Condé Nast Head of Global Audio Chris Bannon on Audio Innovation in Legacy Media

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 Chris Bannon, head of Global Audio at Condé Nast.

What's the most surprising thing that you've learned about adapting magazine brands to audio?

Chris Bannon: How many ready to go talents there actually are in a building full of writers.

Jeff Umbro: We'll talk about his journey from public radio to podcasting, the evolution of Condé Nast's audio business, and how legacy media brands are finding their voice in the podcast era.

Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Bannon: Thank you very much, Jeff. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jeff Umbro: You have been one of my many white whales over the years, so I'm really glad that we're chatting.

Chris Bannon: Well, if viewers can certainly see, I'm probably the whitest actually. But thank you.

I'm happy to be here.

Jeff Umbro: So can you walk us through your early days at Minnesota Public Radio and A Prairie Home Companion?

Chris Bannon: Sure. I got that job because I had been working at a local public radio and TV station where my start actually began in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and I kept trying to persuade Garrison's team to bring the show to Central PA. And instead, after a year of trying, I'd befriended the marketing director and she said the show's moving from New York back to Minnesota. I don't wanna move to Minnesota, but I think you should apply for my job. So I ended up as the marketing director because I knew what it was like to work at a station and they liked my writing samples.

And it was really, you know, it was a time really before the internet. This is 1992, at least the internet as a business tool. And so every day was walking into my office and seeing a phone that had nine red lights flashing on it. It was a great job for being at the center of the show from an information standpoint, while not carrying the terrible burden of having to be the producer of the show, which was a really hard like seven day a week job.

Jeff Umbro: We do quite a bit of marketing at Podglomerate and I find that that's like an interesting position to be in where you are navigating the, I guess, personality and appearance and vision of the show as opposed to making the show. And you can tell when it clicks and when it doesn't. So that's really interesting.

So you spent some time after that at WBUR and at WNYC. What were some of the highlights and lessons that you learned from those years in public radio?

Chris Bannon: Well, I mean the show after Garrison Keillor was a show called Whad'Ya Know?, with Michael Feldman, that was another live audience live broadcast show that was on 300 stations around the country.

Jeff Umbro: You don't do it small.

Chris Bannon: Well, you know, I was an affordable choice as a producer, let's put it that way.

I had loved both of those shows. I was a dedicated listener first. I found that those shows really taught me about the public radio community. You meet every program director. You get to see the fans face to face every week. You do things like, you know, you handle their ticket requests when there are problems. You get to understand the mechanism of how public radio works really, really well.

The one thing I didn't have was news experience really. This was all live comedy and it was all sort of weekend programming, which was sort of the cornerstone of public radio at that time, but not the serious part that people got really excited about in some ways.

And so I got into news at WBUR, sort of by accident. I had a couple of friends there and I'd done a little bit of freelance work for them, and then they lost a whole bunch of producers all at once after 9/11, and I ended up walking in as a kind of journeyman, I think the first show I worked on there was Boston University World of Ideas, a weekly series of college lectures that was still edited at that time on reel to reel tape. I came in, I'm like, I can't edit reel tore tape. We must make this a digital show now.

But then I worked on Here and Now just as a kind of general assignment producer for all kinds of segments and having to come in at eight o'clock in the morning, have a story meeting at 8:30, find a guest, write the script, record the segment, get it into the system before noon has a way of really honing your talents. And I learned a lot about how to write efficiently, how to structure an interview, what really makes for a good news story, as told on the radio.

And I had a lot of help there. The two hosts at the time mentored me in a way as like this hopeless kid from the comedy radio world who had to suddenly learn how to do news, and it's also where I learned to do digital editing. It really built a taste for me for working in news and news programming.

Jeff Umbro: And it gave you a lot of the skills that you'd use in podcasting later on, which is essentially synonymous with radio these days. Do you remember the first time that you heard of a podcast?

Chris Bannon: Well, yeah, at WNYC, we had started, podcasts started being talked about in the early 2000s. I want to say it was 2004 or 2005, but around that time, the Brian Lara Show, which was a talk show that I. Managed, started experimenting with putting out the interviews, the hour, you know, the hours basically of this two hour show as podcast episodes, and we were shocked at how many people started listening to them as, you know, basically time shifted live radio.

Jeff Umbro: Was there a business model for that back then? Was anyone selling ads or was it meant to be an audience driver?

Chris Bannon: It was meant to be an audience driver. You really couldn't monetize it. Nobody was selling ads at that moment, especially at a nonprofit like WNYC where they were really focused on radio sponsorships and membership. We did figure out that it had, at that time, people hadn't converted to digital listening yet, so we could use the radio to drive audience to the podcasts, right?

The most loyal fans of Brian Lehrer would absolutely download whatever podcast player they were using and store up episodes when they were on vacation or something like that. The utility of it was apparent immediately and we would attach fundraising messages to those, right, but there wasn't a sophisticated approach to monetization, no.

Jeff Umbro: I want to touch on your time at Midroll. How did that happen for you?

Chris Bannon: There was a guy named Eric Dean at WNYC, who was the head of business development for the station, the first head of business development, and he had started as a consultant and we became buddies in the process of trying to get what became WNYC studios off the ground. We had about a year of meetings, what must be 4,000 PowerPoints that he created, for the station management to consider the idea of how we would build a network, what that network would be, and eventually it became, you know, the usual suspects you'd expect, Radiolab and On The Media, but also Death, Sex, and Money, which started as a brand new podcast first thing.

Freakonomics Radio, Dan Pashman's show Sporkful, longest Shortest Time, right? That was the nucleus of that network. Anyway, Eric did a masterful job with his business degree of showing how revenue could be made and how audience could be built and what it would take. So he got recruited by Jeff Ullrich to join Earwolf, which was a podcast network with great comedy shows on it, Comedy Bang Bang being the biggest one, I think at that time. It was joined with an ad sales company called Midroll that had been founded by a guy named Lex Friedman. Jeff wanted eventually to sell this Earwolf podcast network and Midroll, the ad sales company, which was really starting to thrive. He recruited Eric to be head of business development there.

I had sort of reached the end of my tether in public media at that time. That was my 24th and a half year, 2015. I could see that podcasting was where the creativity was going to happen. I had made one comedy podcast at WNYC, a show called Lies with a comedian named Sara Schaefer, and he persuaded me that it would be fun to join this company of about 30 people to be the head of content of a network that had more than 40 running shows with three engineers and one producer who had just started the month before, which seems insane to me now when I think about saying yes to that.

Jeff Umbro: Those are often the best decisions though.

Chris Bannon: Well, you know, it did seem like an adventure. I really liked the people. Jeff was a completely compelling salesman of his vision. I mean, I got there in March of 2015 and we were on track to build the first podcast premium service, Howl, by August. He could see the direction podcasting was going in.

Eric eventually became the CEO after Jeff left. I trusted Eric's business ability and he trusted my ability to work with talent. Yeah, it turned out to be a lot of fun.

Jeff Umbro: After Stitcher slash Midroll slash Earwolf, you moved to your own consulting firm for a few years. What did you really focus on when you were, you know, off doing that?

Chris Bannon: I focused on long walks and afternoon naps for about, for most of the first year. I did five and a half years at what eventually became Stitcher, right? Midroll to Stitcher, and we grew from, you know, 30 people to 250. From a business that was doing $10 million a year to in the year of the pandemic, we were on track to do a hundred million.

Jeff Umbro: And you were head of content, right?

Chris Bannon: And I was head of content, but we had really grown it. That can really take it out of you. And I was pretty tired at that point and not really sure what I wanted to do next, and it was the pandemic, so there was really nowhere to go.

I have a little media company called Bella Voce Media. I took on all kinds of weird assignments. They were fun, weird. One of them was working with the set designers of the HBO series And Just Like That, you know, the Sex and the City reboot. They had wanted to create a working podcast studio on that set in Brooklyn. They realized they didn't really know what one should have and how it should look. And so I spent a few weeks saying like, this microphone, not that microphone, the table can't be here. The producer would never sit there, that kind of thing. And calling up friends of mine at NPR and WNYC and Earwolf and getting them, if you watch that show, you'll see posters from Earwolf and NPR and WNYCon the walls in the hallways.

Jeff Umbro: I have to watch an episode now.

Chris Bannon: And then I guess about six months after I got a call from Condé Nast, from the head of strategy here, who said, would you want to help us. There was a new head of Condé Nast Entertainment, Agnes Chu, the woman who was hired to kind of reorganize and rebuild the film and television and video and audio business here.

Would you want to help design how we should do podcasting? And I said, sure, that sounds like fun. And so for six weeks, I had a marvelous experience with Mike interviewing a bunch of other people who worked here, sort of thinking out loud about how would you stagger the growth of a thing like this? Which brands would you start with? What would you really wanna start making?

And then I didn't hear anything for four months. And then in July of 2020, he wrote me and said, do you have time to talk tomorrow? And of course my head went straight to, oh, this is where he tells me that they have hired someone else to carry out my plan. Right?

I'm very much a pessimist. And so, but it actually turned out to be that he was saying like, oh no, we presented your plan to the board and they really liked it and they want us to hire you.

Jeff Umbro: That's amazing.

You are the global head of audio at Condé Nast. What does the global part of that mean?

Chris Bannon: Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Jeff. It really means that I'm here for the entire community of Condé Nast, which is a global company, right? We have Vanity Fairs in many countries. We have Vogues in many countries.

Jeff Umbro: Are you doing separate productions in in different countries?

Chris Bannon: Yes. And there are like, there's a, the Vogue Mexico people were just here last week taping an episode 'cause they happened to be in town. They all run on their own sort of business principles. And my job and my staff's job is really to help support them by figuring out, okay, you want to do a limited run series, you want it to be branded, here's what you may need to do. Let me put you in touch with some producers in London who could help you do that. Let me help you figure out what the launch plan should be.

Most of the magazines in the global Condé Nast world, you know, they're just in different markets and they know their markets, but they can decide what they wanna do, but much better than I can.

But I can help them because our, the American podcast market is so far ahead in terms of its monetization strategies and marketing. Than a lot of the other European markets, let's say. So I learned something by having this title because I get to find out a little bit about how things work in Italy and what success is like there.

And also they all have such fantastic accents.

Jeff Umbro: Which is amazing in audio.

Chris Bannon: Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's just really fun.

Jeff Umbro: One of the reasons that these shows work as well as they do is that there are so many people, either the hosts or the guests on the shows that have these amazing personalities and are really warm and welcoming for the listener. And it strikes me that you just have most of that built in.

You know, all of your hosts work there or have written stories for the magazines or your guests are commenting on the news of the day that are being written up in all of these websites. And how much of that was in your original vision?

Chris Bannon: Well, my original plan as I presented it to Agnes was that we would rely on creating talk shows for each of the major brands. They had done some successful like narrative series. Vogue had one called In Vogue: The 90s, In Vogue The 2000s that later became a TV series on HBO, but they had not, beyond The New Yorker, created consistent, you know, programming that would help build loyalty and, you know, drive subscriptions and do all the things that really good audio programming is supposed to do for the company, and I knew we didn't have a giant budget to bring in, you know, celebrities at that time to host our shows.

We did have a lot of really talented, educated, informed, and driven people in the building. What it really took was some very careful casting to find out which people were best at playing which role in each show, like we spent about nine months developing the Vogue show, The Run-Through.

I had no staff at that time, so I hired Mary Beth Kirchner, who's a producer I've worked with, This American Life veteran, has done a million really wonderful, wonderful shows. I knew she would understand what Vogue wanted in a kind of almost existential way, like she would be in tune with their sensibilities more than any other producer that I knew. And she taped, I don't know, 12, 15 different sessions with different staffers, had them try different things, came up with some different show concepts, all of it to try to just understand, okay, what is the community of talent in these editorial rooms, and how do I find the right person to lead a conversation? How do I find the right color commentators? What are they particularly good on? How do they react to each other?

My goal with any, and we've had a lot of success I think replicating what we did with Vogue, for The New Yorker, and for Wired in particular, with two or three person chat shows that feel like that's a sort of family of performers who like each other, can finish each other's sentences a little bit, can disagree once in a while, in a way that doesn't ever get ugly.

What that does is create a room for the listener that's a happy place, even if you're talking about very dark things. Thank God The New Yorker's DC Roundtable is there to tell me how democracy is going to hell.

Jeff Umbro: And I absolutely picked up on that and actually like leading into this, I went and listened to five or six of your shows this morning, and I think all of what I listened to had at least two, if not three hosts that were kind of leading into the headline of the episode. I think Women Who Travel may be the only show that you guys are currently publishing that's a one-to-one and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys are have canceled that show, right?

Chris Bannon: Yeah. It had been running both, before I came here, it was a two person show, actually two editors did it entirely in their spare time and one of them left the company and we continued it with Lale for four years. But it was a, it turned out to be a difficult show to grow and a difficult show to fully monetize. And you know, the media industry is facing some really serious challenges right now. So yeah, unfortunately.

I think it could come back. It had a very loyal audience.

Jeff Umbro: It was a great, I mean, the episode I listened to today was talking about a restaurant that's like two hours away from me, so.

Chris Bannon: Oh.

Jeff Umbro: I may be going for a visit.

Chris Bannon: You should go.

One of the things we did with that show was think about how do you do a travel show in audio that isn't, you know, somehow less good than what you would see on a screen, and that it came down to thinking about the texture of the audio. Can you put someone in a place? Can you get someone to create an emotional relationship with a place that will come through the audio?

Jeff Umbro: And that is probably the most sound designed episode that I heard.

Chris Bannon: Yeah, it relied heavily. That was another reason why we weren't able to really keep doing it because it, we had a pretty high standard of production on that. That became more difficult to afford.

Jeff Umbro: There's one show in your slate that I think is a little bit unique compared to what you've produced over the years, and that would be In The Dark, which is a, you know, really amazing investigative series that just won a Pulitzer for its third season and you know, has done quite a bit even prior to that.

Why this show? Why take the risk on that particular property and why bring in something that is so separate from everything else that you're producing?

Chris Bannon: It's funny that you say that. I don't think it is separate. I think it evolves separately, but it has an incredible amount in common with The New Yorker. This is a light sounding word, but you're telling something in a really entertaining way that they don't forget as serious as season three was, and as hard as that story was given who the victims were, they don't forget that they have to keep it moving, that they have to provide some suspense, that they have to create some moments of levity in that story, or else no one would stay with it if it was uniformly sad. You're leading a listener through an experience, kind of like an amusement park in which there are some terrifying moments, and then some like, oh, thank God.

Jeff Umbro: Well, so you have the tenets of storytelling that go into it and you know, it's an amazing show, just like most of what you guys produce, but it is a limited series. It is much more expensive. You have to hire journalists to go and spend years researching the show. Presumably, with all the shows you're producing, you're trying to monetize 'em through advertising. You're trying to get new subscribers to the magazine.

It strikes me that it's unlikely that this show is gonna make its money back via advertising. Maybe I'm wrong. Is it the prestige? Is it the awards? Why this show?

Chris Bannon: I mean, advertising isn't really the sole support of The New Yorker to begin with. It's subscriptions, right? And so that long-term loyalty to The New Yorker and what it is built over a hundred years is. Very similar to what I felt working in public radio all that time that we had successfully built. We had become the first choice, to put it in radio terms, the P1 of a lot of people who wanted to have The New Yorker as their first magazine choice.

And I was pretty sure that In The Dark, those audiences overlapped, right? But I also think that every podcast can bring new fans to the brand that it's attached to, people what we, you know. And so I thought, well, this is a chance for us to make some revenue from advertising, to really experiment with what happens if we turn this into a subscription driven enterprise for The New Yorker.

And that's what, especially last year we, we did a short run series called The Runaway Princesses with Heidi Blake based on one of her articles. That was only four episodes. And then we did, you know, the nine episodes of season three. The goal economically for me. Is to get them to do as much content as efficiently as possible, right, which they already do. They are the most efficient people I've ever worked with. I have to say that like it's dazzling to me what this small team of people can actually accomplish in a year. So I knew that was in my favor and that they were hungry to do more.

So it wasn't just me adopting a once every three years series. We talked together about how can we up your output, what other kinds of shows could you do? How would collaborating with writers enable you to do more and to make this a more consistent experience for New Yorker audio fans and they signed onto that, you know, willingly, happily, and now they have a two year pipeline of stories they're working on.

Jeff Umbro: Oh, that's amazing.

Chris Bannon: You know, with that kind of planning, then I can go out to a sponsor and say, Hey, I have this thing coming in the spring of 26. Last year it got 27 million listens to you. Would you like a piece of it now? And it becomes much easier to sell than a one-off unknown story. Right? That's starting from zero listeners.

Jeff Umbro: What are the key metrics or signals that constitute success for an audio property at Condé Nast?

Chris Bannon: Our major metric is monetizable ad impressions. That is how many ads and how many breaks in how many shows per year can you deliver? And that's important because we are a giant sales organization, right? And so many other parts of the company have the same ad impressions-based drivers in their annual plans.

At Stitcher, like Midroll, when I was back there, we would actually decide, oh, we're gonna launch three large shows, six medium-sized shows, and four small shows next year. And that's kind of the way, we looked at it as ad inventory in a way, but it was also about the scale of the shows and.

Jeff Umbro: And the scale of the network as a whole.

Chris Bannon: Exactly, and here I don't have nearly as large a network, but I do have a great sale, a huge sales operation that can sell my work packaged with digital ads, even print ads, you know, videos on YouTube. They can go to eBay, the big sponsor this year of The Run-Through at Vogue and say, would you like to dominate? This key demographic that we serve through these editorial products, including podcasting. When I came here, one of the theories I had was that coming here would be good because this company does so many different kinds of advertising and I wouldn't just be in a another spot selling market.

Jeff Umbro: Now, how does podcasting fit into Condé Nast's, like broader sales and revenue strategy? I believe PRX is selling your podcast ads.

Chris Bannon: I actually have three people, three organizations selling podcast ads. WNYC sells The New Yorker Radio Hour and is the primary seller there. PRX sells everything in my current inventory alongside Condé Nast. That's all thanks to my operations director, Nico Steele, who manages to create communication pathways that I don't think could properly be diagrammed among these organizations.

Because PRX is engaged in more traditional podcast selling, right? There's a campaign Quince wants to sponsor X audience at at Y number of impressions. They're doing something that Condé isn't doing. Condé is looking at these bigger deals in which audio is an add-on, an upsell, and then WNYC is over there taking care of the Radio Hour and helping to make sure that that's our biggest and most expensive show so it needs the most advertising, you know, underwriting attention.

Jeff Umbro: I'm very jealous. You, you kind of nailed this from every angle, which is very nice.

Chris Bannon: I always wanna hire sell through rate. Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: Everybody does, but you guys are doing just fine.

Chris Bannon: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Jeff Umbro: How do you consider editorial firewalls when it comes to podcast advertising? Are you ever nervous that David Remnick reading a quince ad is gonna be a conflict?

Chris Bannon: Well, that would be

under our current rules. You would not be allowed to do that. At The New Yorker specifically, there's one group of editorial contributors who are allowed to read ads, and that's the Shouts & Murmurs people. So we have four voices, the cartoonists and the people who write the funny, the comedy pieces in, in the magazine.

They do all The New Yorker ads. Roz Chast is the voice you'll most likely recognize there. Her cartoons are so great. Every magazine has its own line where it will draw, you know, whether X part of the editorial staff is allowed to read an ad or not. And then within each brand, they have standards about which categories they will accept and won't accept, which advertisers are absolutely forbidden.

You know, we've built all these rule sets sort of custom for each brand, so it's a little harder for our sellers, particularly PRX, who's on the outside, right? They have to figure out, oh, I have a campaign that might go on Wired, but do they have the rules that allow me to run this with Katie Drummond, our global editorial director saying the ad.

It mostly has worked. We've, we've worked together with PRX for a year and a half now, and it has been pretty smooth for the most part. It's nice to have the extra money.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I imagine. Are there any revenue streams that you guys are pursuing right now beyond ad sales or pushing magazine subscriptions?

Chris Bannon: Well, The New Yorker, we're always trying to figure out how do we drive the subscription business further, right? And that's an ongoing, every time we have a season of In The Dark coming up. We start to like, we have a new fall season coming. I can't disclose what it is yet, but it's gonna be great. And so The New Yorker is right now engaged in figuring how do we improve on the performance of in the dark this fall versus what we did last year.

The other thing we're exploring at the moment is more live, more live shows. There's a New Yorker festival every year. That's a great thing to go to if you get the chance and you're in New York and those always sell out. The podcast tapings that we've done there have been a lot of fun. We did a Critics at Large taping at The Bell House, which is one of my favorite venues in New York, and that did very, very well. That also sold out.

We've done a few other live shows that have made us think, okay, we need to invest more in this. So I think we'll bring The Political Scene from The New Yorker to a live audience this year, I hope. And then I think starting to travel them around the country goes back to my time with Prairie Home and Whad'Ya Know? I think there's tremendous value in bringing the show to the audience and letting them touch each other. It's great for the performers. They really enjoy it, and especially if you get them a good hotel room and, and it's also really, it just creates loyalty that's very hard to break.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I mean I've been to several of those shows and, and I hear the ads promoting them within the audio experience and if you can find the audience that's actually going to engage with that, then you're kind of set.

Chris Bannon: Smartless is the best example recently, right? Although Conan does a great job with his shows too. It is so much fun to sit in the audience of one of those shows.

Jeff Umbro: I have a lot of friends who probably have not listened to a podcast in a decade who have been to those shows.

Chris Bannon: Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: You know, it's Smartless, the Giggly Squad, something from Alex Cooper like.

Chris Bannon: My favorite, one of my favorite Earwolf shows was a show called Bitch Sesh, which those live shows are killer. They're the funniest. It's like being, I, it's like you found yourself in a comedy cult.

Jeff Umbro: And everybody there is in the cult with you and it's great. So I totally know what you mean by being in a room like with your other fans.

Chris Bannon: That's my happy place as a show maker, generally. Can we make things like that?

Jeff Umbro: When you're working with these historical storied brands, how do you balance editorial integrity and creative risk taking? What kind of goes into the thought process there?

Chris Bannon: Well, you might have heard of a little thing called the fact checking department at The New Yorker.

Jeff Umbro: We, we made a show a couple years ago called Missing Pages, and we actually interviewed one of the fact checkers from The New Yorker, and I was exhausted even listening to that interview in a good way. But they are very impressive people.

Chris Bannon: That's right. And our shows get fact checked and the hosts know that. The producers know that. There is, you have to be extremely scrupulous with your information. And you know,I'm filling in for one of my executive producers this week 'cause he's on vacation, so I have to do the first pass listen on some of his episodes for The Political Scene.

You know, in the back of my head, every time I hear a host say something, it's like, oh, can we stand behind that? Do I have to flag that for the producer?

Jeff Umbro: You guys just. Fiona Hill / Putin episode, so there's a lot of fact checking on that. I'm sure.

Chris Bannon: Exactly. Right. And it not only goes through fact checking, but through legal too, there's a legal review of each episode. So you know, we can't do, it's really hard to do breaking news that way, but that's not what people are, to Wired a little bit, but people haven't generally been coming to our world for breaking news, they come for smart analysis. And you know you undermine that if you don't provide fact checking, legal review, all the safeguards of journalism.

Jeff Umbro: Are there any shows or formats that you've launched that have surprised you in terms of critical response or audience?

Chris Bannon: It really comes down to who are the characters I'm working with. I'm bound a little bit by that multi-host format because jobs turn over in media, and every time you lose a writer or an editor, if you've been wholly dependent on that person, you're screwed, you know?

Jeff Umbro: When these personalities that are getting a salary from the magazine, when you tap them to host a podcast, are they being reimbursed differently or is that just part of their new job?

Chris Bannon: Generally, if you're a full-time staff person here, it's part of your job.

Jeff Umbro: So you don't have many safeguards then for people jumping ship and going elsewhere?

Chris Bannon: I guess the safeguards are I have to make shows that they love doing. I have to make it really easy for them to do the shows because these people have so many other responsibilities besides going into my studio and talking for an hour. Right?

Jeff Umbro: That is the result of them putting 20 hours of work into something.

Chris Bannon: Right. And like all their work informs how good they are on the podcast, but I can't make their day harder. Like that would be the worst thing I could bring to this whole company. And so a lot of what we do, and fortunately I have an amazing small team of producers and executive producers who make sure that it's a good time for the most part when they're in there.

And you know, what they do get out of it is personal brand building. The Run-Through started from zero as a Vogue show. They'd never had a talk show like that. But it really has grown into a show that the industry listens to.

Jeff Umbro: People have cited that to me before.

Chris Bannon: That's great to hear. I never tire of hearing that, but it's like that's what you want is a show that has fans in the world in which those hosts work. Right? Because they would be easily bored if it weren't relevant.

Jeff Umbro: Have you guys ever thought about doing like any kind and, and maybe you've done this and I just am unaware, but any kind of shows that are collaborating two different magazines like a New Yorker Vogue collab.

Chris Bannon: We have talked about it. I think. Katie Drummond, the editor, the global editorial director of Wired, has been on the Radio Hour and she and David are working up a kind of act, it almost feels like, like they at a company gathering, she interviewed him last year and there's. There is some collaboration there that I think could happen.

In The Dark has asked me to keep an eye on what's going on at Wired because they have a tradition of narrative, investigative narrative journalism, especially around hacking with Andy Greenberg. But like a lot of reporters, like they just had, Evan Ratliff just published a story about the Zizians and if we'd known that was coming and if we hadn't already been at work on season three, like that could have been a great New Yorker wired venture.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, that would've been amazing. The Wired team is a special place in my heart. There was about a decade where I think I read every single issue cover to cover. I would still do it. I just am busy.

Chris Bannon: They're really killing it right now. Katie has put in place a group of people with impeccable sources in the world of DOGE and DC, and she did that a year before. She started that, a year before that administration, and it is really paying off.

Jeff Umbro: I feel like I'm reading some citation of Wired and DOGE every other day.

Chris Bannon: Pretty much That's right. It's inspiring.

Jeff Umbro: So Condé Nast has been publishing audio for about 15 years now. How has the company's approach evolved over that time?

Chris Bannon: It started as two producers in a broom closet, basically kind of the, the way many legacy media companies did. Like the boss isn't looking, let's go make a podcast and publish it under the brand name and then apologize later. Then there was a period that Panoply came along and supported, particularly Vanity Fair with some shows, one of which is still running. Little Gold Men was a Panoply project. They had a team in the late 20 teens at Condé Nast Entertainment. The previous leader before Agnes, and they ran smack into the pandemic and that sort of collapsed that effort. And then I was brought in to try to create a sort of a more systematic approach to show development and monetization.

Jeff Umbro: It seems like it's working really well. And to your point, there have been fits and starts from my vantage point.

It says a lot that some of those shows that were started 15 years ago are still around.

Chris Bannon: Well, you know, podcasts are hard to kill.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Chris Bannon: Especially very cheap ones, right? That's kind of the rule is, well, it's hardly costing anything, so people say, well, we might as well let it go, but I think there is a risk with doing that and not focusing on either growing it or shutting it down.

It takes attention from the audience, however small, away from everything else you could be doing.

Jeff Umbro: And attention away from the people who are making the show if, if they're staff at the magazine.

Chris Bannon: Oh, and that's absolutely like the, the editorial leadership here needs every person they have. They can't afford to have someone wasting time.

Jeff Umbro: So what trends in podcasting are you most excited about, specific to Condé Nast, and how do you know what is a podcast versus a magazine article versus a YouTube video? What is squarely in your lane when it comes to these decisions?

Chris Bannon: Well, we started doing more video. I wouldn't say we are full-time doing it because Condé Nast actually has already succeeded in video pretty extensively. If you look at our Wired and Bon Appetit and Vanity Fair, even globally, we have a very viable video business, so they don't need an hour long conversation with three people wearing headphones necessarily to feel successful in video. Right?

I think whatever I do in video has to be additive in some entertaining or monetary way. We'll probably do more things that just try to call attention to what the quality of the shows and the personalities that we have available here, largely through social. But I, you know, I think we will start doing more video as we see an opportunity not to disrupt the rest of the business.

I personally think live is a place I'd love to do much more in because I do think there is revenue there that we haven't tapped into. And it's also a great way of sort of building franchises. You know, we have two episodes of the political scene that could travel and be very different. The Roundtable on Friday, and then Tyler Foggatt's one-on-one interview on Wednesdays, and those are different kinds of shows for different kinds of places in different groups of people, yet they share a feed and have an overarching subject that they fit under. But I think trying to understand who those audiences are more specifically and figuring out what else we can build for them is probably what I'm gonna focus on for the coming year.

Jeff Umbro: Well, thank you, Chris. This was really, really fun. I'm glad that we got to talk.

Chris Bannon: Jeff, I'm really flattered that you asked.

If I can ever be useful to you anytime, just let me know.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Chris for joining us on this week's episode of Podcast Perspectives. You can find him on LinkedIn at Chris Bannon.

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.