbro: I'm really excited. You've, you've been on my list for a very long time, so I'm really happy that we're chatting.

Can you walk us through your early career, basically how you got from, from start to today?

Leah Reis-Dennis: SiriusXM was the place where I first learned what it was like to work within a much larger organization as opposed to Himalaya and Poetry in America, which were both very kind of startup like fly by the seat of your pants type of vibes. And then I actually met Jenna Weiss-Berman through a friend. She called me one day and she said, Hey, I'm stepping from Pineapple Street Studios into a larger role at Audacy. The leadership seems to be really excited about kind of unifying all of our different podcast assets and building out a coherent business, and I would love for you to come and help me do that.

So I thought Jenna was amazing. I adored everything she had done. You know, I'd been following her kind of as a fan through her career. So when I got this opportunity to go work with her, I said, absolutely, let's do it. So I joined Audacy in 2022 doing business development and content strategy, and then I've been there ever since.

As the head of podcasts, I oversee podcast content, deal making, acquisition and development, editorial, marketing, partnerships, both on the operation side and on the revenue side.

I kind of sit alongside sales, so podcast sales does not roll up into me crucially. And podcast finance, they are, they are my partners.

Jeff Umbro: So you're not very busy.

Leah Reis-Dennis: I'm telling, I'm telling myself that the summer is calm. It's all, it's all mental, right?

Jeff Umbro: You have an amazing team around you that helps, I'm sure. But, but that is a big job, 'cause you oversee over 300 podcasts now, right?

Leah Reis-Dennis: Yeah. I mean, one strategic approach that we've taken to building out our podcast portfolio is that we really like the kind of network of networks approach. So for instance, we have a partnership with CBS that includes both their sports slate and their news and entertainment slate. So that's, you know, over a hundred shows just there.

And we have a partnership with PAVE and with Tenderfoot.

Jeff Umbro: So you don't have 300 points of contacts.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Exactly. Those types of relationships work really well for us because they give us the scale and these kind of like deeper, really like operational partnerships.

Jeff Umbro: So Audacy has a pretty unique history moving from radio and broadcasting into podcasting. What's been the most rewarding and also potentially challenging part of that transition?

Leah Reis-Dennis: I would say the rewards are much bigger than the challenges. So I'll start with the challenges. I think a company that is, you know, so dispersed, it's not like if I wanna talk to the salespeople, I go in one room and I talk to the salespeople. I can go in one room and talk to our national enterprise sellers and that's great and that, you know, gets a lot of the job done. But I was just in San Diego and I met this woman Erica, who is a local San Diego seller. And the brand Vuori is based in San Diego and she runs, you know, a huge account with them or you know, Tecovas has become a big account for us. And that was a brand that one of our regional sellers in the south brought on.

It's a pro and a con, right? It's a pro in that we have really, you know, far reaching tentacles to bring in a lot of opportunities, but it's hard in that, you know, we're kind of just now in the past year at a place where all of our local sellers are enabled to sell into podcasts. The learning curve is, you know, a, a slower ramp than if we just had like five people in one central office. I wish I could go and sit with them all, all the time, but it's also a pro because we are able to actually introduce more brands into the podcasting space that aren't already there because we have those local relationships.

Jeff Umbro: So Audacy is the second largest radio company in the US. How is that kind of working alongside the podcast side of things?

Leah Reis-Dennis: Yeah, I mean, I think they, they work really well together, both in terms of content and in terms of sales. Right? So on the content side, if we bring in a big sports name, say we bring in an NFL player who plays for the Eagles, or who used to play for the Eagles, if that person wants a podcast, we're also trying to get creative with our dealmaking, so we also have him doing insider call-ins to the Philadelphia sports station, and the ads that he reads are ideally running across game day, where we do play-by-play in Philly, as well as the podcast.

It's nice for our audience because they have these kind of flagship talent who they get used to listening to in a variety of formats. But it's also nice for our brands because when we talk about, you know, a lot of networks, right now we're talking about multi-channel packaging, and so yes, we're doing audio and video and social, but we're also doing across our over the air products.

Jeff Umbro: And you talked a little bit about the integrations with the sales folks on broad. And podcast. But what about like on the marketing side? Are you using broadcast to grow the podcast and vice versa?

Leah Reis-Dennis: We use broadcast a lot to grow our podcasts. Pretty much every time I'm traveling, an Audacy station will be on in my Uber, or you know, in the background of the bodega I'm going to, you know, to get a breakfast sandwich. I hear our podcast promos so much. It's really cool. I was in, I was in Fort Lauderdale over the winter and there was one promo, like multiple times for one of our shows.

So, yeah, I mean, I think it's really effective. We, we find that it's more effective for some genres than others, and so we try to be pretty data-driven about that. So typically when we do a podcast deal, we have, you know, an overall kind of marketing plan and we do. The first step of the marketing plan and then we evaluate.

Right. What's converting, is it mostly podcast to podcast? Is it mostly social? Is it mostly broadcast to podcast? It's kind of interesting how much it differs from show to show.

Jeff Umbro: We've seen that with some other folks who are kind of using the cross promo strategy from broadcast to podcast and also podcast to podcast. There are just some genres that seem to be more innately like set up for that. What are some of the genres that you find really successful when it comes to that kind of promotion?

Leah Reis-Dennis: We have some shows that their hosts have radio roots. The shows kind of have more of a radio type of vibe, like a, a very high energy chat. We find that those convert really well over the air. Also, when, you know, when there's a real content tie in, I'll give you an example. We work with Disgraceland and Jake Brennan's the host.

We've been advertising that on our music stations. That's done really well, right, because it's about the music industry, right? Or like our sports shows, especially when they have a local focus, of course do really well on those local sports stations. Sometimes it can be a harder sell if it's, you know, say a women's lifestyle show running across all programming on a music channel. You know, maybe, maybe it converts well in a single hour, but we're not usually using that degree of detail for a large scale broadcast campaign.

Jeff Umbro: So Audacy's acquired a couple companies over the years, Pineapple Street, Cadence13, Podcorn. While you have DNA from all of these companies that are like entwined in what you do today. None of those companies exist in their original form as of now. Was that by design or was that just basically dictated by what the market wanted?

Leah Reis-Dennis: It was dictated basically by what the market wanted, I would say. In terms of the core of what the Audacy Podcast business is now, I would say it looks the most like Cadence13 used to. Right. In terms of, you know, we're making kind of, we are partnering with and developing kind of mainstream talent driven shows and focusing in a major way on the monetization and growth of those shows. Right. You know, kind of a classic network business.

Podcorn evolved a lot from the time that we purchased it to where it is now, and that business has always done pretty well in its latest form. We've kind of re, we've rebranded it the Audacy Creator Lab and the Audacy Creator Exchange, and its Audacy solution for an independent creator who is looking for distribution and monetization and isn't big enough to do a deal with the Audacy Podcast Network, you know, kind of our, our, our premium network, but they still wanna be part of our ecosystem and access our ad demand.

Jeff Umbro: It becomes like a farm league for you guys.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Exactly. And so that business does great and it's always done great. But Podcorn was a confusing name, right? And the Audacy Creator Lab kind of makes a little more sense.

Pineapple Street, the shutting down of Pineapple Street is more recent news, of course. And that was kind of a, I think, a sad development for a lot of people, given how large Pineapple Street really loomed as a brand, right, for so long, and the quality of the projects they created, which were so high, I don't think anyone would argue that Pineapple Street was the best, if not one of the best kind of prestige production houses. And so that was a long and hard process instead of decisions. But you know, that is an industry that has changed an immense amount in terms of branded production work, narrative documentary production work. You know, those, those two things which were really pineapples, bread and butter, have changed immensely from 2019 when it first got sold to then Entercom to 2025.

Jeff Umbro: And the whole industry is seeing similar things. It's not just Pineapple that that has been shut down recently. There's a number of production shops or smaller networks that have decided to close their doors and the ones that haven't are all really getting caught up in M&A, which my opinion of that is that it's usually more out of need than want, but obviously every circumstance is different.

It's a sad development, but also Audacy is, is in a much different position than it was a couple years ago, and in theory, that's going to be for the future of the company, so it can remain healthy and you know, continue to expand. If that's something that needed to happen and for lack of a better word, like it's good to rip the bandaid off.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Yeah, I mean, we have a finite amount of resources and we are really trying to use them in the places where we are strongest in and feel the business has the most potential.

Jeff Umbro: As you should, you know, that's, that's how to run a business, so.

Well what kind of deals is Audacy looking for today? Presumably there's no M&A on the horizon, and if there is, you wouldn't tell me anyway. But when it comes to like the kinds of creators that you wanna work with, what's an ideal partner for you guys?

Leah Reis-Dennis: We're really looking for two overlapping categories. The first is, where are there still actual holes in the market? These days, there's a lot of podcasts. There's not too many actual holes, but there are still some, and we are launching a show in October that I cannot share with you. However, I'm convinced that this show is going to fill a huge hole in the market and it's gonna be a huge hit. So catch me in Q4 and you can see, you can see where, where we're at, but there are some places where we're trying to just be smart about where, where is there a real hunger for audio and also video content that is not currently being served?

And then the second part is our sales team. We work so closely with our sales team to try to make sure that they have the shows they need for what brands are asking for and nothing more. I can love a show and if sales says, look, we don't, we don't care about it. There's nothing to do there. You know, I'll, I can try to push a little bit, but at the end of the day, we are really in lockstep. So right now one of our biggest focuses is sports, like I said, you know, kind of beating a dead horse here, but that connection to our broadcast strengths is really important to us. So we're trying to grow in sports.

We've developed a really nice strength in entertainment, kind of entertainment slash comedy with Office Ladies, Fly on the Wall with David Spade and Dana Carvey. We have a bunch that are in the pipeline. We're launching in September a Simpsons rewatch with Nancy Cartwright, which I think is gonna be really fun. The voice of Bart.

Jeff Umbro: Did she do like five voices?

Leah Reis-Dennis: Oh no, she does like 10.

And there's this amazing video on YouTube of her alternating between all the voices and she has, she's gotten quite big on TikTok and socials, which is pretty cool, 'cause I think of The Simpsons as like my generation.

They're really popular with like the Gen Z and younger kids on TikTok, which is pretty cool.

And Nancy Cartwright, fun fact, her niece is Sabrina Carpenter, the pop star.

Jeff Umbro: No way.

Leah Reis-Dennis: So there's that connection too. Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: Is she gonna be a guest on the show?

Leah Reis-Dennis: I hope so. Not yet, not yet confirmed, but I hope so.

Jeff Umbro: What a funny family reunion that would be.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Right? I mean, I'm just waiting for her to be a, a character on the show show.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, it'll come.

Leah Reis-Dennis: That would be really cool. I think it will. She's, she's big enough now. So sports, entertainment, comedy, and I really like, I call it women's lifestyle. I like that a lot as a category for us. We like to find places where there's overlap, right? So Office Ladies, it's entertainment. It's comedy. It's also women's lifestyle, right? Jenna and Angela have a lot to share about their families and their parenting and their friendship.

We also just signed the recap show with Tobin Heath and Christen Press from the US Women's National Soccer Team. That's a really cool show because they're talking about women's sports, which is obviously such a hot content area right now. But they also talk a lot about what they call gal culture as kind of an alternative to like locker room talk, bro culture. So that's, you know, another angle of women's lifestyle.

So I like to find pockets where our focus areas kind of overlap because that also allows for more promotion, right? Like if we sign a true crime show, we're going to be advertising it on all of our women's lifestyle shows because it has the same audience, even though it's a different content area.

Jeff Umbro: I mean, you guys obviously are just coming off of a tough like year or two. You're cognizant of risk. What are you trying to stay away from?

Leah Reis-Dennis: We're trying to stay away from shows that have already peaked. When I think about signing new shows, I'm thinking, is this a place. It's, it's like the stock market, right? Is this a place where we can get in low, and help that show grow and be true partners. And then ideally, when it comes time for renewal, it's like we've grown this thing together.

So an example of that is Search Engine with PJ Vogt. That's, you know, it's such a good show. We made a bet on that show early before it existed. We worked with pj, we really helped him grow the show. We, you know, our sales team sells the hell outta that show.

Jeff Umbro: I've bought ads on that show. I also, by the way, was going to wear my Search Engine t-shirt for this interview, but it's in the, it's in the wash.

Leah Reis-Dennis: You should have told me I would've worn my sweatshirt. You could wear your t-shirt. We would be twins. So that's an example of a bet we took that, you know, had some risk attached because that show is not cheap to make. We did have to pay for that show, but it's really paid off for us. The type of deal that I'm trying to stay away from is, you know, someone who has been really in the zeitgeist whose star is about to fall. I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here, that's a deal that no one wants to make, but you know, we try to think really strategically around are we paying for someone at their peak or are we paying for someone at their kind of zero to 50%?

And that's where we wanna be.

Jeff Umbro: What does that actually look like, bringing on a new partner? I know it's gonna totally depend on scale and risk and all of these things, but what is the structure of these deals, to the extent that you can speak about that generally?

Leah Reis-Dennis: Yeah. So most of our deals are, you know, we try to keep it pretty simple. Most of them are structured around a rev share that is gonna be determined basically based on how much we are investing. So if we're doing production or if we're doing an immense amount of promotion or whatever the case may be, you know, we're obviously gonna keep a bigger piece of the pie.

And then some of our shows have a guarantee attached. Again, we think of minimum guarantees as exactly that. They are minimums. The vast majority of shows on our slate out or in the minimum guarantee by say, month 10 of the term, if not sooner. So we are really trying to, you know, yes, make sure that partners know that we're putting our money where our mouth is, but also the true upside for both parties is on the backend versus kind of the way the industry operated in 2021, where everyone was like, all right, what's the most we can possibly make?

That's, that's what the MG is gonna be. We're not in that anymore.

Jeff Umbro: Nice if you can get it, but not sustainable long term.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Yeah. Yeah.

You know, you mentioned promotion earlier. We do have kind of an amazing promotional engine with all of our over the air inventory as well as our podcast inventory. And since I joined Audacy in 2022, that's actually something I learned from Wondery. It used to be not as common that networks would ask for inventory from partners as well as providing true marketing support.

And that's something that Wondery started doing really early and often is they asked for mid-roll inventory, feed drop inventory. And so we started doing that from day one when I joined Audacy. That has just resulted in a huge amount of promotional power that has been really valuable to our partners.

So all of our shows give us, you know, it's a, it's a give and it's a get.

Jeff Umbro: It's really impressive to see what you guys are doing. You can kind of see the effects of this with some of your partners like PAVE Studios and some other folks. And one of my goals one day is to work with you guys so that I can tap into that network. So I think, you know, it's, it's been interesting to kind of watch Audacy over the last few years because I do feel like you guys are really good at actually running like solid businesses for individual shows, networks and for you as a company.

So it's been kind of cool to see. And I, I guess I'm curious, it shouldn't be the case, but it seems like that's something that's really difficult for a lot of shops to figure out these days. Why is that?

Leah Reis-Dennis: We have an incredible team across partnerships, across operations, across revenue partnerships, marketing, finance. It was really important when we started thinking about kind of who is Audacy within the podcast industry at large. And the way that I like to frame Audacy to partners is that we are the smallest of the major networks.

So if you look at kind of the five, I, I think of us as the smallest of the five kind of major networks. So Audacy, iHeart, SiriusXM, Wondery, and Spotify. And people may argue with me on that list, but that's how I look at it.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah I agree with you and I might add a couple names. To that too. But overall, I think that's accurate.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Yeah. I mean we're, you know, bigger than the Audioboom, Acast, but we are the smallest by design. So we have the scale and the reach of the biggest networks so that, you know, we can land the brand partnerships. We have all those relationships with advertisers and agencies. We have that scale, but we also maintain the kind of more white glove boutiquey feel that you would get from a smaller network, and that's really important to us.

Our partnerships team, we basically built from the ground up thinking what should a partnership team look like? And our answer is, nothing should ever come as a surprise to a partner. We should have a hundred percent transparency. Huge expectations around communication. So all of our partners get from us every month, you know, a beautiful deck that shows here are your top advertisers. Here's how you're pacing against a deal, against our deal. You know, if there's a download benchmark. Maybe you're at 80% of the download expectation and you're at 90% of the revenue expectation. Your contract says you need to vet ads within two days, and your average turnaround time right now is one day. Great job. You know, every single piece of the contract is outlined in this deck every month, and you can see how you're pacing against all the expectations, right?

There should never be a time where you get to month 10 of the deal and you're talking about renewal, and the partner says, oh damn, I've been underperforming. Why didn't we talk about this in month four so we could have tried to work on it, right? And that's, it sounds obvious. But that's not something that happens at most networks.

Partners and agents especially really appreciate it because it makes, you know, for the agents, it makes their job a lot easier because they don't have to be the bearers of bad news. We are all a hundred percent read in on everything that's happening within a given relationship at any given moment. That, I think it's a little bit of a roundabout way of answering your question, but that has allowed us to make really good deals because we will often win business under market. It's not uncommon that we aren't the most competitive on MG, we aren't the most competitive on rev share, but people like to work with us and they know that we're gonna be good partners, honest partners, communicative partners, and that goes a long way.

Jeff Umbro: I've heard nothing but good things on that front, and what you just kind of ran through is a problem that I've seen many networks try to solve. It's very time consuming and requires everybody to be firing on all cylinders, which is one of the big reasons why more people don't do it. Power to you guys for being able to achieve that.

I mean, longtime listeners of the show will know I interviewed Jenna a couple years ago and, and it's always refreshing to, to chat with the folks at Audacy because of your outlook on the industry and how you treat your partners, which is not the norm at many shops.

So final question is, what do you see coming for Audacy three years out? If we have another conversation, what are we gonna be talking about?

Leah Reis-Dennis: Jeff, that question scares me because I think so much could change in the industry in three years, right? I think a lot of it is going to be around how networks are being reactive to tech platforms and their evolutions. I think we have not seen the end of Spotify's kind of strategic moves around how they want their listeners to consume podcasts.

And so we're trying to be as proactive about that as possible. But there's only, you know, so much we can do. You know, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, they have a lot of power in this industry and so I think where we sit in three years is gonna largely depend on how nicely they decide they want to play with others.

Jeff Umbro: I know you have a, an argument on if Spotify does away with the RSS, so I, I don't know if you want to talk about that today.

Leah Reis-Dennis: We are a big client of Spotify's because we host many of our shows right now on Megaphone. So we have a positive relationship with Spotify. We meet with them regularly. We share our feedback about their tech developments. They solicit input from us. That makes me optimistic, you know, we are grateful for that relationship.

So, you know, at the end of the day, we are an audio content company and Spotify is a product focused tech company, so our incentives are never gonna be perfectly aligned, but hopefully we can get to a place where it's kind of mutually beneficial and I, I trust that we can, because I think their team is great.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. I agree. I've had a lot of conversations with the folks over there, and I don't think that they will ever intentionally do anything to harm their partners. I do think one day maybe there's gonna be some kind of tension there.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Sure there are always tensions, and that's, that's the spice of life. What fun is it without tensions?

Jeff Umbro: But your point is well taken. The future is very opaque right now, but also I think that many publishers and content companies such as yours should just continue doing what they're seeing work and continue to try and refine that. And it sounds like that's what you guys are doing and, and you're doing it very well.

Leah Reis-Dennis: I'll also say in terms of where we wanna be in three years, I mean, ideally we wanna sign more exciting voices, but I would also hope that a lot of our current partners are still here, right? I would hope that, you know, churn is inherent to any network business, but I, I really value our partnerships as long-term investments.

And so I hope that kind of the flagship talent you see now is still the flagship talent, plus some new faces that you'll see in, you know, 2028.

Jeff Umbro: Give PJ a network. I'll listen to every show.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Done.

Jeff Umbro: I love it.I think he would not want one, but it would be great if he did.

Well, thanks, Leah. This was super fun. I'm glad that we found the time.

Leah Reis-Dennis: Thanks so much, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Leah Reis-Dennis for joining us on the show this week. You can find her at Audacy or on LinkedIn.

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, and Morgan Swift. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

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