Navigating the Evolution of Ads with TWiT.tv’s Lisa Laporte

Lisa Laporte: Podcasting, as big as it is, it's still small when it comes to the players that are buying in it, so keep your integrity intact and try to only bring in things that will actually work.

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of The Podglomerate. Today on the show, we are speaking with Lisa Laporte, the CEO of TWiT.tv, or This Week in Tech. TWiT is the podcast network founded in 2005 by Leo Laporte, the Chief TWiT.

It is a network of podcasts created to keep listeners updated on the many facets of technology. TWiT has launched all kinds of different initiatives to keep their community engaged, including video, live chats, where hosts can interact with their fans, and a members club. Lisa has been with the company since 2008 and runs it alongside her husband, Leo.

I'm especially excited to chat with Lisa today because she has been in the industry longer than most. She chats with us about the importance of growing a community around your shows, why creators should create shows that defy the bounds of audio and the many benefits of post write ads. And I think it'll be pretty fascinating for anybody in the ad sales side of the business.

So let's get to it.

Lisa, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Lisa Laporte: Well, thank you for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: I've been a fan from afar for a long time, so this is a pleasure. Can you walk us through like how you would introduce yourself at like a cocktail party or something?

Lisa Laporte: I'm Lisa Laporte. I'm the CEO of a technology media podcast network called This Week in Tech, also known as TWiT.tv.

Yeah, I pretty much have been here from the start. I was actually a consultant when I was referred by one of my CPAs to TWiT, and I remember going, what's a TWiT? Are you kidding me? I was really intrigued by it. It was new media. It was audio only. They were doing all these shows. What's a podcast? Like, I remember explaining what that was for years.

And it was out of this little cottage. There were like three or four people working with Leo Laporte, and they had a handful of shows. And this is really interesting. And I always said to myself, I was going to have my own business until I found where I wanted to hang my hat for the next 20 years. Or maybe I will just keep my own business going for a long time.

So I really just fell in love with the industry and I started working more and more and I was kind of halftime at TWiT and halftime in my business for the first two years I was at This Week in Tech. And then I took over as CEO and pretty much became the backbone to make sure we had what it took to grow.

Whereas Leo loves; he's talent. This man loves to broadcast. He eats, lives, and breathes tech, as you all know, if you know who Leo Laporte is. And that's what he loves to do. And the last thing he wants to do is run a company. And what I love to do is run the company. And the last thing I want to do is be on air, but now I have my own podcast.

If I can help somebody with my expertise at this point, having been in, honestly, business my entire career, since I was 18, I started running my first company, so almost 40 years I've been in business. But now that I've been in podcasting for 16 years, if I can pay it forward, I will. So it really started out with explaining to everybody what a podcast was.

And then Serial came out and it became, Oh, now I can explain what it is. And actually, we used to call ours Netcasts because podcasting to us seemed so not professional or we didn't like the name and so we ended up changing it. It was netcasting and then I finally just had to explain to Leo, nobody knows what a netcast is.

Everyone now knows what a podcast is. So we changed it to podcast. So we were one of the first to go live with video. And I remember a couple of years ago, everyone's like, do you simulcast? I'm like, yeah, for like 13 years, I've seen everything. I've seen it explode. People, not everyone knew who we were initially.

And now people are like, who are you? Cause there's so much content out there, but yeah, I pretty much have seen the birth of the industry and today where I think it's just fragmented in so many different ways. So we could talk about how that's happened, but I feel like we have a niche audience. We super serve and cater to those who eat, breathe, and live tech, and that's our vein and we're going to stay in it.

Jeff Umbro: You guys today have eight public facing shows and a handful behind a paywall. In 2008, what did that look like?

Lisa Laporte: We have had This Week in Tech, Security Now, Windows Weekly. They were all pretty prominent shows on our network. We had a bunch of other different shows. We have since added some, removed things. This Week in Google was born in the cottage. We are now in our third studio, almost our fourth, cause we're now going to be a remote company at the end of this month. And even that show is pivoted. So we probably had about five or six shows back then, and we had over 20 shows at one point. So we've had a couple of, you know, blowups, retractions, blow up again, retraction.

I'd say now we do have eight public facing shows, but we do have five club shows that we release the audio portion to the public now. Now that we do have a club, we're able to be a little more fluid. We want to start doing a few things that are just for our community as well.

Jeff Umbro: What is the mission of TWiT? And has it changed in the last two decades?

Lisa Laporte: The mission has not changed. I finally made Leo write it down. It's like, our mission is to help people navigate through technology so that they have the information they need to move forward in this world. So we cover privacy, you know, we do reviews. So it is really our goal to educate the public on how to navigate through technology and how to help understand it.

That has always been our mission and that has never changed. It's like two lines. I feel really bad I don't have it right in front of me.

Jeff Umbro: No, no worries.

Lisa Laporte: Our mission has always been just to help people navigate through technology and just give them all the information, not hide anything, not sugarcoat it.

You know, we even have brands that we sign as advertisers and they're like, Well, what if something goes sideways at our company? Are you going to talk about it and still cover it? And we're a tech company? I go, Oh, you bet. With full disclosure that you're a sponsor on our network. So that's, that's really what we stick to.

And we bring, I feel, on the best experts in tech that we can, so.

Jeff Umbro: I do not disagree with you on that front. Do you guys own all of your shows? Like, is there like, okay, so you don't license anything. Have you ever considered that as like the landscape has changed?

Lisa Laporte: A lot of people have come to us saying, I have a podcast, I have 30, 000 downloads, I want to out, I want to join your network and stuff.

We have done this in the past. I can't say we haven't, and I can't say, put it this way, I don't say no, I look at everything. But the reality is we have done this in the past. People have come to us and we have brought on their podcasts. We help them grow it. And as soon as it got to a certain amount, like we put all of our blood, sweat, and tears into it to get it up to a certain level, then they're all, thank you. We want to leave.

So honestly, that's why we don't do it anymore because there's a lot of upfront cost in getting things off the ground. We've hired hosts to get shows off the ground and then a year into it they came to us saying they want to be paid ten times more than we were paying them and we're like, but your show is just, like we're just starting to recoup our investment in this. So we thought, we, you know, we looked at that and we just said, this is not a good model. So we've stuck to hiring a couple of in house hosts and then maintaining the shows that we have. I've done this too many times and we've lost big time, so.

Jeff Umbro: And have you ever considered branded podcasts or anything because you do have such great talent in house?

Lisa Laporte: I have wanted to do quite a few things. I'd say my biggest challenge is that my partner is my husband and he's talent and he doesn't want to do things like that. So the only one thing I would want to do differently if I were to do TWiT again, is I would want to have a little more separation of church and state and just say to Leo, like, we won't touch your shows and how you do stuff, but I would have broken off a piece of TWiT and have done stuff like that with some different hosts. I would have loved to have done some sponsored stuff, but Leo's like, no, we're a journalistic entity.

I don't want to do that stuff. And I think we could have done it and done it well with another host. I mean, there's a few things like that we could have done, but we, we didn't. I just decided it wasn't worth arguing with my partner on this.

Jeff Umbro: In the last few years, the ways in which people are buying podcast ads has changed.

Yes. Could you walk us through a little bit about, of like, what some of those changes are and like, how it's impacted TWiT?

Lisa Laporte: When the pandemic hit, I mean, I lost 60 percent of my advertisers in two and a half weeks. Because the reality was I wasn't going to make B2C products stick around. I, I know we all have contracts and stuff, but you also have to have a business hat on where you're like, you know, we had just signed somebody that was selling, you know, camera bags, travel camera bags, and this hit, seriously.

So I just was like, people were reaching out, everyone was freaking out. And I'm like, okay. So I realized in two and a half weeks being one dimensional and ad supported was really dumb that we were only, we were stuck in this one lane. So letting people out because that was the smartest thing to do, but then doubling down on where are you going to go to reach people and as we all know, cybersecurity threats went through the roof, all this stuff started going through the roof.

So we ended up pivoting more to being B2B advertising, that kind of thing. So we were able to help fill in the blanks there. In addition to that, though, I said, you know, I never wanted to be one dimensional and now we are here. So I started researching podcast clubs because we originally started out where we were fan supported.

Hey, donate, you know, help us out. And then we started becoming more ad supported. So we still had a tip jar on PayPal and some people were, you know, donating that way. But I started looking around and I said, you know, we always wanted to be more fan supported. Let's add a club, let's figure something out. So I launched Club TWiT.

That was my design. That was my thought. I talked to Leo about it. He said, sounds great. But I did all this research of who we should partner with. We couldn't do Patreon because we have multiple shows, different feeds. It just took a while to really design that, so we launched our club, so that was a revenue stream, you know, we were able to add to our network, and it's really relatively inexpensive, it's all of our, you know, public facing shows plus bonus content.

Ad free, seven bucks a month for everything. And right now we have 15 shows, so it's a pretty good deal. We also have like special things. So that definitely helped, but then I also partnered with Libsyn last year. So what Libsyn is doing is they're selling the residual inventory.

Jeff Umbro: Can you define residual just in case anybody doesn't know?

Lisa Laporte: Okay. So residual would be anything that we didn't sell on our first tier ads. So right now we are one of the few podcast networks that still embeds their ads and embeds mean that the ads live in perpetuity. We don't strip them out after we do them. In addition, on our first tier ads, we take the time to introduce to our audience products and services, our ad reads are anywhere from two to eight minutes long, depending how ever long the host wants to take. We don't tell the host how to do it, but the reality is, is we don't do that many ads. So there's just a couple. So Libsyn sells our residual audio inventory on our audio ads when we don't have it fully sold out. So they're able to insert a 15, 30 or 60 second ad read. So it's audio only. It can be producer read. If people want to spend more money, they can have host read if we approve the brand. And even then, they're limited, they can't do firearms, they can't do political ads, religious ads, cigarettes, hard alcohol. They have to run, like if it's a wine club or something, we might approve it. But we are a family friendly network, so when they do a dynamic ad insertion, either host read or, you know, producer read, we limit them and all to what they can promote in the content of our shows.

So, so when we publish our shows, our feeds, they're our audio CDN, so they're able to then put in these ads, but of course pull them out as soon as they're fully satisfied.

Jeff Umbro: It sounds like you guys have kind of created this hybrid approach where you can do these like very highly curated host read ads. And then there are ways in which people can get lower entry points, whether that's with, you know, host reads that only last for so many impressions or as a period of time.

Have you found that that's effective, increasing revenue in the ways that you want it to? Because I know you just started doing this a few years ago, and was that in response to, like, this volatile ad market?

Lisa Laporte: It was also because I'm now challenged with people that don't get the host read difference.

Like they were buying, you know, 10, 15, like radio cheap ads through these services, you know, that buy remnant inventory or residual audio inventory. And then they come to me and they're like, but I really want what you do and I want to reach your audience, but I wanna pay this price over here. So yeah, last year we were setting it all up, so the residual audio inventory and then I opened it up about four months ago with them.

I called them, I go, why aren't you selling us as host read too? This is silly. We're only doing producer. So it definitely helped, you know, having those, I mean, and it's good for brands. It should be a blend. So if you're going to buy these 5 and 10 dollar CPMs on dynamic ad insertion, be sure you're doing some host read elsewhere and other advertising elsewhere.

Jeff Umbro: There are a lot of things that have impacted podcast publishers in the last few years. Whether that's the IAB or Apple's iOS update, agencies are getting a lot more available inventory so they can negotiate a little bit harder in terms of lowering the CPMs. And I do feel that it's a little bit funny and forgive me for any like regular listeners to the show, cause they've heard me say this a million times, but there are people who are getting the same product that they've had for years, and the reason they keep coming back is because it's very effective and it's working for them, but they keep coming back and asking for a cheaper avenue to get into that.

And it's always part of the negotiation. But to your point, in recent years there's been a lot of consolidation and there are bigger parties who are willing to say yes to these things and it's cheapening the overall product. How do you feel about the industry consolidation? Like, is there anything that you find as like a silver lining that comes from like all of these companies teaming up together?

Lisa Laporte: For me, I'm starting to get more business because people are tired of what they're hearing from these places. That their ads aren't working, you know, with them or, you know, like iHeart, getting people to download episodes and then billing their sponsors on it by giving people gaming tokens has really hurt me, cause people come to me and they're like, are you buying gaming tokens for people? We're like, no, we're not. So in a way it's kind of brought people back. It's twofold. One, it has helped me because people reach out to me and they're like, I don't want this stuff over here. I want what you guys do. Oh my gosh, you guys actually do this?

And I'm like, yeah, and we've done it for 20 years. So I think our process is really smart and it's helped me grow, but it's also hurt me because then people are like, well, I want all that cool stuff and I want your audience reach, but I want to pay what I pay these guys over here. So I think the consolidation, it's like anything, there's pros and cons to it.

Jeff Umbro: We're sales partners and everything. I would love for you to walk us through like what's involved there, because I think it is like really unique to what most podcast publishers offer and in my opinion, the right way to do it, but also like, you know, admitting that this only works if somebody is like a bigger partner who's going to spend some real money and like really invest in the operational side of things. Can you walk through what would happen when somebody does give you that phone call?

Lisa Laporte: If someone reaches out, what I normally do is I'll send them our partnership process overview. So I have three process overviews. One's our partnership, one's what to, the campaign, what to expect in the campaign, and the other one's my reporting process.

I kind of laugh and joke, you know, because I think of them as guides, like what to expect when you're expecting. So to me, I really want to be thorough in educating people when they come to us what's happening. So typically if people reach out, I send them my partnership process overview, which goes, this is what we do.

You know, we vet, our minimum is 25k. And it gives them a little idea of everything. And then I send out our audience metrics, just a one sheet that I cut and paste in. Here's an overview of our audience. And then what I do is say, look, let's have a conversation. I want to hear about your growth goals. What is your, what's your reasoning for wanting to do a campaign on our network?

Let's have this conversation first, just to see what you're trying to do. So to me, I don't even want to talk budget, timing, show selection. I want to have a conversation with the brand to see what they're trying to do. So if I'm booking a meeting with somebody to have a conversation, I've already vetted that particular client.

So what that means is we pull what I call a one sheet. We do a deep dive into the company, who their partners are, what are their services? Do we have any competitors on our network now? So we do all this upfront reviewing. And then before I get on the call, I probably spend an hour to two hours on the brand looking at their blogs, what are they doing in the market?

Are they on G2? So when I get on the call with the person, they're not talking to somebody that goes, Oh, what do you guys do? They're talking to somebody that has already done all this homework on them. And I really want to know about what are your goals? What are your growth goals? Where are you trying to go?

How are you trying to get there? And then I ask them, what are you advertising in now? What have you done before? How are things going? And then I explain like how our process works, talk a little bit about our network, and then if they like what they hear and I think they sound like they're a brand we can help grow and that our audience can benefit from, then I will take my meeting notes to my team, I meet with my editorial team. What do you guys think? Do you think this will work on our shows? I will go back to them and say, Hey, I think we can do something. This is what I'm thinking.

When I stepped into this, 50 percent of our audience made a purchase based on an ad they heard on our network. When we used an outside agency, I said, that's not good enough. Today it's 88%. Industry standards 43. So we're at 88 percent of our audience has made a purchase based on an ad they heard on our network since I took it over 10 years ago, because it's all about our network. So if you do that, it's just a win win.

Jeff Umbro: If you're going to put the energy in at the beginning, then you can assume that your customers are going to have better experiences. You'll get more renewals. Every customer will be higher value. You can have that relationship for a long time to come. I think a lot of agencies or a lot of publishers are kind of dealing with this now, but I feel like everybody wants to treat their, you know, ad sales situation like you do, but it's really expensive, time consuming, and it takes a little bit to build up your portfolio to a point where you can support something like that.

Would you have recommendations for anybody who's at a point where like they don't necessarily have the resources to do that?

Lisa Laporte: I would probably recommend continuing to partner with somebody who can sell on your behalf and do insertion and then practice doing host read ads. Go practice in a mirror.

Practice actually, practice it like you would your craft on your podcast so you can then eventually offer that maybe to the partner and saying, Hey, I'm willing to do some host read ads if you get me the ad copy. Don't take everything and anything because it's going to hurt you. Podcasting, as big as it is, it's still small when it comes to the players that are buying in it.

So keep your integrity intact and don't fluff your numbers. Try to only bring in things that will actually work. Don't approve anything and everything just because you're trying to grab at it. And to me, honestly, maybe ask for, you know, your audience to support you or find somebody that fits your brand and maybe get a flat, like, hey, reach out to somebody.

If let's say, you're a race car driver and you're doing a race car coverage, maybe reach out to a tire place or an automobile place and get like some, get like a flat rate type thing instead of trying to do a podcast, you know, go out to market for a podcast buy. At some point you have to like tow a line on what works.

Like, I've had agencies reach out saying, okay, so I have a huge client that wants to buy one ad. That's it across every single show. And I'm like, yeah, no, go somewhere else. Cause you need frequency and you need things like that. So I just don't, grow your audience, do what you love. Don't quit your day job if you aren't making money on your podcast yet.

Jeff Umbro: A lot of what you're doing with these brands is about just educating them. If there's like a big company that's new to podcast advertising, do you have like a top three hit list of like what you wanna make sure they understand before they buy an ad?

Lisa Laporte: Yes. I typically wanna make sure that they understand, honestly, that every ad that's dropped on our network takes eight weeks. The biggest thing I find, the biggest problem with big brands, little brands, everybody, if they don't understand this takes time, then you never get there, number one.

Number two, I want to understand how they're measuring success. Because then I want to make sure they have all the tools it takes to properly measure a campaign on a podcast network because the reality is it takes more than a landing page or offer codes, especially with our network, they're tech savvy. They're going to Google the name and go straight to the website.

So always on how long it takes and frequency. I would say frequency of making sure that they're not too thin, that we have the right frequency on dropping ads onto the network to make sure that they're getting the messaging there. So really that and advertising elsewhere. So I pretty much focus on those three to four points to make sure they understand how this works, what else are they doing, that they have the right frequency, and that they understand that this is the start of the journey.

If we see the right lift in this quarter, during this test, we wanna be talking in six weeks about extending it. Because once you start establishing trust with our audience, you don't wanna like drop a quarter, then come back, drop a quarter. 'cause the reality is then the audience goes, well, what's going on?

Are they a brand we can still trust? I mean, people will reach out after brands leave our network for two or three years ago, do you still, would you still recommend these guys? I go, yes, that's how we bet.

Jeff Umbro: So it sounds like your major selling point is just building this relationship directly with those people and treating them like human beings, and.

Lisa Laporte: Yeah, isn't that a concept? I really feel like it's so funny because so many people just sell on volume and numbers and what's worked before. And I, I find that when you remove the human element entirely, you miss so many things. And sometimes these brands aren't sure what they're trying to do. And that's where my, cause I, trust me, I've had salespeople, I've had salespeople over the last 10 years and they come in my office and they're like, how do you do that? And I go, you know, I wish I could train people. I'm willing to open my brain and tell anyone everything I do, but having helped companies since I was 18 grow professionally, I can't really give that experience to one of my salespeople. So for me, I don't even look at this as sales. I look at this being a guide. I want partners and I've talked to brands three or four times sometimes before we even send out proposals.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome.

Thank you again to Lisa for joining us on the show this week. You can find her online at Lisa Laporte, L A P O R T E. She's pretty active on Twitter and LinkedIn, and you can also find her at the TWiT.tv website. I encourage anybody who may be interested in learning more to reach out and get in touch.

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'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 social platforms @podglomerate or @podglomeratepods. This episode was produced by Chris Boniello, and myself, Jeff Umbro.

This episode was edited and mixed by Jose Roman. 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 and Tiffany Dean. Thank you for listening and I'll catch you all in two weeks.