Lemonada Media CEO Jessica Cordova Kramer on the State of the Network

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the latest news in the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of the Podglomerate. Joining me today is Jessica Cordova Kramer, CEO and co founder of Lemonada Media. Lemonada is known as a hit-maker with shows like Last Day, Believe Her, Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and one of their latest titles, The Dough with X Mayo.

We dive into how Lemonada approaches narrative productions as well as celebrity driven shows, what it means to be an audio first network, and how Jess feels about the current state of the industry. 

Let's get right to it. 

Welcome to the show, Jess. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Thanks, Jeff. 

Jeff Umbro: I interviewed you guys in 2019 when you launched the network. You had just launched Last Day. [It’s a] great show, still around, doing good in the world, and entertaining people as well. 

But I wanted to ask – I think I might've asked this question back in 2019 – but why start a network as opposed to starting just a podcast? 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: It's such a great question. We sometimes ask ourselves that on a regular basis. The truth is we were putting Last Day out there and pitching it out, trying to get a network to take us. [We’re] still waiting to hear back. It's been four years. It'd be nice if someone would get back to me. 

But I was at Crooked [Media] at the time and I had been there from day zero, and so I'd seen a company put more and more content out, and I said to [Stephanie Wittels Wachs], “what if we did it ourselves?” And as we were making Last Day, we were like, “man, there is so much bad stuff that we could be talking about that could help people in our sort of comedic, thoughtful [way].” 

And so we just started to think: let's go bigger. Let's put Last Day out, but let's have it be part of a slate. Let's have it be part of a company, we thought [it would be] a small company that we own – things have gone much more quickly than we expected. But that was the sort of genealogy of Lemonada. We thought this was our barrel of lemons, but lots of people are struggling out there. And what if we had content that helped get people out of the bed in the morning at scale?

Jeff Umbro: And so fast forward to today, which is four years later, in a nutshell how's everything going?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Every single day is incredible and challenging – any kind of startup is going to feel this way. Then we're in the space of both content, so we're working with creators, and also really heavy content sometimes and other times comedic. It is incredible. 

The business is thriving and growing, but also, every day is a new challenge. It was [September] 2019 when we launched and now it's October 2023. It's been four years in the broader world that has been completely wild: elections, and COVID, and wars, financial crises… So we're, we're both trying to make beautiful podcasts that lots and lots of people listen to with incredible, talented, diverse people in this environment. 

So, sometimes people make jokes about white-knuckling, and we have very white knuckles. But we have an amazing team. We love it. But I'm never like, “oh my God, it's so great. It's so great.” I'm like, “oh, this is, this is a lot of work.” 

And launching shows is a lot of work. Every single show is our baby. Mountains of effort [go] into it. Even our sales and distribution partners, we care deeply about. We only bring people on the network who feel mission-aligned and where we can sell [their] show [and] distribute it well. So we care deeply.  And it takes a mountain of work to launch one show. 

So it's going. We are tired. I've covered up a lot of my gray hairs for this recording. But we feel good about what we're doing. [We] pop out of bed like “I know what I'm here to do.” And that feels good.

Jeff Umbro: I love it. And I totally get the white-knuckling – that doesn't seem to go away. 

You mentioned you have sales and distribution partners as opposed to your original shows. What's the general breakdown of that?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but I think it's about 7 to 10 sales and distribution partners, compared to a slate of… we'll have about 50 shows on the network altogether. So it's a small percentage of our portfolio that are partners who make their own content. 

But we're working with them to distribute it, monetize it in some ways, market it as well… That number will grow – I don't know if the percentage will grow. 

But there [are] so many incredible creators out there who are like, “my stuff would be amazing on your network.” And we're like, “we agree and we can sell the crap out of it. So let's go.”

Jeff Umbro: And you have expanded quite a bit. You literally started with the one show. You're now at 50-plus. It sounds like almost 60, if you include sales and distribution partners.

Jessica Cordova Kramer: We'll be up 50 at the end of the year, including sales and distribution.

Jeff Umbro: Got it. That's a lot. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: It's a lot.

Jeff Umbro: How do you scale without sacrificing quality?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: You need incredible people. Our team is mostly made up of wonderful human beings who share core values with each other. Our core values are mission-aligned, honest, and empathetic. So those are the things that we are looking for in staff.

We've got about 55, 56 full time staff members now. The bulk of [those] are on the production [and] engineering side. And it's a full suite network, so we've got a marketing department, finance, operations, sales, and development. We've got it all in house – and that is the kind of care we take with each show. So it's really about people and paying attention. 

And I'd like to say not biting off more than you can chew, but we're definitely doing that sometimes. But yeah it's really about the people and making sure you have the resources for them – for each other to do the work, and then for talent, because we work with people we care about and we want to make sure that their show is getting the attention that it deserves too.

Jeff Umbro: And in terms of biting off more than you can chew, I know that you guys have expanded a lot and have done a lot of cool things, but it still feels – to me as an outsider – that you're very thoughtful about everything that you do: in the shows that you choose to work with and how you put them out in the world.

So just a note to say that it shows. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer:  Thank you. 

Jeff Umbro: So you also work with quite a few celebrities or well-known talents. We're [at] a point in the industry where a lot of celebrity deals seemingly have not gone well. So how do you approach the idea of working with somebody like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and doing the show justice, but also putting out something that is meaningful as opposed to just a name?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Yeah, with any of our podcasts, there's a few things that really need to be true before we either make them ourselves, find a host, or we bring a host onto the network to make it together: it has to be on-brand, and for us that means it has to “make life suck less” in some way. So a million things could fall under that category, but some things really don't. And so it's very clear where you're like, “this is super amazing and super entertaining, and not for us.” S, that's a sort of easy clearinghouse. 

And then [in terms of] “make life suck less,” we have big huge sweeping narrative series on topics, we have shows like Last Day that are human-centered but covering big issues, we're talking with people, now we've got comedy… We've got a brand new business show called The Dough that I'm really excited about that's about women in finance, but it's hosted by a comedian. So all of these things “make life suck less”. And that is a clear uniter. 

And even with our ad sales and distribution deals, we're working with folks like Kate Bowler and Everything Happens – like if we had existed before, we might've had that show on the network to begin with. It is a perfect fit for Lemonada. [We work with] José Andrés, Meghan Trainor… These people are making podcasts that are squarely meant to help people in some way. So that part is easy. 

And [if you think our show quality is high] it's not me [it’s] my co-founder, Stephanie Wittels Wachs, who runs our production team. She's the one who makes those shows every single day with our incredible production team: Steve Nelson, Jackie Danziger, and many other wonderful people. 

But when it comes to making sure that the shows are high quality and on-brand, it's not just us. We have a pitch advisory committee from our staff that's reviewing pitches. We have all these wonderful things that happen so that we can be like, “this is [a] really good fit for us,” or “maybe we're not the best network for this.” So [we have] very collaborative decision making at Lemonada. 

Now when it comes to talent, [with] Julia, look, I mean, she's Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We are the luckiest people alive. I wake up every morning and I pinch myself that I get to know this woman, collaborate with this woman… She's an incredible talent. 

But she was looking for a network – she had an idea about talking to older women because she felt like they hadn't gotten the platform that they deserved after living remarkable lives, we believed in that vision, and she wanted a team that could actually help her bring it to life. 

And so for us, working with celebrities, talent, well-known individuals, [the question is]: is there an authenticity and passion there? Is there a core idea that hasn't been done yet in this particular way? And if you can find that space and make a beautiful show, it's going to be a hit. So we're just thoughtful, is probably the short answer to your question.

Jeff Umbro: So I have two threads that I want to follow from that. 

One is talking through the process: take Julia, or someone else comes to you with an idea. How do you sit down and actually dissect this and figure out what you need to do to make this a success? And I know every show is a little different, but do you start with the idea, the producer, the research, the writing? What comes first and then how do you develop that?

And the second thread which we can get to after: what other celebrity-driven shows outside of Lemonada [do you feel] are doing really well right now? And why?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: My answer is so frustratingly the same for everything at Lemonada: it's true for marketing – I said on a lot of panels, Lizzie Breyer Bowman does too –it is a million little things done well, and I'm sorry to disappoint you about this answer–

Jeff Umbro: No, that's a great answer.

Jessica Cordova Kramer: That's the answer. There's no silver bullet to marketing. There's no silver bullet to development. It is really [about] taking the care and the time together. 

And we're, we're clear with our hosts, [we tell them]: “this will be hard. This will be complicated. There will be a moment in time where you're regretting every life decision you ever made that led you to the moment that you knew us at Lemonada, and then you will get to the other side and you will be extremely happy and proud.” Because we do take care of people. 

Even ad reads are beautiful – they’re content. If [Samantha] Bee is reading a hair product ad, we care about Sam. We care about her reputation. We care about what the audience is hearing. And we really care about our brands too. And I think they feel it. So it is truly a million little things done well. 

We have a development team for both our weekly and narrative slates that put time in on the front end to really dig into what a show format will be. We always think about what episode 65 is going to sound like, not episode one. Like, is this something you could actually keep doing [and] want to keep doing on the weekly side? 

We think about story and story arc really detailed on the narrative side. We have incredible people. And yeah, we always think about what's the right mix of producers and engineers, and who's the right person to help bring this talent to the fore…

And Stephanie is a genius. That's the other thing. I always say, I'm the fuel, but she's the fire. I'm the one who's making sure we have the resources and the infrastructure and all the boring shit – I get to talk to you, that's like the highlight. I operate as a CEO. She operates as the chief creative officer. I have big picture vision stuff all the time, but she is the most detail-oriented creator and producer, and can really work with all kinds of people. I call her the talent whisperer. 

So it is unfortunately just very hard. 

Your second question about other shows that have broken through on the celebrity side – obviously there's Smartless, and I'm a fan. I think any show where you have notable voices and they are operating as if they are your friends, they're funny, I can put it on at the gym, the banter is good, the interviews are good. It's a simple formula, repeatable, very clear what episode 65 is going to be, they seem to enjoy doing it. So you just feel like you're sitting around with them. 

And part of why the show is so funny is you get the behind the scenes of what life is like for these guys, and it's great, and their chemistry is wonderful. So it checks all the boxes for everything other than like, maybe format – I mean, it's just three guys who are celebrities and friends talking. If I pitched that to you, you'd be like, “eh.”

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. That doesn't sound great. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Yeah. But it is great. And then there's Amy Poehler's new show which was exciting [for] me. Mockumentary is my favorite form of art by far. I got a chance to listen and I think they do a great job improvising. It's number one in comedy right now and I'm not sure anyone else could have pulled that off but Amy and it's fantastic.

Jeff Umbro: So Wiser Than Me [with Julia Louis-Dreyfus] was, you said, a hit three times when I asked you about it before. It is a phenomenal show and it actually [has] a lasting retained listenership, which is not always the case with celebrity driven shows. 

How did you approach the marketing for that show in order to unlock that kind of success?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: We have a recipe for hit shows, we followed it with Wiser Than Me, and we have a mega hit. And we've had a few mega hits. [With] this one, it's Julia Louis-Dreyfus. There are so few people whose voice you could put on with no context and be like, “that's Julia Louis-Dreyfus.” We did the inventory – it's like Barack Obama, probably the last few presidents, Julia, and maybe like six other people where you'd be like, “I know who that is.” So there's just some magic there. 

And we've had a lot of number ones. This is not our first number one. But it was sustained for the longest period of time. It's still top on comedy and it's still top 100 or 200 every week.

Jeff Umbro: And just to clarify, you all have had a lot of success and I'm not minimizing any of that, but this one in particular did stand out. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: No, this was a mega hit. Yeah. And there's only so much you can do to control that.

We knew we were going to make a hit show, no question. We were going to hit number one, no question. It was going to have millions and millions of downloads. Our marketing plan includes all of the Spotify work, all of the Apple work, all of the Amazon music work, and all of the other partnerships with other platforms, editorial, PR, earned media, you name it. So we had our recipe and we followed it with fidelity. 

And there's no accounting for word of mouth. It's the secret sauce. People would tell us that they were like standing in the grocery line and two women would be talking about Wiser Than Me. If I go to a party and there's a bunch of middle aged ladies there – which is the only party I will go to – and I'm like, “hey, I produce Wiser Than Me,” – which I would never do – people would be like, “oh, you produce Wiser Than Me?” I mean, it's a thing people are talking about at yoga studios, it's a thing people are talking about at cocktail parties, and you cannot make that happen no matter what you do. The only way you can make that happen is to market a great show well and then pray. Iit is a phenomenon in that way.

Jeff Umbro: Step one of any marketing campaign is making a good show. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Yeah, exactly.

Jeff Umbro: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about sponsorships because you have the model that everybody thinks that they're going to have when they get into podcasting, but nobody can actually achieve it. But you guys did it and you're continuing to do it. 

You're able to, in many cases anyway, find a partnership to sponsor the show, like a grant or an organization that wants to be attached to something you're producing, as opposed to, like, a DR brand who's sponsoring a hundred thousand impressions on the show or something. I know you have both, but you've been very successful in building more of a partnership with different organizations as opposed to, like, a sales department. How do you go about doing that?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Rewinding a little bit: we do now have sales fully internal and we have a sales department led by Sisi Dong Brinn. We're hiring for two positions, two salespeople right now. In the beginning [we] had ad sales and distribution partners, first with Cumulus and then with MidRoll, and they were wonderful partners. During the time that we had them managing our sales, we started to understand that part of the business more, and thought we could probably do this better ourselves without having to share any revenue. And so in May 2021, we took sales in-house. We've had a real sales team since then. It's not huge. 

We also do some partnerships with nonprofits and foundations, as you referenced, but it is a pretty small percentage of our pie relative to brand-direct relationships and also agency relationships.

So we have a full sales team and they are working just like any sales team you would have at iHeart, Acast, [or] any other place. And they do sometimes work with foundations and sponsors, who we call partners, helping us as sponsors pre-fund big sweeping narratives that are quite expensive to make.

Then there are sponsors on that show. So we work with incredible organizations like the Jed Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation, and others on our shows to make some of them happen. And they're incredible, but the vast majority of our revenue is more standard than you'd expect. And our sales team is killing it. We love them. That's why we're able to have ad sales and distribution partners, because we're not usually finding foundation [and] non-profit partners for other shows. They're just reading standard ads for the most part.

Jeff Umbro: So that's a good clarification because the Jed Foundation, for example, is kind of front-and-center on some of your shows, or one of your shows, right?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Yeah, one right now. But we've had like a bunch of different partnerships with them over the years.

Jeff Umbro: But it sounds like that's more of a situation where they're partners, but they're funding the initial production of the show, in which case [it then] kind of follows the standard roadmap of like selling sponsorship and sales and such. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Yep, all sponsorship, exactly.

Jeff Umbro: So, you guys specifically call yourselves an “audio-first” network. What does that mean?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: It means the thing that we say we're good at is making podcasts – making audio podcasts. We are not a video production house. We're not pretending to be. If an incredible show comes to us and is like, “we think this is a webcast,” we're like, “we do not have the skills to pay the bills on that. We just don't.” 

I mean, we could do Riverside like you're doing right now. We use zoom all the time as well. For the Sarah Silverman show, we've got some nice video cameras in the studio for her so we can collect clips at the caliber that she's used to.

But ultimately our bread and butter and our skill set is audio production. If you're an audio producer, you're a freaking audio producer. You're not a video producer. Even the editing is different. So we are just really clear about that. 

And every three to six months, we, at our executive level, are having a conversation about: is this the time that we're building video capabilities. And, at this point, we have not decided to do that because the infrastructure for distribution, monetization, and all of that is just not where it needs to be for us to efficiently make video a big part of our work. So we are audio first. It's just nice to be focused. 

And a lot of our talent – they're signing up to be on a podcast. They're not signing up to be on a webcast and they don't want to be videoed. We're talking about hard stuff – people are like openly weeping. With Julia's show, she's like, “I don't want these ladies to have to do hair and makeup to come on and talk to me about aging.” 

Part of our core business is being clear about what we're good at.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, full disclosure, this show in particular is meant to be that experiment for us to see exactly what does need to go into it. There are many, many shows that we produce that will never be on video. So, I'm totally aligned with everything that you're saying.

I do think it's an interesting distinction as you start to move into other areas, like the Lemonada Book Club, and a few other things that you all are doing. I assume that there's, at some point, in some way, some kind of derivative IP situation happening… But yeah, I agree with your assessment there. I think it is a completely different beast in order to work on video or other platforms as opposed to audio. 

On that note: with the Lemonada Book Club, could you walk us through what exactly that is?

Jessica Cordova Kramer: All of our listeners are readers, all of them. Some of them are reading audiobooks, but they're readers. And some of our guests are authors. And we thought, “man, there's just this content connection that we can make through booking, through engaging with our audience in a different way. And we'd love to do it.” 

When we launched Lemonada, it was always about content and community. And so we flirted with this late last year – launching the book club in a pilot format and working with a publishing house who we love, Penguin Random House, for a few months to really understand what this might be. And now we're working exclusively with Apple Books to bring authors who are working with Apple onto Lemonata channels and then co-promoting. So it's a cool opportunity. 

We just had Kerry Washington on Samantha Bee's show. Kerry Washington is a great human being. She just wrote a memoir. Memoir works really well with our audience because it's not dissimilar to listening to someone in a long-form podcast and hearing about their lives in particular ways. And our hosts are excited because it's not just a PR op or a guest booking op. It's an op to really dig in with an author in a particular way. 

So that's how we think about it. We think about it as an engagement tool, a community building tool, and there's lots of other stuff going on behind the scenes as well… Just really bringing that community core value to light for us is big.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I come from the world of book publishing, and I'm a big reader, and so I've been reading all the emails and texts that you guys send out, and I'm very jealous, to be honest. We had a plan for something similar that was way further down the pipeline. I am paying attention and you guys seem to be doing really cool stuff there, so congrats.

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Thank you. 

Jeff Umbro: And can you walk us through the Partner Studio as well? Did you guys just have a lot of people coming your way that wouldn't necessarily fit into another bucket? 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Yeah, we just launched the Lemonada Partner Studio. We very decidedly from day zero are not a work for hire studio, so we've almost never done anything that was like someone coming to us and being like, “can you make my podcast for me?” We made that decision because we wanted the business to thrive as a podcast business. We wanted our P&L to make sense as an externally facing hit show network, and didn't want to have this situation where we were really having to do work-for-hire to pay the bills.

So early on experimentation was around like, how do we make shows that are great and profitable? It's like a Venn diagram. 

Jeff Umbro: That's the secret sauce. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: That's the secret sauce and that's what we've spent four years doing. 

But, especially as our brand has grown, there's been more and more incoming [people asking] “like, really, can we hire you to help us do this thing?” And so this year we experimented with a couple of projects and now we're experimenting less is what I'd say. But still, we're taking on projects in a more for-hire capacity when they make sense for us, [when] we'd be the right network for it, or the right group of people for it. So mission-aligned projects that we can actually handle that we're experts on. 

So do not hire me to make your webcast. I will not do a good job.

Jeff Umbro: Well, we will still try. 

I think it's such a fascinating idea, especially because you guys waited so long to do it, for all the reasons that you just mentioned. But it's such a core skill set that so many people don't have. And so you can kind of plug and play based on what you're already doing so well.

Jessica Cordova Kramer: We're working with extraordinary people, I will say that. It's amazing. It's ridiculous, but people are like, “hey I have an idea and I wanted to hire someone to do it and you might be the right people,” and we're like, “in this case, we think we are the right people.”

Jeff Umbro: With the general podcast market today, are you optimistic about what's happening in the ad marketplace? How do you feel right now generally about the podcast economy? 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: I am so optimistic about audio. More and more people are listening to podcasting than ever. 

Every industry has to go through growing pains, grow up a little bit – go from early stage media, to emerging media in the last few years, to something that is more standard. And all of these big [holding companies] at the agency level know what audio is. Audio budgets are becoming a more standardized part of every huge brand spend each year. So I'm super optimistic about that. 

I heard a stat – don't fact check this because this is just from my memory – I won't name any brands, but a brand that spends about $4 billion a year on advertising is spending about $800,000 of that on audio right now. And that percentage will continue to grow as people understand the conversion in audio and how to access listeners in a more strategic way. 

But it takes time and it's been a tough year for podcasting. In some ways, the white knuckling is real, and people [are] trying to persevere through some of the challenges and find ways to make it work.

And I do think audio is here to stay for sure. I think it's going to grow market share hugely. And there's so much happening in media more broadly: Streaming is changing dramatically. Cable is changing dramatically. Linear radio is changing dramatically. And podcasting is just a big part of all of that.

Jeff Umbro: That's my favorite answer. I'm not even going to ask a follow-up because that's exactly how I would have said that. Well, thank you so much for joining us. 

Jessica Cordova Kramer: Thanks for having me.

Jeff Umbro: You can check out everything that they are working on at LemonadaMedia.com. 

For more podcast related news, info, and takes, you can follow me on Twitter @JeffUmbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Podglomerate. If you are looking for help producing, distributing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at thepoglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com or follow us on all social platforms @podglomerate. 

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello and Henry Lavoie. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Vanessa Ullman. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. Thanks for listening, and I will catch you next week.