Glenn Rubenstein on the AMP Accords

[00:00:00] Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives

[00:00:02] Glenn Rubenstein: So for podcasting to grow faster, specifically on the advertising side, we really need to put some pressure on YouTube to allow pixel measurement and better tracking of ad conversions.

[00:00:13] Jeff Umbro: What is a podcast? That question, along with two others surrounding measurement and attribution, led a group of industry leaders to create the AMP Accords.

But are these genuinely urgent problems that need solving, or is the industry overcomplicating itself? Today on the show, we have Adopter Media CEO and founder, Glenn Rubinstein, to talk about the AMP Accords, why Glenn believes that they're necessary, and whether these proposals could change how podcasting advertising is bought and sold.

So walk us through, like, what Adopter Media is, for anybody who doesn't know, just to, like, set the table for the AMP Accords.

[00:00:45] Glenn Rubenstein: So Adopter Media is a dedicated agency focused on host-read endorsements, podcast advertising, YouTube sponsorships. We've been around since 2016, and we are a brand-facing agency.

We're the podcast advertising agency for brands, in that we rep advertisers, right now around two dozen, and what we do for them is plan, manage, execute, and optimize their podcast campaigns. So we work with anywhere from dozens to thousands of creators on behalf of a brand to help them scale their messaging and really invest in this channel.

[00:01:17] Jeff Umbro: I've heard this before, and, and I won't tell you where, 'cause I don't know how accurate it is, but is it accurate that you are, like, the third or fourth largest ad representation agency out in podcasting?

[00:01:29] Glenn Rubenstein: In terms of our size, it really depends on the day of the week, depends on the month, depends on the level of spend.

But I think some of the consolidation helped in that regard. When you had Veritone and Oxford, who were both top three, consolidate into the new Oxford Road, and then you have Ad Results, I would say that on a good day we might be three, occasionally we're four. But I would also preface that regardless of who is three or four, there is a lot of daylight between what Oxford and Ad Results and the number three and four agencies spend in this channel.

[00:02:01] Jeff Umbro: I believe it. They've just been consolidating for years and, and doing things. They, they've been chasing scale for a lot longer.

[00:02:08] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah.

[00:02:08] Jeff Umbro: So.

[00:02:10] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah, and our, I think our growth trajectory has been phenomenal. You know, for the first couple years. The agency, it was just myself with a virtual assistant or two.

My wife, our COO, joined the company in 2019. It's funny because she's the one that taught me about the advertising industry originally. She worked in network traffic at a CBS affiliate. She went on to write and manage help systems for WideOrbit, which is a network and broadcast ad tracking sales software, and she's a certified PMP.

So when she joined our company, that's really where I think we became a real business. We started hiring. Adam McNeill came on board in 2022. And yeah, now we're up to, like, 20 people that work as part of our organization, so it's very exciting.

[00:02:50] Jeff Umbro: That is exciting. So what, what separates podcast ad buying from other media?

[00:02:55] Glenn Rubenstein: I think it's interesting. With podcast ads, traditionally, it's been more of a throwback to the early days of television in the sense that you have the characters or the host of the show actually doing the read. So if you think about TV now and what TV advertising is, it's now more mini movies, pre-produced commercials, jingles, spokespeople.

It's different, but it literally used to be back in the, the 1950s, you could watch an episode of Leave It to Beaver, and at the end, you would have the entire family around the breakfast table doing an ad for Corn Flakes. And I think that with podcast ads, that's really powerful. Radio, you know, endorsements have existed for as long as radio has been around, and radio kept that torch going of host-read endorsement advertising, and maybe it's because so many of the early podcast pioneers came from radio that that's the ad style that podcasts adopted and really made their own.

You know, I've been talked about this lately. I think that you look at different genres and the way that they do ads, and you can really kind of see how it started. Like, you can listen to some podcasts and say, "Okay, this is a radio guy," because they're doing it very much in a radio endorsement style. You listen to a comedy podcast and say, "Okay, they're doing this in a more irreverent style, trying to make it feel a little bit more like their content."

And I think what's great about this is that these things are all labeled as ads. Everybody says, "This episode is brought to you by, this episode's sponsored by." That disclosure is there, but when the ads are really good, they're as good as the content of the podcast, and sometimes they're actually even better than the content.

So if you get a host that's really inspired The copy and talking points from an advertiser isn't a script. It's like an improv prompt, and they're gonna say, "Now we're gonna talk about this." I would say with our client Magic Spoon, that we're very blessed to have been a part of their success. We've been working with them as long as they've been a company.

And for a lot of podcasts and YouTube hosts, they'll get the Magic Spoon talking points, and instantly they wanna talk about their nostalgia and fondness for the childhood cereals that they loved. And so then you get these interesting rants and stories, talking about Saturday mornings, talking about coming home after school, and then they pivot to talk about how Magic Spoon helps them recre- recapture that feeling and recreate that feeling as an adult in a way that's good and healthy for you.

So I think that when you have the right advertiser, the right thought starter, and the right host, you can do something that sometimes surpasses the actual content of the podcast and allows the host to get really personal and tell a story they wouldn't have otherwise discussed.

[00:05:31] Jeff Umbro: So, uh, that's kind of the landscape in which you exist in the podcast industry.

A couple weeks ago, Dan Granger and his team at Oxford Road, and many others, released something called the AMP Accords. I- in 30 seconds, can you explain what the AMP Accords are?

[00:05:47] Glenn Rubenstein: Okay. So the AMP Accords first and foremost, are out to define what is a podcast. They came up with a simple definition. If you can listen to it on demand and listen to it with your eyes closed, it's a podcast, regardless of whether it's audio, video, or the platform that it's on.

In terms of measurement, they wanna look at actual plays versus downloads. They wanna actually u- start using HLS to count in 30 se- second increments who's listening to these podcasts and figure out, you know, what are brands actually getting what they're paying for. And then on top of that, they wanna make some improvements to measurement to start looking more at attribution and how we're measuring conversions and purchases of podca- from podcast ads.

[00:06:28] Jeff Umbro: We're gonna spend a few minutes on each of those three buckets, but before we get there, I wanna just walk u- through, like, kind of the history of why these exist. Like, what, why do we need these things in the industry?

[00:06:41] Glenn Rubenstein: Well, first let's start with definition. Uh, the, some of the thought behind this is that when you're dealing with a company, especially a larger corporation that's not a startup, there's a question that if you're gonna advertise on podcasts, whose budget does that come out of?

Is that coming out of the influence budger- budget for Meta, Instagram, et cetera? Is that coming out of the radio budget because it's audio? If you start looking at things like YouTube and the influencer space there, it can kind of be a little convoluted where these overlaps and boundaries actually exist just to determine You know, is this an offline medium?

Is this a digital medium? So we're trying to take, as an industry, we're trying to figure out how we can make this more sellable, and I think the AMP Accords have done a good job of trying to narrow that definition enough to at least the point where there's ... So we at Adopter could go to a client and say, "Okay, treat this a little more like offline.

Treat this a little more like radio." But if you're looking for digital meta Facebook style attribution, that's maybe more in your influencer space. If you're looking at direct click and measurement, there were some of those tools, where this is a little more offline, a little more treated like radio. And yes, we're gonna get you better metrics, but you have to come into this not expecting that you're gonna be able to treat this like you would a buy on meta.

And I think even with the idea with YouTube, you know, I will tell you that in this industry, there are a lot of agencies that will be the podcast agency for a brand, but there might, they might have a separate YouTube agency that handles YouTube native video, and this actually kind of helps where that dividing line is.

You know, we've had some of these co-parenting relationships with brands where we take the podcast side and another brand takes the video side, and we always fight to keep podcasts that are on YouTube that are simulcast. And so this definition right there will help us win that battle with a clear line.

If you can listen to it with your eyes closed, it's a podcast. If it's a how-to, a tutorial, it's video, use a separate YouTube agency for that.

[00:08:46] Jeff Umbro: So who was involved in the AMP Accords, and why did they feel the need to, like, put this document together?

[00:08:54] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah. Okay. So for full disclosure and transparency, even though we endorsed the AMP Accords, we were not involved in putting them together.

This was convened by Dan Granger and Oxford Road. For the AMP Accords, they had advertisers, I believe BetterHelp was one of them. I think Shopify was another. They worked with Libsyn, Spotify, and other major players in the space to try and bring in a cross-section to get differing perspectives.

[00:09:20] Jeff Umbro: So I, um, I was fascinated by who they brought into the group You know, you just mentioned it.

There was platforms, there was publishers, there was agencies, there was the actual advertisers. And it, it just got me thinking, like, why each of those parties were brought into the room. So why were each of these parties interested in, like, putting these accords together? Like, what does a platform have to do with an agency, have to do with an advertiser, have to do with a publisher when it comes to, like, actually measuring this stuff?

[00:09:49] Glenn Rubenstein: Well, I'll give you some of the real inside baseball on this. This is not the first time the industry has tried to come together, or people have tried to do some collective bargaining, or even look at measurement. I mean, NPR with their RAD measurement, uh, is one previous attempt that was company-led. And if you look at that a lot of the time, it's kinda tough when one company just says, like, "We're calling for a new industry standard."

That's usually met like a lead balloon, right? It doesn't, doesn't fly. Now, if you get a large conglomerate, like if YouTube were to say, "We're changing the way that we measure things," that would be industry-wide. If Apple says, "We're changing the way we measure things." So you really need some sort of consensus as a starting point.

And one thing that, the part of the reason with the AMP Accords, by the way, part of the reason why we're comfortable endorsing them and we're really getting on board with this and helping push it forward is because nobody got everything they wanted, and they admit it's imperfect, and they admit that it's a start.

This isn't meant to be like, "This is the law that we are passing down on the mountaintop. Everybody follow this for 2027 buys." They're saying, "This is, these are ideas, and can we work to improve upon and strengthen these ideas?" So look, we've tried it before with other advertisers and agencies, just even on something like insertion order terms, to say like, "Hey We find that we want to be able to negotiate this.

We think this is a fair way to do things on, like, a 45-day measurement window. And then even with that, and th- and these are people that I consider very good friends in the industry, even with that, there was a lot of butting of heads where it's like, "No, we want this," then we have to make exceptions. And then, "We don't wanna disclose all our IO terms, 'cause we think we've got something proprietary."

It's like getting a group to agree on where to go to eat lunch sometimes alone is enough, let alone how are we going to define standards that are going to be abidable by the industry. So I think this is, this is a very good s- first start.

[00:11:40] Jeff Umbro: I agree. But I guess I'm curious, like, who is asking for these new standards?

[00:11:44] Glenn Rubenstein: Advertisers. It's always advertisers. And this is where it gets a little more convoluted, in my opinion. And the reason why is that ... And I've been in this space since, like, 2010, 2011, just on, just on the business side of podcasting. I mean, I was originally doing a podcast back before it was even a podcast.

I was doing, like, live internet radio in the ShoutCast days in the late '90s. But what's happened is, since I've gotten in this business, there has always been this idea, well, the brands are saying, "Yeah, but how many people are really listening?" Or, "How many people are skipping ads? And if we can just get them that data, then they're gonna bring in money."

Hey, the brands are saying that, you know, CPMs are all over the place. It's Wild West. We don't have ad formats. If we could just solidify the CPMs and the formats, then the brands are gonna come in. So I will say this. In the last five years, I have it quantifiable, qualified from brands that I've talked to.

If YouTube enabled pixel attribution No, no limit on what brands will spend in this space if we can start pixeling YouTube. Brands tend to offer the same offers on podcasts that they're offering in their other channels. Sometimes if you go to their website, you'll get a big pop-up that says, "Hey, got a sale going on right now.

Use SPRING25 to save 25% off." Podcast offer code was 20%. Or they'll say, "Enter your email and phone number to save an additional 10% on your order," and then people end up using that code. So offer code's kind of nerfed already based on that. So there's surveys, which are great, and surveys tend to provide a lot of lift.

But I can also tell you that I've seen surveys where it'll be like, "How did you hear about us?" And someone will type in Joe Rogan, and it'll be like, huh, that's funny. We've never actually advertised on Joe Rogan and I don't think he's ever mentioned our brand. But, you know, maybe we were working with Tim Dillon or Sam Tripoli or a regular guest of his, and somebody conflated that and just put in Joe Rogan.

That's all previous measurement that, again, nerfed at this point in terms of capturing full audience. 15 years ago, you could say maybe we're getting 70 to 80%. Now it's more like 20 to 30% through those methodologies. So then you have pixeling, and I say this, I was an advisor and investor in Podsites, sold to Spotify in 2022.

I'm an advisor to Podscribe. We helped them develop their attribution product. We've done a lot of other stuff with them. They were a part of the AMP Accords. So with Podscribe, we do audio pixel matching for all of the Adopter media clients. What that does, you listen to a podcast, it captures your IP address.

You go to the website, you make a purchase, captures your IP address. I don't need you to do an offer code, a URL, a survey. I know you heard the podcast and made a purchase. Doesn't matter if you Google it, clicked on a Facebook ad, whatever. On YouTube, we don't have the ability to pixel, so we're back to that 20 to 30% effective capture mechanism.

And given that YouTube has been enormous growth for podcasting, and now you have some podcasts that started out as audio only that are now consumed 80 or 90% on YouTube. I have brands that have 20 to 30% effective hard data. We've got amazing hard data on the audio portion, but it's a little weird then to just say we're gonna now model the video results based on the audio portion and what that's done.

We're gonna apply that same math formula to video to measure lift. That's not good enough. Like, it's good enough for now, but it's not-- I'm telling you, it's good enough for the brands that are true believers and understand this medium and that see the success. But there's 5X, 10X, that if we say, "Hey, we have hard pixel data on all ends of the spectrum, and we can triangulate for you."

[00:15:12] Jeff Umbro: If you're someone listening to this episode and you want to go deep on the podcast advertising industry, I recommend going back and listening to our episodes with Matt Shappo from the IAB, Bryan Barletta from Sounds Profitable, Cameron Hendrix from Magellan, Pete

[00:15:25] Glenn Rubenstein: Birsinger from Podscribe, and Dan Misner from Bumper

[00:15:30] Jeff Umbro: Well, wait, what happens though if the data's not good?

Because, like, from what we see historically on YouTube, and this is not a blanket statement, but, like, a lot of the consumption on YouTube is a lot worse than what it would be on other platforms. So, like, what if they get that data and then they don't like what they're seeing?

[00:15:46] Glenn Rubenstein: Well, first off, if you're a direct result brand, all of this other data is secondary, right?

If you're just running a brand and you just care about revenue, and I can even get you that 20 to 30% effective mechanism, and you're looking at it and going like, "Wow, we made a lot of money advertising with these people." Yeah. Like, we should do more of that, right? But I do think that it is what you're saying, it's a, it's baked into the pricing on YouTube.

YouTube CPMs tend to be less than audio CPMs, and part of it's based on numbers. So let's, let's go really granular and inside here. A lot of audio is sold on US-only impressions, and even further, some of that's sold on US-only, over-18 impressions. So let's call that a qualified impression, right? We mean that's addressable market.

It's where the brand is. We can advertise against that, and it makes sense. With YouTube, one of the first things we do when we evaluate a YouTube channel for sponsorship is we say, "Hey, can you give us creator access, or can you at the very least send us a screenshot of your demographics before we even talk about price?"

So if a creator sends over something and it's 50% US audience, and of that 50%, 80% is over the age of 18, I can then say, "Okay-" Whatever your view numbers are, we're talking about a 40% addressable audience, so we're gonna pay a CPM that reflects that, because the rest of it is no, of no interest to us. So we do have means- Got it

to filter that, but I do think if you put pixel in- Yeah ... it's gonna become even stronger. And then when you talk about the AMP accords they're talking about in terms of actual plays, and Creator Studio has this, iTunes Connect has this. It's funny, for as much as people wor- worry about ad skipping and worry about, like, are people actually listening to these things, when Apple unlocked the Creator Connect and the skip data back in, like, 2017, 2018, it was something that it's, like, only 17% of people don't finish episodes or skip ads.

[00:17:27] Jeff Umbro: Yeah, if, if you look at the Bumper data on this, they, they published an article a little bit ago. The vast majority of, of podcasts actually have, like, you know, a, a 60 to 80% completion rate. Correct. And, you know, uh, they flipped the script and said, like, "Let's not look at ad skipping. Let's look at ad completion."

If 10% of people are skipping the ads, that means 90% of the people are listening to them.

[00:17:51] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah, the, and for breakage, that's exceptionally low, all things considered. So I think that's the thing with Bumper, and I love Bumper, and I've known, you know, Dan Misner for a long time, and we had a spirited discussion for, like, four hours in a Toronto coffee shop once.

But I think that with Bumper, like, Bumper scores, I think, could really take off, and what the AMP accords are talking about doing is very similar, right? So look, if it was a dirty secret of this industry that ad skipping was a huge problem or that incomplete listens were a huge problem, w- I think people would've been very nervous before the AMP accords proposed this.

But I think based on what we're seeing from other signals, I think this play data and the chunking via HLS, I think it's only gonna strengthen what we already know. But it's gonna give a more quantifiable measur- measurement on a podcast-by-podcast level that's going to be more automated and independently third-party verified that will be, be easier to bring to advertisers.

[00:18:49] Jeff Umbro: Okay, so I wanna take one step back We've established that the, the first of the three tiers of the AMP Accords are defining what a podcast is. We know that the importance there is less about the consumer and more about the brand who's buying, so that they can help define this in their P&L and their spreadsheets and their budgets.

Um, the second bucket is about exposure and how to measure that. Um, and you just walked us through, uh, you know, vanity URLs, promo codes, leading up to pixel attribution today. Walk through what kind of exposure metrics the AMP Accords are looking for, 'cause today, most people are still using download as the currency, and, like, what, what is, what do the AMP Accords hope to change?

[00:19:36] Glenn Rubenstein: It's really about validating the listen-through that we just talked about, how far into episodes people are going, completing the episodes, even hearing the ads, right? And this is kind of the iOS 17 thing that I talk about in our blog post, not part of the AMP Accords, but it was, it was relevant. We discovered Back in early, no, late 2022, when dynamic ad insertion was all the rage, we kept saying, "Why is it everything that has an embedded ad or a baked in ad performs better than an impression-based buy or a dynamic ad?"

And at a certain point, we had all these theories about late insertion, and we caught some things, right? We caught some issues with ad servers inserting ads late. That got fixed. Knock on wood, it's still fixed across the board. Yeah, recurring problems, right? We, we monitor and audit. And by the way, for people that don't know, for Adopter Media, on behalf of brands, we don't only plan these buys and manage these buys, like we audit and report these buys.

So when we see something that's up, like we, we dive into it. And we were saying that, okay, dynamic ads just suck across the board. So because of our relationship with Podscribe, I was able to go to Pete and say like, "Hey, can you do us a favor on this episode? Can you actually just send over the IP logs?"

You know, just to figure out, like did, did this get served? We w- we wanted to look at the timestamps, and we wanted to look at the unique audience versus served ads. And then we started saying, "Huh, why was the same IP address served 300 ads in the span of like an hour of the same ad?" And so what we figured out was there was a problem in iOS, and it was fixed in iOS 17.

But the problem was, if you listened to Joe Rogan, let's say five years ago, and then you stopped, and then yesterday you said, "I'm gonna listen to this new episode, Mr. Beast is on," Apple Podcasts used to then go through and say, "Oh, you wanna listen to Joe Rogan again? Let's download every episode you missed over the last five years."

And if you had a dynamic impression campaign running, that was hundreds or a thousand impressions all going to your device on these downloads. It was a lot of data. It was a lot of bandwidth. So Apple fixed this with iOS 17, and now I think if you have that gap and you restart again, I think it's like three episodes.

It'll, it'll like pre-cache-

[00:21:49] Jeff Umbro: Exactly ...

[00:21:49] Glenn Rubenstein: three episodes. So but this caused a big hit to industry download numbers back in 2023 with this fix. And, uh Yeah, it's, it's just crazy that this was a problem. So I think the question now is, we know that downloads are more legitimate now. We know that it's not over-serving downloads or impressions, but this is really the listen through metric.

It's the same thing Bumper wants to solve, but the thing with, the challenge with Bumper is you have to go into Bumper, connect your account, and you're not sharing this with an advertiser or a third party. Podscribe and Magellan and other people, the Pixel, are kind of like the Nielsen. In addition to doing attribution, they're kind of like the Nielsen.

They're, but they're actual ratings data for the podcast industry because every time that Pixel gets fired, that's a countable impression. So it's not based on what, if you host a podcast on Libsyn, it's not based on what Libsyn tells you the downloads are or what you say the downloads per episode are.

I've got a third party now that's verifying it, and advertisers take third-party verification very serious because that means that no one's grading their own homework, and it's, it's trustworthy, it's credible, and it's legitimate. So what they're talking about doing is taking an idea similar to Bumper with a Bumper score for actual play through completion consumption.

They're taking that and moving that potentially to a third-party measurement system, like a Podscribe, to where you know that it's gonna be third-party audited, verified. And you might not like what your completion rate is. That's the one thing with Bumper. If you don't like your Bumper score, you don't have to share your Bumper score with anyone.

But this is saying, if I'm gonna give you $500, $5,000, or $50,000 to place an ad on your podcast You're gonna allow me third-party rights to actually verify that my advertiser's getting what they're paying for.

[00:23:36] Jeff Umbro: Okay, so in a roundabout way, we've kind of covered the idea of, like, what is a podcast? How do you measure exposure?

How do you measure attribution? We've talked a lot about, like, what has been wrong historically in the industry, uh, and things that have been kind of right-sized and things that the AMP Accords are, are trying to lay out and fix. And I'll say, too, the AMP Accords were, you know, a group of people who came together, they wrote a document, and then they handed that to the IAB, which is, you know, the de facto measurement agency of the industry or measurement body.

So they no longer really have a dog in this fight other than whether or not their organizations are gonna implement these changes. So my question for you is, like, how realistic is it that any of these changes are implemented?

[00:24:25] Glenn Rubenstein: Well, and it's funny, too, because the IAB Tech Lab opened up for comment their own improvements- Yeah

to podcast measurement, I think, like, three days before these came out. So,

[00:24:34] Jeff Umbro: uh- Yeah, and they were very different, right?

[00:24:35] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah. So again, like, we view this as a starting point. So in our blog on Adopter.media, we talk about nine things we would do to improve upon this. And I think that that's the key here is that the AMP Accords are perhaps a sea change moment because it's gonna g- it gives the industry something to talk about and something to start with.

It's not about saying we need to adopt these tomorrow and the AMP Accords are law and this is how we're all gonna conduct business. It's about saying this is agreed-upon consensus changes from 12 players in the industry, and now where do we take this? How do we implement some of this, and how do we improve upon the rest?

[00:25:12] Jeff Umbro: Well, and so I understand that. I guess my question is, based on these changes, as I understand it, like, a lot of different people need to buy into this in order for this to actually take effect. So I'm curious, like, how realistic it is that these changes are actually made. Um, because at the end of the day, like, uh, whether this i- this has been kind of marketed as, like, how to unlock the next billion dollars in podcasting.

At the end of the day, like, the podcast industry has been very kind to a lot of people, and a lot of people, to your point earlier on in this conversation, don't necessarily wanna rock the boat.

[00:25:48] Glenn Rubenstein: Well, it goes back to the original thing we talked about. If Oxford Road is the number-one largest podcast advertising agency them being on board with this

[00:25:59] Jeff Umbro: They just don't have to buy ads unless you give them that information, you know?

[00:26:02] Glenn Rubenstein: Well, let me put it this way. Doesn't Walmart dictate that every year you have to, like, improve your product to become just a little bit cheaper, a little bit more efficient, a little bit better if you wanna be stocked in Walmart? Costco has their own brand standards. So in a way, you could say that this is kind of a similar situation.

If Walmart and Costco demand something, brands will do their best to comply with it because they want that business. If Oxford's number one and brands want their business that's there, if Ad Results gets on board with this, I don't know that they'll publicly get on board with this, with the little bit of rival agencies being number one and number two.

But they could call it something else, but it could still be similar, right? And we've seen that before in multiple other industries. And I think that at Adopter, we have the ability to push for some things. I'm not saying we could get all of this enforced, and some of it is going to take a tipping-point level of business, you know.

But this is where it's interesting because if Oxford Ad Results, Adopter Media, Right Side Up, Sonic Influencer Marketing, Mint, Incremental Media, Podscale, We Are A-OK. If we all start saying, "Yeah, yeah, we think this is, this is good," we're gonna have some, again, collective bargaining power.

[00:27:25] Jeff Umbro: So Dan wrote this article all about, you know, you can buy ground beef the s- and which, you know, was in reference to buying ads the exact same way that we're doing it today, or you can buy tenderloin, which is essentially buying, like, a verified impression.

And, and the crux of the article is, like, both can exist at the same time, and people can decide if they want to buy the filet mignon or the, like, ground beef. So I guess I'm curious, like, what you think about that. Like, is there going to be a world where both of these options are available?

[00:27:53] Glenn Rubenstein: Well, it's interesting, right?

I think there are some CPM concerns. But here's how I think... It, it goes back to what Dan said, actually, right? So if you look at, there are maybe five, and this is, I'm telling you stuff, the industry, we seldom talk about these things publicly. There's, like, what, three million podcasts in existence, probably, like, five if you count YouTube and roll up the definition of a podcast and apply it there.

There's maybe 5% of those that could support direct response advertising, we're gonna measure this, track this, we know that we're gonna get positive ROI and ROAS. And I will say that Adopter Media, we work with that 5%. We probably work with the top 2.5%. Right? That, that's our business model. If, if something is just garbage and doesn't get results, we're not advertising on it.

[00:28:37] Jeff Umbro: Yes.

[00:28:38] Glenn Rubenstein: So it's gonna be tricky if you switch to plays, and what was once a $25 CPM is now a $40 CPM or a $50 CPM. However, if a podcast is in that 5%, brands will pay it because they'll be like, "Yeah, this is the premium. This is the, the prime cuts," right? Where I think this is gonna be beneficial, but also a little scary, is if we switch to plays for the other 95%, we can now monetize that effectively.

It'll still be at a 20 or a 15 or a $10 CPM, but you'll be selling based on plays, not impressions, so advertisers will say, "Hey, we're getting the tonnage. We're getting the exposure that we wanna get here."

[00:29:13] Jeff Umbro: Which ironically, sorry to interrupt, is basically, like, if you buy a podcast campaign today versus a radio campaign.

[00:29:19] Glenn Rubenstein: Correct.

[00:29:20] Jeff Umbro: So, like, if that's- Or

[00:29:20] Glenn Rubenstein: TV, right?

[00:29:22] Jeff Umbro: Or TV.

[00:29:23] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah. Or

[00:29:23] Jeff Umbro: billboards.

[00:29:24] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah. So the 5% is going to ascend into a different segment of this industry, and the rest will almost be treated the same way run of network or run of network programmatic is, where it's like, yeah, it's a $10 CPM. Maybe it'll settle at a $15 CPM, but you're only being charged on actual listens, not based on the impression metric.

And in fact, what I could foresee happening is the Joe Rogans of the world, the Bert Kreischers, the My Favorite Murder, Crime Junkie. I think there are rate cards if this catches on. You're gonna see price per episode, and then you're gonna see impressions per episode, then you're gonna see, like, verified plays per episode.

And then it's up to the advertiser to then say, w- which do I wanna divide that by to get the CPM that the brand's gonna be comfortable with? They're still getting the same thing. They're still say, paying the same price, but it's just a calculation thing. Because I'll tell you right now, there are some ultra-premium podcasts, I can present a candidate sheet to an advertiser, and it's like $10 CPM, $15 CPM, $20 CPM, $80 CPM.

And I could be, "Yeah, but this podcast prints money for its advertisers." And they're like, "Yeah, but on principle, my CEO ki- will kill me if I pay an $80 CPM."

[00:30:36] Jeff Umbro: Yeah. We've seen that many times before.

[00:30:38] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah, so there will be a little bit of that sticker shock.

[00:30:41] Jeff Umbro: Yeah. When you, it, it's funny 'cause, like, you look at a spreadsheet and you look at the cost per acquisition, you know, it's clearly the winner.

It's just, like, every other metric, it looks like it's not.

[00:30:51] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah. And so I think for existing advertisers, it's gonna be an easier pill to swallow. For new advertisers, it's gonna take some education. But I do think we'll get there if this catches on. And I, again, I, I don't wanna say I don't care about this, but it's not my business model.

My business model is the top 5% of

[00:31:09] Jeff Umbro: podcasts. Yeah.

[00:31:10] Glenn Rubenstein: But I understand for the health of the industry that, that if we can monetize more effectively that other 95%, that's how we take the industry from 3 billion a year to 5 billion or beyond a year. Overall CPM comes down, but volume goes up considerably.

However, I really wanna protect that 5% of podcasts, because already ad load is getting out of hand. Like, hosts that don't fully invest in delivering great ads is an issue we don't talk about enough. Even this idea, like talking right now and looking at the screen, there are hosts out there, there are podcasts that charge, like, a decent five-figure sum for an ad, and if you buy an ad there, you're gonna see somebody just reading off their talking points-

looking down, looking to the side. And it's like, if I'm even paying you $500 for an ad, this teleprompter I'm using right now to speak to you on, this is like a $300 purchase. You know? If you're charging any decent amount of money for an ad, and you have a video component, it best look like you're putting some thought into your presentation.

And additionally, and this has been a pet peeve for as long as I've been in the industry- I don't care how good of a host you are, there, there's like a fraction of a percent that can literally take a piece of paper and do an amazing ad read the first time they read the copy. Please, for the love of God, read, just do a read through off-camera.

Just, just one. Yeah, do your

[00:32:32] Jeff Umbro: homework.

[00:32:32] Glenn Rubenstein: Just do one- Yeah ... read through, so that way when you do the ad itself, it doesn't sound like you're stumbling and tripping over words, like you actually familiarize. And even if this is an existing sponsor, like you know the sponsor, you know the product, but they might have brand-new copy.

Like, nobody wants to hear it sounding like, you know, you're a fifth grader reading a book report. Put some effort into it.

[00:32:49] Jeff Umbro: Well, I- it's funny 'cause I do remember historically every time you booked an ad, you would get on the phone with the brand, and you'd kind of walk through everything. That just doesn't happen very frequently anymore.

[00:33:00] Glenn Rubenstein: We do it for every single placement, every single client. If you, the first time you're working with one of our brands, we're having a phone call. And like ad quality really matters to us. Not to toot our own horn, we're the only agency nominated, uh, alongside the hosts in the Best Ad Read category in the Ambies, and we were nominated for two of them the first year they did it.

I think we did a really amazing Magic Spoon ad with Jon Stewart and a really amazing, uh, Ollie dog food ad with Rachel Dratch.

[00:33:25] Jeff Umbro: If this all works and goes according to plan and all of these different companies adopt these new, uh, kind of mandates, if you have YouTube, Spotify, Apple, you know, some of the smaller apps, if you have all the publishers, if you have all the agencies, what does this look like in two years?

[00:33:45] Glenn Rubenstein: I think it's similar to what I outlined. I think we have the top 5% that kind of exist in a hybrid of old versus new standards. Maybe it's higher CPM based on plays versus impressions. I think they'll have an easier time commanding those CPMs if they say, "Hey, we're gonna cap ad loads," at least for the first 90 days on new episodes.

Again, these are things that we, beyond the AMP Accords, can kind of try and push for a compromise in the industry. But I do think we're gonna see that lower 95% be more monetized as a whole, which, uh, is a good thing for growth. I think that it's ... You know, it really comes to ad load though. It comes to ad load and ad integrity are the things that I'm really worried about because I do think that commerce has put the cart before the horse a little bit in this space.

And I'm not saying the AMP Accords haven't done this, but I do see how the industry sometimes starts getting in love with hypothetical dollars. And, um, you know, they haven't killed the golden goose yet, but man, some of the people that came over from radio sure are trying.

[00:34:46] Jeff Umbro: There, there are certain companies that have ad loads that are just egregious.

[00:34:51] Glenn Rubenstein: Absurd.

[00:34:51] Jeff Umbro: Uh, and I think-

[00:34:52] Glenn Rubenstein: Absurd ...

[00:34:52] Jeff Umbro: you know, anybody listening can probably tell who, but-

[00:34:56] Glenn Rubenstein: And we don't do business with them- Anyway ... by the way.

[00:34:58] Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

[00:34:59] Glenn Rubenstein: Yeah. Oh,

[00:34:59] Jeff Umbro: interesting.

[00:34:59] Glenn Rubenstein: We put our money where our mouth is. Like, unless the- Yeah ... client absolutely has to be there, like I'm just not supporting that nonsense.

[00:35:05] Jeff Umbro: Thank you, Glenn, for joining us.

This was great.

Thank you so much to Glenn for joining us on this episode of Podcast Perspectives. You can find Glenn online at Adopter.media 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 myself, Jeff Umbro, and our production team, Chris Boniello, Jose Roman, and Nicholas Abouhamad. Thank you to our marketing team, and a special thank you to Dan Christo