How to Level Up Your Podcast Monetization Strategy

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

Jeff Umbro: This week on the show, we are going to be presenting a webinar that occurred on July 17th, 2025 between Alec Trunley, brand partnerships director at RedCircle, and our very own Dan Christo, COO, at The Podglomerate. This webinar is all about how to deliver, evaluate, and rebook. A great ad read in short, a lot of podcasters are very focused on trying to monetize their show, but it is very rare that one of these podcasters thinks about these sponsorships from the brand side.

What are you delivering as a podcaster? What does the brand see? What does the brand get out of it and why would they come back in this fireside chat? Dan and Alec are going to walk you through the secrets of crafting successful ad reads that advertisers actually want to rebook. Alec helps top tier advertisers scale host reads across hundreds of shows at RedCircle and Dan has helped unlock nearly $3 million for Podglomerate monetization clients. This deep dive reveals the advertiser perspective that most creators never see, giving you the competitive edge to transform your ad reads from one time deals into recurring revenue.

In this session, Dan and Alec will talk about what makes your ad irresistible to sponsors, how advertisers evaluate your ads performance behind the scenes, which metrics actually matter for securing future campaigns and the most common mistakes that they see when podcasters are delivering sponsored content.

And now let's get right to the webinar.

Dan Christo: Today we're gonna talk about how to deliver, evaluate, and rebook a great ad read and talk more broadly about relationships in general between sponsors and publishers. My name is Dan Christo. I'm the COO at The Podglomerate. We produce, grow and monetize podcasts.

And my co-host today, Alec, if you wanna introduce yourself.

Alec Trunley: Yeah. Thanks Dan. I'm Alec. I do brand partnerships. I handle a lot of the major agency and brand relationships for RedCircle and the hundreds of shows that we represent. There basically the main goal there is to, you know, find the brands and the podcasters that are the best fits for each other and match 'em up and create those, you know, successful long-term partnerships.

That's the game really, right.

Dan Christo: Always the, the never ending game. But yeah, thanks Alec. And, and thank you to RedCircle for their partnership and putting this together alongside with our Podglomerate team too. So really grateful to have them as sponsors and, and partners. And also just full disclosure too, we are clients of RedCircle, so we do have a working relationship outside of this, just so everyone's aware.

But today we're gonna go through, we have a bunch of cool questions and prompts that are really informed by our own experience. So Alec being very involved on the sales side, although I'm the COO at the Glomerate, I also run the monetization department. So I've been deep in the weeds since 2019 and seen the evolution of the market over the last six years, really.

Now how, how dramatically it's changed. So we're gonna take you through some prompts initially for about a half hour. Hopefully we get through everything. Then at the end, the back half hour or so, we'll have time for questions. So feel free to put your questions in the chat. We have some very helpful helpers that are gonna organize them and, and let us know.

So feel free to fire those away. And then at the end, after Alec and I are done, we'll, we'll go through some of those questions for you. So. Without further ado, kick it off. Our first topic here what makes a podcast ad read successful from an advertiser's perspective? And Alec, I was hoping that you could share a couple specific examples of any ad reads that worked really well for you guys in the past.

Alec Trunley: Yeah, a hundred percent. So I think for podcast advertising specifically, or advertising in general, obviously the goal of the brand is to increase sales, right? They're trying to increase their revenue. It's all about, unfortunately, or fortunately, it's all about money. So if you get an ad deal from a brand, you're basically, you've just been hired to be a new salesperson for this brand, basically.

And they're gonna evaluate. How well you do at your job using promo codes and pixels to figure out if it was successful or unsuccessful? Basically would just mean like, was it profitable or unprofitable for this brand to work with you? The best examples I have are, you know, the reality is, is like you're gonna get a test from this advertiser and they're gonna commit a certain amount of money to a certain amount of episodes or flights with you to figure out whether or not it is a good partnership, whether it can be profitable, whether you are gonna do a good job for them.

And if you don't get more brand deals from this advertiser, the reality is that you probably didn't drive the revenue that it costs to work with you. The ones that go long term, when you get an annual deal, you're clearly helping that brand increase their revenue, increase their sales, and you know, you're getting support for your podcast to do what you love to do, you know, for the next, you know, 12 months.

So, you know, those are kind of like the basics of how these. Brands are testing into podcasting and how you can work with them long term. It is about driving sales at the end of the day.

Dan Christo: Right. And sometimes it's hard to understand that when you're first starting off the relationship, you know, what are those conversion metrics?

What really drives sales for you? A lot of times it's you know, sponsors are a little reticent to give that information away 'cause it could give away leverage. The negotiation I. But what we'd like to see ideally is really focusing on long-term partnerships. Although we get focused on the deal in front of us the long-term partnership is where the publisher and the brand really, really win.

And then all the intermediaries in the middle like us kind of can just get out of the way and, and let everyone do their work. One great example that we had over here at Podglomerate was a show called Armchair Explorer, which did, which is a fantastic travel show. And. They did a small test campaign, as Alec mentioned, just a traditional sort of host read DAI.

For a month or two just to see if there's any kind of audience engagement. And then they stopped the campaign, but then later in the year it attest pretty well and they ended up doing sponsoring custom episodes. So that's a bit of an outlier and it's almost a best case scenario where you're going from an audio specific ad and it's blossoming into a more 360 or a, a different type of relationship.

So you're not just selling directly on, on the podcast inventory, but you're kind of selling elsewhere in the ecosystem that you're building. That one was really great, but the, the core of that ad read and the core of that ad success was really the authenticity. So, Aaron, you know, did this read for.

For a travel company, Amtrak Company, train. So they were advertising on just broadly what the Amtrak services were, but Aaron had had used them a lot and he put a lot of his own experience and kind of how he talks in the podcast into the initial ad read. And that's what really caught the sponsor's ear and made them think about, you know, sort of expanding the relationship that way.

Alec Trunley: That's exactly the right way to look at it, is like, how can we make sure this test performs well so we can extend it into the rest of the year, but then also, how can we ratchet it up? How can we get more involved with each other to build a better relationship and to, for one, so that the brand can increase the revenue.

And for you as a publisher. To make cooler and more exciting ad reads that don't feel repetitive, that can be custom that you can really have fun with. 'Cause those are the ones that also perform even better as you can, as you have more room to be creative. Kind of like the sky's the limit in terms of how much revenue you can drive to your partner's website and also you're now delivering.

You know, depending on what you're working on, it could be a FinTech company. Maybe it's a really educational custom segment where you're delivering education to your audience around a specific financial topic, but also driving traffic to the sponsor's website. Or on the other hand, it should, it could just be like a really entertaining ad read.

You know, I, I've had, I've been lucky to work with some, like pretty popular podcasters. People like Joe Rogan and Dak Shepherd, and the one thing that's like the through line, through all of their ads is like, they're never boring ads. They're very, they're very engaging ads and they love the product and they can talk for seven minutes plus about how amazing, like the, the one thing that was like.

The reason it was hard to work or hard to get an ad read on Joe Rogan's podcast because he almost always says, no, not a good fit. I'm not comfortable endorsing. I can't speak authentically about this product 'cause I don't use it. I've tried it. You know, we send them samples, not interested, but once he got a brand that he was obsessed with, MeUndies is a good example.

He like threw away all of his underwear and filled the drawer with MeUndies and it was all he wore and he talked about it all the time and he crushed it from MeUndies all the time. Yeah. And it was because one upfront is really hesitant to commit to a partnership where he's not bought in, where he doesn't feel like it's authentic to him.

And then two, he is so educated on the product because he loves it, because he uses it. 'cause he's tried it could talk endlessly about it as if he was talking to a friend. Right. Like, and the another, another kind of through line to that is like. Sometimes you feel people rushing, oh, I gotta like fit everything into 60 seconds.

And like the reality is, is the data says that like longer ad reads perform like better and better the longer that they go almost to like no end. And that's the, you know, we've seen seven minute ad reads. Is that like the best listener experience? Like maybe not people are gonna skip, but the people who are gonna buy are listening and they remain listening for seven minutes straight.

So,

Dan Christo: yeah, you, you hit on a lot of really interesting points there that I, I think we'll probably pull apart a little more, in a little more detail later on too. Yeah. Just, just for context, I don't think we shared initially on the call that between us our organizations and us individually, we work from shows.

You know, not everyone's Joe Rogan, right. But what we're what we're giving you is really universal. And what we've seen shows all the way from you know, 500 downloads a month, up to 500,000 downloads to 5 million downloads a month between RedCircle and Podglomerate, you know, hundreds of shows. We have a lot of experience all the way up and down the spectrum, whether you are, you know, episodic, see you're focusing on episodic, a daily show seasonal.

We've kind of done it all, all genres. So what we're trying to give you today is really sort of those universal nuggets that are you know, transferrable across whatever your show might be. And I think a lot of things you were touching on there, Alec, were to kind of touch back on authenticity.

That's unique to everyone. So sponsors will give you, sometimes they give you a script. Oftentimes there are guidelines or there's a, a section where you can put your own flavor on it. And, and part of it too is really just understanding that, you know, what is your audience? How do you relate to them? If your remaining consistent in who you are and how you're engaging with your audience, that's going to flow through to the advertisement as well.

So it's, it's not about. Changing yourself to necessarily fit what the brand is, is asking specifically for, but it's really leveraging, you know, your own connection with your audience and trying to translate, you know, what their message is to them. So what that means for somebody who's speaking about, you know, sports and mattresses may be very different than someone who's speaking about politics and, you know, trying to sell some sort of medication.

So really the. The comps matter a lot, but at the end of the day, if you just stay true to yourself and try to speak to your audience about the products, like it's something that you want to talk to them about, it'll come very naturally to you and you're, that's giving yourself the best chance of, of conversions there.

Alec Trunley: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think. I think it is also something we'll talk about later, and it's like not every partnership that looks amazing on paper works, right? Like it does sometimes. There's just things that don't work out well. You know, if every partnership ends up never becoming a long-term one, there's things we could dig into to figure out why.

But sometimes there's sometimes just things just don't work, even if it looks like a perfect fit.

Dan Christo: Yeah. And, and the opposite is true. Sometimes you get a really weird opportunity Yeah. That you, you don't think it's gonna work and then it tests through the roof and, you know, that's getting lucky. But it does happen.

Alec Trunley: Yeah. And that's why we test Right. You know? Yeah. Test everything. And

Dan Christo: so I wanna move us through to kind of our, one of our next big topics here is. Talking about how advertisers are evaluating the ad performance after it runs. So we kind of just talked about maybe how to make it a little bit better as you're sculpting the ad, but after they get some data, after you see that test, how are we looking at that?

Put us in the advertiser shoes if you can Alec for a minute here. Whether it's the advertiser or their representative at an agency, most of the time for some of these bigger buyers. Mm-hmm. How are they looking at. The ads performance, are there metrics, are there timing decisions? How are they thinking about that?

Alec Trunley: Yeah, it's something that I said at, at the beginning about like what makes a successful ad read, which is like, did the campaign make money? It is usually that simple. At the end of the day it's kind of a yes or no question around, you know, the advertiser looking at how much they spent on the ad reads and how much revenue that was generated as a result.

And that gives you a very simple formula to figure out whether or not you can afford to continue spending money working with this podcaster. Or if you need to, you know, turn towards other tests, try something else. So that's usually like top level North star what the, what the marketer is looking at. But there's other considerations.

Obviously it's not always. Just cost versus return because there can be factors around, you know, traffic, maybe we're driving amazing traffic, the average crushed, we drive amazing traffic. And at some point in the customer journey, which we can see through the pixel, someone just like an abandoned cart or it's really common that they're like abandoned in cart.

At the same point, you know, there's a case to be made that at a certain point the customers then is once we've passed 'em off to the brand, it's now the brand's opportunity to win or lose that customer. The one other consideration around that is like you are being, it's not just you in isolation, in a vacuum, you are quote unquote, competing for this budget with all the other podcasters.

And like, you can drive a ton of traffic and people can abandon cart and another podcast cannot drive as much traffic, but generate a lot of revenue. And like at the end of the day, they, they've won and they're gonna get the renewal and you may not. So it, it is difficult because. What are we gonna ask them to like completely redo their landing page?

Just for us? It's not always a realistic ask, but it shows a lot of promise and that's when you know, a good ad rep or you know, showrunner can jump in and say like, the, the creative was amazing. They went above and beyond in terms of like. The personalization, they clearly love the product. We can see that the traffic was amazing.

Let's you know, quote unquote retest. Let's try it one more time with a little bit of frequency, with a little bit of like revamp direction around, because there's also, you know, there's three ad reads in a test oftentimes. They're not always the same. And there's something about, you know, after one, two, and three out of those three, one of them drove more traffic than the other, and you can mm-hmm.

Figure that out. If you have an open line of communication with the brand and double down on that ad, read the theme of that ad read. Maybe you talk specifically about a story about how that brand worked in your life and the other two had reads. You focus more on reading the copy and focusing on the benefits.

You know, you can learn from that and, you know, take that advertiser's perspective in terms of testing and double down and focus more on what worked the first time. So there's a lot of considerations, but, and that's a lot of information to go over, but at the end of the day, it really does come down to that like profitable or unprofitable equation.

Dan Christo: I mean, it's, it's a lot of information, but a lot of really great concentrated information. So please, please take note of everything Alec just ran through. But yeah, to kind of, to kind of zoom back out for a second, yes, at the end of the day, you know, if you think about how any advertising purchase gets made, it's down to.

Media purchasing down to digital media, down to podcasts, down to the audio assets specific to the podcast, which is what we're talking about today. There is a very large ecosystem and infrastructure built here for how things get purchased and how those decisions are made, and that's really what Alec touched on the first point, where the conversion metrics need to be there because they're not even really competing.

You are not competing against other shows. You're competing against the other cost of acquisition for clients in any other advertising channel that could exist. So you're fighting for budget. This is how anyone who's making these decisions, this is, this is their job. This is how they keep their job.

They need to be making good decisions with their budget or with their client's budget if we're talking about an agency. So it may appear very reductive from, from our chair, from the publisher's chair to say, I did a great ad read. We had some good traffic. It's all kind of relative. And as you build relationships with people, you get to understand some, some folks are really good about it and will let you know, Hey, you know, like it's going well, but we can't afford it at this price here.

Now of course, some of that's always negotiating, but that's maybe where if you're used to, if you're used to getting a $25 CPM, maybe you take a 22 dollar CPM in order to get the deal done. And that's part of that back and forth in the partnership. But yeah, the, what they're really gonna look at is, I, I view things in kind of a stoplight fashion.

So, you know, green, yellow, red, red, the conversion ratios were terrible. I'm not looking at that again. Green, that's really great. We're gonna keep hammering that to try to find our point of diminishing marginal returns on that in initial investment or on that podcast or on this whole media buy that we're doing.

And then yellow. It could have been better. Now let's dig into the details here. And a lot of everything that Alec just spoke to is really about that yellow section where there's a lot you can do that can put yourself in the best position to when, when we're, when you're talking about this with an advertiser, and most of the time you either have someone like myself or Alec talking to another agent, another intermediary.

And so we, we understand the vocabulary a little bit more, but very broadly, you know. The point of context LEC brought up is great. If you have three ad reads, how is each ad read different than the other? What was happening in that time of year that may have contributed to a change in listening activity in general.

And also, you know, if something is relevant to a season, you know, if it's Oscar's season or if it's Mother's Day or Father's Day, like certain ads are gonna perform a little bit more strongly or weekly depending on what's happening in the world around us. So those are important facts that when you're in that yellow section and you're con sort of fighting for the renewal or fighting for the relationship it's important to really put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side of the phone or email as the time these days, and try to give them as much information that could help explain why things maybe didn't go the way you wanted, wanted to initially.

So I think super high level, you know, takeaway being conversion metrics are sort of the be all, end all, but there is a lot of opportunity if you present your case nicely and, and, and thoughtfully, you know, with their best interest at heart. Then we do historically see a lot of people that even if we don't get the green light on that next deal.

They remember that. They remember you. They remember that you are trying to be thoughtful about things and it might not be a no, but it might just be a not right now. And they come back to you in a few months. Let that audience kind of simmer and get some new people listening to the, to the show, that sort of thing.

But I can prod a lot about that all day. I'll, I'll keep us moving. Is there one question that we kind of touched on it, Alec, but is there any difference between vanity metrics and sort of actionable metrics from an advertiser standpoint?

Alec Trunley: I. I'm sorry, can you ask the question again? The vanity metrics from the advertiser perspective?

Dan Christo: Yeah. Is there anything, well, I'm, I'm kind of leading you a little bit, but for instance, like, you know, like download, don't get me in trouble. Impressions. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm just kidding. Downloads, impressions, traffic, conversion ratio. Like, are there anything, are there any metrics that we really shouldn't be paying much attention to?

Versus things that are super important?

Alec Trunley: When I think about. Like taking the perspective of the advertiser, right? Let's say I have a set amount of budget and I wanna reach as many people as possible. So I reach out to a publisher and they say like, oh, we have a hundred thousand impressions available.

That sounds, you know, that's great. I'd love to reach a hundred thousand people. And then you get into the details and it's like, oh, it's, it's not actually a hundred thousand people. It's 50,000 people hearing the same ad twice, or 25,000 people hearing the same ad four times. Like those have different values from an advertiser's perspective, because at the end of the day, yes, frequency is important.

We wanna reach people. A few times people are not typically responding to. To a calls to action immediately after one time. We wanna build frequency, but those are important considerations. A hundred percent from an advertiser's perspective, is the unique reach of the podcast. And how many humans are there to go on their phone and test out this product to act on the call to action.

Because if, if I'm doing my, you know, there's equations that they do on the advertiser side beyond just cost versus return in terms of like how to deem. Which shows are worth testing into based on. Their budgets and how much their product costs and all these other things. And at the end of the day, like an audience of 10,000 people may not just be enough based on their data of how many people convert on average.

Mm-hmm. If it's 10,000 people and not a hundred thousand people, because absolutely someone has to buy the product at the end of the day.

Dan Christo: Yes. One, 100000%. Yeah, you kind of stole a little bit of my thunder there. So I had, I had two answers for this one. One was kind of what you just pointed to from the publisher standpoint.

Every conversation that I have that starts with a new publisher that's evaluating whether to join the network or not, or if we want, want us to represent the Brad sales, they say, well, I have this many downloads. I say, great. How many uniques do you have? You know, what's the frequency of the show? So easy math.

If you have a weekly show, you know, and you have a hundred thousand downloads, it's not that a hundred thousand people are listening to the show. You know, the back of the napkin math would be, divide that by the number of episodes per month. And you're always gonna have more uniques than that.

Traditionally, that's almost always the case that more people are listening to your show than 25,000. But that will help you get closer to the real answer from the advertiser's point of view or from the, from the buyer's point of view, where they're going to underwrite that more conservatively and say, yeah, I'm only going to assume we're going to reach maybe 25, 30, 35,000 people in the course of a given month here.

And you know what's, how many people are listening on a repetitive basis? So they have their own, everyone has their own secret sauce to understand when have I sort of exhausted the audience for this show from a buyer's perspective, which is why a lot of shows in the sort of 100 k. Maybe this, this like the mid six figure down to 50 K range campaigns often don't last more than about three months, unless it's a proven relationship and you know, you can extend it and not sort of oversaturate the audience.

But I would say from the publisher side, the vanity muscles or the vanity numbers is your downloads. So really drill down on activity, understanding your audience, understanding your show specifically, are you a daily chat show that might get a hundred thousand downloads a month, but only 2000 per.

Every episode, episode in a 30 day window, that's gonna be very different. You know, what you're gonna be able to buy, how you should be approaching any ad read should be very different because your audience is hearing you five times a week. You should be a little more willing to be flexible to the publish to the, to the buyer in that case, and accommodate more refreshes for a, for ad reads.

The flip side being something you touched on Alec, was, was traffic. I think traffic is an underrated metric that. Institutionally isn't weighted as, from a buyer's perspective, institutionally is not weighted as heavily as it should be. And you know, when you talk about advertising or buying in other places, you're talking about getting people into top of funnel.

Ideally, you want conversions, you want people going all the way through your buying process and, and signing up, getting data from them, getting their, getting their email address, something. But you know, action, action item for everyone on the call. Test everything. You know, we have worked into our process here.

Any ad read we buy in the, in the process document and workflow for every single ad we are testing the promo code, the landing pages we're going through the buying experience and providing feedback on that. Because sometimes the, the URL isn't up in time, you know, the ad starts on seven one. It's seven three, and the URL isn't functioning where they can track my acti track the activity that you're driving for them or the promo code's not working in the way or not working at all, or the way that's, that's been anticipated.

So from the, from the public, from the buyer's perspective although conversions are very important, I think traffic is something that is really, really important and. Through pixel tracking, you can pixel tracking or promo codes or URLs. That's where I would try to drive the conversation. Anytime you're talking about a renewal or you're just checking in and saying, Hey, how's it going?

How much, how much traffic are we seeing? I would start the questions there rather than how many conversions do you have? So I think that's just an important distinction and. In my, in my experience, it's something that I have to kind of pull out of, of agencies and buyers, is to get those, those traffic metrics from them.

Alec Trunley: Yeah. It's not always super easy to get that information, but it's a, it's a really smart way to go about the conversation because a point that I made earlier is like, at a certain point, they're on the website, they're now. Yours to lose as a brand. Mm-hmm. Right? If your landing page is not converting well, if your offer is not compelling, if it's an expensive product and you can't try it out 30 days risk free, or you know, there's a million ways that smart advertisers, market their products and if it's, if it's difficult or confusing or where to put the promo code is basically hidden on the website, something like that. Mm-hmm. I mean, I've seen it. I've been like, as an advertiser, I go and double check and I can't even find where to put my podcaster's promo code. Yeah.

You know, if I can't find it, a listener can't find it. It's not, attention is expensive, like, I'm just gonna give up, I'm just gonna screw it, whatever. So that's

Dan Christo: a really smart point. And there's a lot of people, way more experienced and smarter than I am that put a ton of time and money into studying some of this stuff.

But psychology behind promo codes and coupons and the mentality of, of a consumer who is driven by that versus someone who is just getting the exposure marketing. But I think at the end of the day, the traffic is the great normalizer. You know, like between the ad copy that they're either forcing you to read or the suggestions they're, they're boxing you in you into certain copy.

That could be a challenge. Of getting, you know, traffic where it just doesn't resonate with the audience for whatever reason. So, again, institutionally, we, we push back on that from, from our process standpoint. We review the copy when it comes in, and we don't just blindly forward it along, we review it, we say we, we'll, we'll push back if needed.

It's rare, but it's always thoughtfully, respectfully, Hey, I think I see what you're going for here for this audience. Do you mind if we do A, B, C, X, Y, Z? And almost always that's, that's really well received. And then they just highlight the few sections that have to be read exactly the way it is, whether it's from a product standpoint or regulation standpoint or just something that they really want from a branding perspective.

So I think that's, you know, that's something to keep in mind too, is that whether it's the actual copy they're asking you to read the. Experience for, for the buyer or, you know, the pers your audience member who's going to turn into a buyer for them? I can't, I don't want to name any names because it's a, a bit disparaging, but there was one campaign we had that required a, it was a URL, so go to this website.

The website was, the URL was different than the product name that was being advertised. And on that website, you were forced to watch a 92nd video before you could do anything on the screen and even click out of it kind of thing. You just had to watch it or close the window altogether. Then you had to click a button to get to the next landing page, which was just sort of like a generic market website that didn't have the product they were talking about and had the different product name on it.

It was very confusing. Like I tried to actually go and buy the promo code and couldn't do it. So that was sort of the worst case scenario, but just a really great example of, of of why you should why you should just go test it out and make sure that everything's working as expected and, and provide some, again, like thoughtful and respectful feedback if you feel it's too challenging or you know, too many clicks or that sort of thing.

Alec Trunley: I think that's really smart. Yeah. It's not, it's not. There's really smart people working on these problems, but in that case, it's not rocket science. Like that's a difficult journey as a customer.

Dan Christo: Absolutely. I mean, I'm, I'm lazy as a customer. Like if, so, if someone makes it easy for me to buy specifically with, you know, like delivery apps or something like that, I'm just pushing like, yeah, sure, I'm tired.

Just want it. Yeah, and some people are really, really good at it. There are some sponsors that I think do do a great job of making even the mobile buying experience too, because. That that's a common, I'm actually glad that just popped in my head. Common problem these days, if they're, most people have a great app or a great, you know, optimized for mobile website on their phone, but I, you know, if you look at any kind of infinite dial report or anything, people are not listening on their computers.

So a lot of time their, their main company website, it, it functions perfectly and that might be where you're testing it, but really most people are listening on a mobile device or, or in their car. So, I would test it on the phone and see if it's, if it's functional there and like how, how difficult it is.

Just looking at the time, I want to jump us ahead. Alec, are there any common mistakes that you see podcasters making when they're delivering sponsored content? Anything that's just a, an immediate red flag or hits your ear? Funny.

Alec Trunley: It, it's always comes back to like sincerity or authenticity, I think for, specifically for host red campaigns.

You know, podcasters listening to this, like they probably listen to many podcasts and they can hear it. They can hear it when the host is not really that passionate or not really that sold on the product itself. You don't have to use the life insurance product, but you have to be. Genuinely authentic about how important life insurance is in general.

Then like, you know, there's nuance to it, but you know, everyone it's pretty, you know, it's pretty obvious to know when you're just robotically reading a script versus you have that personal connection and you know what you're talking about, and you really do feel like this is a great value for your audience.

Like, you want your audience to go and try this life insurance company because it's really important to you. And, you know, if you've got a story about that, like that kind of stuff. It's really important and your audience knows it right away, and not to mention how much that hurts, like the next brand that you work with and they're like, okay, it's happened again.

They're not working with a brand that they don't seem very interested in. And you do that a few more times and all of a sudden you're. Your important relationship, like if you're starting out as a podcaster, all you have is your relationship with your audience and you know, yeah, not always worth it to work with an advertiser you don't wanna work with because they are giving you, you know, some, some money.

It's important to, to generate revenue for your podcast, but there's a lot of ways to do it. So. Advertising, maybe not always the right fit for that brand or in general. Another big one is rushing it. I think like lots of podcasters, you know, they get these big scripts and there's, you know, agencies, brands, professional marketers who write this copy and it's oftentimes tested and proven to be effective.

But what's always more effective is the personalization and stuff. So take your time with it. You don't have to, like you had just said, your ad rep or you should be going to the brand. If you're deviating from script in a major way, but you feel it's been gonna be beneficial for sales, you know, you can go ahead and get approval on that.

Send them the ad read, does this sound good? Everything okay? Like you, you can do that. Don't ditch the script altogether. You want to make sure you're hitting the call to action. But that body piece, a lot of times the brand's perspective is like. This is host read. You know your audience the best. Put it into the voice of your show.

Don't make it to like, don't put on your announcer voice and make it all ad read. You know, just be authentic. So those are kind of like the mistakes that I see commonly as like they're just reading from a script top to bottom, saying everything, even saying like. Remember to talk about your personal experience with the ad read.

Oops, sorry. Like, just do a retake. You know, it's really not fair to your, to your brand partner that you're just spending literally 60 seconds of work to do the ad read. It takes a lot more than that to do a successful ad read. Hmm.

Dan Christo: Yeah. Authenticity. Authenticity, authenticity. And that's different for everybody.

One thing that I think is, it's, it makes me laugh every time, but if you don't actually research the product in any way, I love publishers who just wanna sponsor everything. That's great. Everyone makes more money, fantastic. But you kind of actually have to understand what what it is and not just read the script.

So oftentimes there's a very slight change of. Phrasing or they will talk about something that actually doesn't quite relate to the product in a certain way, thinking that they understand it. So that would be, you know, it's happened once years ago where we didn't catch it and the buyer heard it first.

They're just like, what? What are you guys doing over there? Like, this is completely not what we're trying to do. And again, I don't wanna disparage any particular brand, but that's something that, we'll hit the, the buyer's ear very funny, and the agents agency's ear, very funny. And that would, that'll get a pretty bad taste in their mouth if you completely sort of miss the mark on what it is.

So if, if it's something that is organically aligned with your audience, then it's very easy and very natural for you. Sometimes you'll have things that. May not make sense or aren't directly aligned, I'll just use like, you know, a mass mattresses. 'cause Casper does a lot or better help 'cause they always their perennial large sponsor.

Maybe you're not talking about sleep or mattresses, but it's something as simple as, hey, if we're in the market for a mattress, or like, hey, if you're looking for better sleep and it sort of takes you out of your given relationship gives you sort of. Permission to be out of your normal way of speaking and engagement with your audience to just sort of acknowledge like, Hey, I'm talking to you about something that, you know, I am a human and I have these human needs and this is something that helped me.

So you can do the total shifts, but just again, having it be authentic goes a goes a really long way with folks.

Alec Trunley: Yeah. Even, even we've seen a lot of success for podcasters to say like, if you love the show and you wanna support us, supporting your sponsors is one of the best ways to do it. Exactly.

That's like a true, authentic statement that you can make as a podcaster. That, you know, if someone's on the fence about testing out whatever Liquid IV and you're their favorite podcast that they listen to two times a week and you know they wanna support you, and they're like, well, I love Liquid iv, I love the podcast.

Or I'm interested in Liquid iv, I love the podcast. Like even that statement alone is one, extremely authentic. And two, it's asking your audience to buy the product through the lens of like, support the show even if you know. And it's a great product, and saying stuff like, listen guys, advertising's really important to our show.

It helps us make it free for you every week. You know, saying things like that and saying like, we only work with sponsors that we're really interested in. Like mm-hmm. Talking about the ad, the fact that there's ads in your show is okay to do and oftentimes is a helpful. Bridge when you move from content to ads because your audience understands, first of all that you do it.

And second of all, it's it, it goes back to the authenticity and it goes back to, you know, the support, right? Your audience oftentimes wants to support you. Sometimes they're looking for ways to support you, and they don't always have one. If you're not running subscriptions or if, you know, that's an easy example, but you know, so buying, buying the brands that you work with is a super easy way to do it.

Dan Christo: Exactly. Great point. Yeah. All great advice. One other thing that just popped in my head that I think is really important for us to spend a little time on, get this question all the time, but the timing and placement of ads I have plenty of opinions but Alec, do you want to go first

Alec Trunley: in terms of timing of the ads?

I don't know if there's like a lot of like. From what I can tell from, you know, the studies that are done by, you know, the, the, you know, like the pixel partners in the industry, you know, like pre-roll or mid-roll or I, it kind of seems like it's a wash in terms of what performs better. I think the, the obvious one is like, don't put a host right.

Ad at the very end of your show where you say like, oh, guy. Okay guys, thanks for listening this week. Signing off Q, closing music. And then the ad read like people are closing, are ending. They're, they're moving on to the next episode or something, and that ad read is never gonna get heard at. Also, certainly don't place host ads in the post-roll.

But I think pre-roll pre-roll, mid-roll, early, mid-rolls, late pre-rolls. Super, super excellent placements.

Dan Christo: Any specific timing or percentages, you know, how far into the episode, how many in, in certain episodes? Any opinions on that?

Alec Trunley: Yeah, I think it, it's up to the publisher what makes sense for you and you know, what you are comfortable with from like a listening experience.

If you wanna kick the show off with an ad. It's fine to do. I would recommend doing like a short intro to the episode, then ad read, then content, you know, two ad reads back to back. Totally fine, but not ideal. Three plus ad reads back to back. You're just not setting yourself up for success if you're doing something like that because Right.

The likelihood is that. You know, if the first, it goes back to again what we talked about before, which is like if, if they're a good fit for the brand, they're probably gonna skip regardless. But if they're interested, they will listen. And if they skipped the first ad, they might've been interested in the second ad, but they knew the ad was coming, so they skipped them both.

So. Rotating as a podcaster, rotating which ads come first in the break is a way to mitigate that kind of like skipping problem that can exist. But certainly like if you want to charge above average rates or above market rates, a single ad in a single break would be much more valuable in terms of like, share a voice for that brand and mm-hmm it will get listened to more likely than, than not.

Dan Christo: Sure, no, all great points, especially the cycling. That's something that a lot of people miss. So if you wanna just save you time from, from a flighting and ad management perspective, as calendar dates shift, and the timing of when the ad is supposed to start stop shifts, it's very easy to just kind of set it to constantly cycling through rather than having an ad locked in position one locked into position two, locked into three, and then having to sort of play Tetris as campaigns.

Onboard and off board. So great note there. I think there's, there are a few, there are a few things I, I generally find helpful. A lot of this is driven by. The IAB standards, which effectively is what folks are buying too. So there's standardization in the documents from an agency and a buyer's perspective that we're, we're selling impressions most of the time.

So you're getting x amount of the buyers getting x amount of impressions, actual sort of downloads or listens on the show itself. And it has to be from a, a hosting platform that is IEB compliant. So, you know, a a, a quick. Boring aside into, into the con contractual nature of some of this stuff. But what that translates to is you actually need the.

Proper quartiles in your episode. So quartiles, you know, break, you're breaking your episode into four chunks. One, you know, the first 25%, the middle 50% in the last 25%. So if someone is buying a pre-roll, it needs to be in that first 25% of the episode. If someone is buying a mid role, it needs to be in that middle 50% of your episode in order to be IEB compliant.

Now, you know, there are ways for thi it won't just automatically shut off, but the spirit of that, you know, it's important to give someone what they're buying. So, so to be aware of that and what we typically, typically recommend just as a starting point, if you're not sure how many ads should I have, where should they be?

We typically recommend try not to make. Pre and mid, if you get up to about 20% of your listening time, is a combination of pre and midroll. That that's a lot and that's a little burdensome for people. There's a lot of data that suggests that there's a significant drop off after that point. So again, your, your industry reports that come out every year, that's sort of something that we track.

But I think that if you do, if you have a roughly 40 ish minute episode or above 40 to 60, 75 minute episode, which a lot of shows are in that range. We always do two. We recommend two pre-rolls or mid-rolls, but broken into two separate locations and then two or three post rolls if you wanna have those as well.

We find that that's a good way to sort of break up. The the ad experience, always finding, you know, don't, don't get married to the numbers necessarily of where things are placed, but just go more organically in the conversation or the flow of the show. So the back end of your production process, really, like as, as your producer, editor, or yourself as you're doing it just marking down quickly on a sheet of paper.

Oh yeah. Like, here's a good place for an ad break. And that'll save you a lot of, a lot of time and headache figuring out, you know, where to put things after. So. I guess I just wanna make everyone aware of the sort of IAB quartiles and compliance. That's again, what, like what a lot of people are actually buying.

And, you know, don't be afraid too. We have some shifts that do 12 ads in, in an episode. We have some that just do a couple. So it really depends on you, what your goals are. If your goal, obviously, if your goal is to maximize your revenue. You should wanna have more ad ad dollars, but maybe we can talk about this later, but there are other ways to monetize your show as well, besides just your, your ad, the ads that you're placing.

Alec Trunley: Yeah, and just one quick note on that too, in terms of like ad breaks and, you know, the rotations of them. Always run your host red ads first. Don't let a programmatic ad start your ad break and your host red ad is behind it. That's, I think that's a really. Quick way to make sure your host short ad is not landing on the right ears.

Oftentimes the programmatic ads, they're a bit more of an interruption to the show, right? They could be expecting an ad break, but you know, I think that goes without saying, but maybe it's worth saying now is like you want the host hosted ads, which help support your show in the biggest way financially.

You want them to be set up for success. And putting them in the back of an ad break behind a couple of branded like prerecorded programmatic ads is not always the best strategy. I would actually say it's a bad strategy.

Dan Christo: Yes, agreed. That is also hosting platform dependent in a sense. So, we host all of our shows on megaphone.

Their, their natural waterfall is to have any host threads run before. So even if you're, of course, ranking and priority, that's always gonna run first. So we find that helpful. I know other platforms do that as well. So, this is not an advertisement for megaphone, although we do love it. But it is a, a really great point that you wanna make sure that whatever settings you have are, are set up properly.

So that your host Reds are always running before any programmatic. Kinda leads me to my next question for you is when you're, when you're talking about hosts and programmatic ads can you just briefly touch on like general performance and, you know, the perception audience per perception for those types of ads?

Alec Trunley: In terms of performance a really great host read ad is typically gonna perform better, but a programmatic ad. Is less expensive. So, you know, there's a trade off where oftentimes they kind of run equal if they're priced appropriately. So I think. Host Red being like the bread and butter of your monetization strategy.

And from a brand's perspective, you know, a mix is super important too. You want to make sure you're working with the hosts who love your product, who drive sales, and you also wanna make sure you're doing some audience targeted buys as well. It's really important to hit the scale that programmatic can get you and the audience targeting capabilities that those buying strategies have.

Is it's, you know, it's kind of. Two parts of the equation. It's a really important part. A lot of times in podcasting, we do get stuck on the host red stuff. It's typically, you know, the stronger way to monetize your show in terms of revenue. But programmatic ads work really well for brands, and they're an amazing way to monetize, you know, quote unquote unsold impressions or just unfilled impressions too.

Dan Christo: Right, and especially the back of your catalog. So if your show has a lot of evergreen content and your, your listening activity is spread pretty evenly across a lot of your catalog, then you're definitely going to wanna make sure that you standardize your back catalog. So do, do an audit. Where are all of my, my ad markers across my entire catalog?

How many do I have? Am I doing 2, 4, 2 in all of these, or do I have a 1 3, 6? 7, 8, 9, mm-hmm. Are all over the place. So just getting a bit of standardization across your whole portfolio. And then setting yourself up to backfill with programmatic. So the, the way we talk about it's kind of raising your floor from a monetization standpoint.

So standardize that back catalog, set those ad markers in the right place with consistent counts, and then turn on your programmatic ads with your exclusions and you know, so you're not advertising any. Categories that you don't want and, and that should vary nicely. You'll see over a couple months sort of stabilize what your new income floor should be.

Then from there, either yourself or your representative is offs selling for host red ads. So your, your CPM in the programmatic space net to you is probably anywhere from, you know, aggressively maybe $10. But lately it's been closer to, you know, 7 8 6 7 8 net. To the publisher for, for A CPM with, you know, various vast waterfalls plugged in behind that as well, if you wanna do that.

And, and the host reds are, you know, 20 to 20 to 30. You know, sometimes the high teens, sometimes above 30. If you have, you have strong demand. So the idea is that you're raising your floor, but then you're, you're also getting that kicker of hopefully pushing your ceiling up too by soliciting these, these brands, sponsors, agencies, and hopefully winning a couple tests so that you can you can, you can sort of beef up your overall revenue just from the ad inventory standpoint.

We've gone on the clock here. Let's just jump to our last sort of question here. Alec, do you have any. One or two sort of gold medal actionable steps for podcasters that they can take immediately after this webinar to improve their reads and chances of building a meaningful partnership.

Alec Trunley: I think one of the things that I mentioned before is to spend more time thinking about how you're gonna execute the ad read, thinking about, how it relates to your audience. I think a lot of times a podcaster can think like, oh, there's a lot of people listening. You know, I don't want it to be an interruption. Like recording the ad read is if you're just talking to the one, like one person in your audience can be like a helpful like frame to say like, I just want this one person to get the point that like, this is a really important like product or service that, you know, if they're a business owner, they need this HR software.

Like, and here's why. Here's how it worked for me. Record it and listen to it back, you know. Listen to, you know, does it sound authentic? At what point did I sound a little robotic? At what point did it not, you know, did the story that I told, you know, not really like land in terms of like narrative flow that I wanted.

Just thinking about it more and thinking about crafting it more. Impactfully I think is important. Like I said before, you'll hear, you'll hear ad reads almost nobody is doing live reads anymore. Live reads are great. No one's really doing them much anymore. Like you do have the opportunity to like correct any mistakes you make in an ad read.

Hearing someone like fumble over a promo code, promo code and say like, oh, sorry, let me say that again. It's just like I, it's almost like at a certain point, I guess it can be like endearing, like, oh, they're really. It is live and they're really doing. But I would say just like spend more time making sure that they're polished and making sure that like you are saying the things you wanna say in the way that you wanna say them and you know, compare it to your script, make sure you're using the right URL.

It's a really costly mistake if you mess up the URL and go live and there's gotta be corrections and yeah, I would just say like. Take it very seriously and do a good job the first time and then, you know, you set yourself up for renewals for sure.

Dan Christo: Definitely. Great advice. From my point of view, I think broadly the, the sort of one action item, I'll give it a couple bullets underneath it, but the one action item is if you're not already here it's a mindset change.

So change your mindset towards professionalism. Partnership maybe not in that order. Partnership then professionalism. So what do I mean by that? There are, it takes a village to get one of these deals done. So, you know, we are representing the publisher, so there's you as the publisher, and then there's me or my team as the intermediary who's working with the agency who has a bunch of different clients of buyers sponsors that they're representing right now.

So. Oftentimes, you know, not everyone in that chain is, is perfect with what they're doing. And if you can, just like with any job you have. Think about the other person a little bit. Think about what you're doing upstream and downstream and how that's impacting everybody else in the chain. Make it easy for people to work with you.

Make it easy for people to buy and renew with you. Just being thoughtful about what you're doing. So it, it really is a long-term partnership and we can get sort of enchanted by the idea of, of x thousands of dollars that could be coming in, but sometimes the, the longer term relationship is one that's better where you may be.

You say, you say you haircut it a little bit and you say like, oh, you know what, we, we should scale this deal back about 80% on the delivery, because I think we won't be able to deliver that many, or we're gonna burn out this sponsor in a couple months. So we'll take 80% off now, but then we'll have three, three buys throughout the course of the year.

But if you kind of ruin that partnership or you, you, you, you. Take a green, you know, the stoplight theory, you take that green light and you drag it down to a yellow on your test or your first couple campaigns, it's gonna be harder to get back to the green. Whereas if you start off, you get a good test, you stay green, you're a little conservative initially, then you're gonna get those renewals and, and build a, a more, you're gonna build more trust and you're gonna build better, longer partnerships.

And ideally you do that. If you're gonna get more tests than you land, you know, you're probably for every RFP that gets sent out, it's maybe one in every 12 to 13 is kind of the ratio we see that you actually win the test or win the deal. But over time, if you've raised your income floor through standardizing your.

Your back catalog and getting your programmatic ads in order and vast plugins in order, then over time you're gonna build 1, 2, 3, sort of longer term repeat sponsors at that higher CPM for the direct ads. And, and then you're kind of gonna be, you're gonna be off to the races and and off and running.

So although it's, I, I definitely appreciate that it's challenging as a publisher who, somebody who's creating something and you're putting all your time and energy into making this incredible show. It's a little incongruent sometimes to treat the ad read or that whole process of communication, maybe pushing back on copy, being thoughtful about.

The ad that you're doing thoughtful about the, the buying process that we touched on. But if you are, you're really just advocating for yourself at the end of the day. So, statistically, if you wanna look at it, if you win an advertisement on podcasting, you're in the. Vast minority of shows, you know, the, it's, it's less than 5% of shows that consistently get any sort of repeat advertising.

So just the fact that you got one, you should consider yourself very lucky and, and just, you know, treat it seriously. Try to be a good partner and a good professional, and everyone in that chain, myself included. We all make mistakes. We all maybe you know, pass an email along a little too quickly sometimes, like it happens.

But if everyone there is, is kind of working with their best interest at heart, with each other's best interests at heart, those are the relationships that you can tell very quickly, oh, this is a good partner. This is maybe someone I don't need to invest all that time in next time because this buyer, for whatever reason.

They're not maybe gonna be a good partner to me. So it's really protecting your own, you know, energy and time too, so that you're, you're able to identify the good partners and give them more energy. And then the ones that don't really give it back to you, you know, maybe you skip 'em next time yourself.

I just wanted to thank everyone so much for joining. Alec, RedCircle, thank you so much for this opportunity. This is really great. And thanks for everyone for coming. We have our contact information will be available to you if you have any other follow up questions or wanna reach out to us. But thanks so much for your time and it was, it was great getting to chat with everybody.

So take care.

Alec Trunley: Thanks Dan. Thanks everyone.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Alec Trunley, who is Brand Partnerships director at RedCircle. You can find him@redcircle.com. And to Dan Christo, COO at The Podgllomerate, who you can find 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 dot com. Shoot us an email at listen at the Podglomerate dot com or follow us on all socials at Podglomeratepods. This episode was produced by myself, Jeff Umbro, Chris Boniello, and Jose Roman.

Thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Erin Weiss, and a special thank you to Dan Christo.