Should Podcasters Care About the IAB?

Jeff Umbro: Hey everyone, Jeff here with a quick programming note. Matt and I recorded this episode before Podnews reported that Spotify had let its IAB certification expire. IAB certification is different from IAB compliance. And as far as I'm aware, all of the Spotify platforms are still compliant with the IAB, but they're not certified by the organization.

So that is why we do not discuss Spotify in this episode about the IAB. I think it's kind of a non-issue for the moment. And I think this episode very much shows the good and the bad with the IAB, and the certification process for industry in general. But give it a listen. Let us know what you think. Thank you, everyone.

Matt Shapo: I think it is a fact of human existence that people with money to spend often get to set the terms of whatever engagement might be.

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, I'm speaking with Matt Shapo, director of digital audio and video at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, or the IAB. 

Now the IAB, I think for many folks in podcasting, is a confusing, and in my opinion, overlooked entity. The organization as a whole is a nonprofit founded in 1996, which aims to develop standards and conduct research for the online advertising industry. Over the last two decades or so, the IAB has established many of the measurement standards within the podcast industry, and as such, many of the standards in which advertising happens in the industry. So, they provide answers to questions like, what is, and what isn't, a download? 

How the IAB decides to answer these frankly mundane seeming questions is increasingly important to everyone trying to make money in podcasting. I and many others know from personal experience that a slightly new definition of a download, for example, can mean the difference in thousands, or hundreds of thousands of downloads, and thus advertising dollars.

So today I'm talking with Matt to give us a crash course on the IAB's role in podcasting, what they do, who they serve, and why it's important to know what they're doing. So let's get to the interview.

Hey Matt, how are you? 

Matt Shapo: I am doing great. Thank you, Jeff. How are you? 

Jeff Umbro: I'm doing really well. Can you introduce yourself? 

Matt Shapo: Sure. My name is Matt Shapo. I'm a director in what is known as the IAB Media Center. 

Jeff Umbro: For the purposes of this interview, I do want to spend most of our time today discussing podcasting. But like, do you have a sense of how much of the IAB's business is happening in the audio space? Or is that like an impossible thing to figure out?

Matt Shapo: I would probably need to run a couple of reports to give you a precise understanding of that. What I will say is that you can just sort of follow the money as with all things in life, right?

So there is certainly greater advertising spend happening in some of the other visual based media, television, digital video display. This is still where the majority of money is being spent in the industry. But what I would say is that audio is a not-insignificant portion of what we do. 

Jeff Umbro: And growing, hopefully.

Matt Shapo: I was just getting ready to say, what's really gratifying to me is that it is increasingly important not only to marketers, but to those of us at IAB who are passionate about making sure that people who are marketing their products and services are getting the best bang for their buck and the understanding that audio is such an important part of anybody's media plan If you want to go ahead and communicate a brand message, it's increasingly important. Generally, it's very increasingly important within IAB. And I'm excited to be a part of that process.

Jeff Umbro: Brian Barletta made me agree to ask you what the difference is between the IAB and the IAB Tech Lab?

Matt Shapo: So the Tech Lab is where you're actually doing the work. You're rolling up your sleeves, you're creating those guidelines. And then we, in the IAB proper, we try to help our members understand what those standards can do for them. I think I mentioned earlier that the entire genesis [of] the podcast download standards at Tech Lab was a desire within the buying community to have confidence in the measurement that's being done in the podcast space. And so they're creating the standards. 

And then we in the media center and elsewhere at IAB are trying to help folks, for instance, in the buying community, understand what the value of their standards are with respect to giving them the confidence they need to go ahead and do the advertising that they want to do.

Jeff Umbro: Some basic questions. What does it mean to be an IAB member?

Matt Shapo: To be a member of IAB means trying to figure out the best way to be respectful, like I said earlier, of consumers privacy as we serve them relevant advertising, but to make sure that we do everything that we can, and this is what every member does, regardless of channel, regardless of role, regardless of whether you're a content creator, regardless of whether you're somebody who actually is trying to align with those creators and the advertiser, everybody at IAB, what it means to be a member is just trying to ensure that the entire experience, from the creation of the content, the consumption of it by the consumers, is as frictionless and enjoyable as possible.

We want to make sure that the experience is wonderful so that we can continue to put this content out into the world.

Jeff Umbro: And logistically, what does it mean to be a member? Like do you pay dues? Do you have to sign up? Is it just [like] signing up for a newsletter or something?

Matt Shapo: Part of the logistics is once you decide that you want to get involved in some of the conversations happening in IAB, it opens you up to an enormous menu of different committees, working groups, board meetings, councils, all sort of discussing specific things that may be of interest to you in your particular business protocol. 

I'll give you an example. We have something called the Publisher Council. We have many people in the audio space, and specifically in the podcast space, that actually are on the Publisher Council. And one of the things that we're doing in the Publisher Council right now, as you might imagine, is talk a lot about the ways in which generative AI is impacting the business, the business models, the way in which people can monetize as publishers in the current day and age. 

The mechanics that you were talking about in terms of membership – there is a fee associated with that. Generally speaking, it is tied to whatever your annual revenue is. And also there are membership fees for companies that are startups. So that's something worth considering for people who may be early in their business cycle, when you're in your first two years. But once you've passed that first two years, everything is pegged to whatever your annual revenue is. And there's some really affordable levels of membership. I should have those numbers off the top of my head. I don't, but it's very affordable.

Jeff Umbro: You have publishers, platforms, advertisers. I know, for example, that publishers and platforms, publishers being like hosting platforms, want to be IAB certified for a bunch of different reasons. How is that different from a membership? And is membership mainly for like a New York Times or something?

Matt Shapo: I wouldn't say it's mainly for a New York Times. I would say it's for anybody who wants to solve for some of those friction points I mentioned earlier in the conversation. Now in the podcast world, some of the friction points do have to do with making sure that we have some sort of standardized understanding of the way in which we measure downloads. But you do not need to be a member to become certified. You can simply pay a non-member fee in order to gain certification.

Jeff Umbro: From my understanding, if you are certified as a member of the IAB in the podcasting space, that essentially means that you have been vetted and you follow the guidelines that you all publish. I know that there are a lot of publishers who might not be certified right now, or platforms, I should say, that might not be certified currently, maybe because they're brand new. Do you find, or do you ever see any pushback from advertisers when it comes to platforms that are not certified?

Matt Shapo: I don't hear about that a lot directly. I would say actually that I don't hear about it at all directly. 

What I can say is that when I am speaking occasionally with some of the advertisers that are members of the IAB, or when I'm speaking to some of the publishers for that matter, that publish podcast content who are working with some of these agencies, I will occasionally hear that it is meaningful to a particular agency or to a particular buyer that the company that is doing the measurement for them.

Jeff Umbro: Who do you consider IAB customers? 

Matt Shapo: IAB is a trade association. Our members are comprised of the creators of content, publishers, advertising technology companies that sort of facilitate the monetization process by being that conduit between the buyers, and the ad community, and the folks creating the content. And so we take dues, as I said earlier, based on the revenue of a company, and then we use those dues to pull together all of the marketplace events and some of those summits that I mentioned, and all of the lobbying that we do in Congress. 

I will say that in my couple of years of working in IAB, I have come to appreciate the extraordinary efforts that everybody in our executive leadership team goes to, to take the dollars that we get from our members and make them go really, really far. IAB definitely falls in the category of people who do a lot with a little when it comes to spreading our dollars around and making sure that we can serve the community.

Jeff Umbro: Speaking of dollars, I don't know offhand what you guys charge for memberships, but for certifications for platforms, this is all anecdotal, so I don't have the exact figures, but at one point it was like a 30ish thousand dollar fee.

Matt Shapo: That's right. It was up that high. Yep. 

Jeff Umbro: And now it's an annual fee of around $6,000. Is that correct? 

Matt Shapo: Yeah. You're, you're in the right ballpark. It's $6,000, $8,000, I think depending on whether you're a member or non-member.

Jeff Umbro: And the reason that I mentioned that is because I want that to be front and center in terms of what these organizations are spending in order to become certified, which in theory, the payoff of that is better data, but [also] more trustworthy data. 

What we're essentially saying is that the listing platforms and the hosting platforms measured downloads, versus listens, versus a million other analytics based on the standardizations that are set by the IAB. 

So essentially what that's saying is like, there are a lot of considerations to take into account as to what constitutes a download on a podcast. Like the number of IP addresses that it's measuring. It could be the timeframe in which an IP address is downloading an episode. It could be the length of the episode that is being downloaded. Did I miss any big ones there? I don't know if there are any bullets that you want to talk about here?

Matt Shapo: So the core standard is based around the combination of an IP address and a user agent. A listener is basically a combination of a user agent and an IP address. And so you want to document and filter based on your understanding of that listener. 

And it's not just a question of identity related to the listener. It's also a standard that has to do with the amount of content that comes with the download before you can fully describe something as a valid download.

So what we say is that in a 24-hour period, you have to have a download that represents at least one minute of episode content above and beyond the header content that comes with it. And you need to be able to filter out duplicates and you need to be able to filter out for invalid traffic within a 24-hour either fixed or rolling window.

Jeff Umbro: Could you please walk us through why it's important for the publisher, the platform, and the advertiser to make sure that these numbers are standardized?

Matt Shapo: It's important simply because people like to have standardization and confidence that everybody is playing in a level playing field. I mean, that's really what it comes down to.

So it's not just about delivering confidence to the buyers, which is really the genesis of the standard. It was making sure that people in the buying community could feel that there was a standard they could respect. 

But it's also making sure that the people who are doing the measurement, those hosting companies that you mentioned earlier, feel as if there's enough standardization. So that they're not necessarily worried that somebody else is playing it a little bit looser with their measurement and that you don't necessarily wind up having an agency or a brand coming and saying to hosting company X, hey, you're telling me it's this number of downloads, but hosting company Y, is telling me it's this many downloads and it seems like it's much more. Why wouldn't I go with hosting company Y? 

So one of the important things that we want to do is put a standard together that allows hosting companies to sort of bring their special sauce – they all have their own special ingredients that they bring to not only the measurement and with the monetization tools that they allow the folks that they work with to use – but they all want to know that their own special sauce aside, they're working from pretty much the same standard.

And that, I think, is the reason.

Jeff Umbro: I really want to underscore this because there have been moments in history in podcasting, and I'm sure in every other industry, where like these standardizations didn't exist and you had advertisers [that] would buy something from me, and then they'd buy something from Matt, and they might get two totally different products based on what they bought. 

And that has nothing to do, most of the time, with malicious behavior of the publishers or anything. It has to do with the platforms that they're working with. 

I wanted to actually go back in time a little bit. The first time that IAB changed their audio standards from V1 to V2 was in 2017. I don't believe you were at the IAB when this happened, but there was a massive shift in downloads on many, many shows.

I'll give you just one example, and I don't mean to pick on any one partner or anything here, this happened everywhere. But we had one show that was on Simplecast, and it was doing 8,000 downloads an episode on average over 30 days. IAB updated their standards from V1 to V2, and that show went down to like 3,000 downloads per episode, and that had to do with many different changes that were made, but essentially it was like filtering out known bots, windowing for content, so it basically made it so that everything was a little bit more standardized. 

I'm glad that that's the case because in theory we didn't actually lose any listeners, we just changed the ways in which we measured the listeners. But that sucked. That was a really poor experience for us and for the host of the show, and the folks that we were working with at that moment. 

You guys recently updated V2 to V2.1, and while we have not seen anything nearly as dramatic as we did in 2017, like there are some shows that were impacted by those shifts.

My question, and like the very long lead up to the question is like, how do you guys square the idea of changing these measurements for the consumer, in one way, and the advertiser in another way, with the impact on the publishers, and like what that means with these shows who have smaller download counts?

Matt Shapo: There's nobody more in love with podcasting than I am and several of my colleagues at IAB. There is therefore no one with a greater attachment to, appreciation for, and love of podcast creators than I. It's one of the reasons I'm so excited to be at IOB. It's one of the reasons I raised my hand to come to work here.

Whether it's IAB proper, whether it's IAB Tech Lab, what we care about, maybe first and foremost, is the publishers. What we care about is the impact that any kind of a standard that we would have anything to do with might have on the ability of those publishers to connect with advertisers and to monetize their shows.

And so when I first got the IAB, one of the first things that I wanted to do was learn as much as I could about Tech Lab and learn as much as I could about the download standard. Like you said, you sat there and you read the whole standard, I must have read it two or three times my first couple of weeks there. And the reason is because I wanted to know everything I could know about the possibility of supporting publishers. 

So we get it. We know that when we do something in our standards working groups, it has ramifications for people that we deeply care about, who are producing content that matters to so many people.

Also, remember that IAB is not sort of ruling by judicial fiat. We're not coming up with these things on our own. We are coming up with these things because people like Sharon Taylor come to meetings and tell us what we should be doing, right? We are trying to reflect back to the industry what they feel the best practices ought to be.

Jeff Umbro: And for anyone listening, episode one of this show had Sharon Taylor on it, former CEO of Omny, current SVP at Triton Digital, and she does give examples of this actually. 

Matt Shapo: You know Sharon. Sharon's wonderful. I can't recommend her highly enough. I told her on multiple occasions that if there were a podcast czar, or if we had like a cabinet level position for like Secretary of the Podcast, I would think that Sharon would be an excellent candidate.

So again, with enormous sensitivity, both on our part institutionally at IAB, and the part of all the people who we are fortunate and lucky enough to have be members, and come to our working groups and talk about these things with us, we're always trying to be mindful of that balance between making sure we have a standards that people can trust, and making sure that it is standardized in such a way that it does not have unnecessarily negative impacts.

There are going to be impacts for sure when standards change. One of the things we've been working through a lot as an industry over the last several weeks, a few months now, is what's been happening since Apple went to the iOS 17 update, right? I don't mean to perfectly analogize it, but when you describe some of the changes, and you work with a lot of creators, and so you were understandably distraught when maybe you saw some impacts from earlier changes to the standard…

Jeff Umbro: And just to be clear, I was not distraught. But like what it does mean is that like folks like myself and other publishers and service agencies and that kind of thing – it is on us to be able to explain why these changes happen and what they mean. 

This is not directed at you or the IAB or anything. I think this is a larger industry question, but like, to be blunt, I think, yes, a lot of this is driven towards making it like more reliable data. But I think a lot of this is driven because advertisers are pushing for it. 

Matt Shapo: That's right. 

Jeff Umbro: Which is good in a lot of ways and really terrible in other ways. 

Matt Shapo: What do you mean exactly when you say it's terrible that they would ask? 

Jeff Umbro: These are all fake examples, arbitrary, but an advertiser is very happily been paying to promote their service on podcast A, by spending a $25 CPM or whatever it is to get 20,000 downloads every month on the show. So they spend their $800 and they get their advertisement, they get the conversions that they want, and they're really happy. They make more money than they're spending. 

Because these changes are made, whether it's IAB, or Apple, or anyone else, all of a sudden those downloads get cut by 20 to 60 percent and the publisher is going to earn 20 to 60 percent less on those ads because they no longer have 20,000 impressions to sell to this advertiser.

The advertiser is making the exact same amount of sales because there is literally no change in the actual people who are listening to this thing. And because these changes are made does not mean that the publisher can turn around and increase their prices because the advertisers have created this standardization of this CPM that's set at this arbitrary level of price. And the publisher is the one that suffers. 

And I don't think that IAB, or Apple, or anything is doing anything wrong. I think long term, we're going to be very happy that this happened. But it does not change the shift in what we're seeing today in podcast publishing. And the result of this means that a lot of people are losing their jobs.

Matt Shapo: I'm very happy you brought this up. Here's the thing, and this kind of goes back to the earlier part of the conversation, to what do we do at IAB? Who are our customers? 

Our customers are obviously people who advertise their agencies, their brand marketers, but our customers are also – and as I said earlier, I'm very passionate about this – our customers are the creators. They are the publishers, right? And one of the reasons that, you know, IAB exists is because people who want to advertise can get so much amazing performance by partnering with these creators that are building all that trust and all that intimacy with the people that love their shows. And that's why they're getting this incredible bang for the buck that you described. 

So here's the thing though. I believe that all the advertisers that we work with are entirely sincere in their desire to simply have a standard. In those IAB Tech Lab meetings, the people who are more often than not driving the conversation that leads to some of the changes that we just put out are not the advertisers. And maybe the people on the sell side who are driving that conversation are doing so because, to your point, they're feeling heat from advertisers that I may not know about. It's possible they're having conversations I'm not privy to. 

But I don't have the sense, [and] I've been here a couple of years now, and I do not have the sense that advertisers are the ones that are pounding the table and saying, we don't love the download standard. It needs to be better. I have the sense that it is more from the sell side, wanting to make sure that they can simply go on a proactive basis and say to the advertisers, we have a standard you can trust. 

And so I'll just say one last thing on that topic. My feeling, and you might have a different feeling, but my own feeling – I have the sense that on net people, especially on the sales side, are kind of happy with the Apple update, despite the fact that it has led to a drop in download counts because of the confidence factor.

And you're right. It does lead to less monetization in the short term, but I hope that in the long term, it ultimately leads to much more monetization across the industry going forward because buyers just have that much more confidence in the standard. I could be wrong, but that's my interpretation of the conversations I've been having.

Jeff Umbro: I think that both of those things are true at the same time. I do genuinely believe that long term, this is the right move and it will make everything stronger in the future. And I do think that the advertisers, whether or not they were the ones that drove this decision, are going to like very much benefit from this short and long term, and I think that's fine.

I don't mean to say that there's a tensious relationship here. These two industries need to exist cohesively, publishers and advertisers. It's just funny, it's been a funny couple of years in the advertising industry, in the podcast space. And the timing of that particular Apple situation was funny.

One of my questions for you, cause I know Apple is its own independent company. Did the IAB have any part in that decision for iOS 17's update [to] stop the auto downloads?

Matt Shapo: So I want to be somewhat careful in the way that I answer this. I'm a person who works at IAB, [but] I'm not the IAB, right? I don't wanna represent myself as speaking definitely on behalf of the company.

I believe that IAB works very hard to represent the interests of everybody. And so as part of that process, we absolutely reached out through both the Media Center and Tech Lab to folks at Apple. Who we could try and talk to, to help sort through some of the confusion that existed even before they made their update.

But I will just say, in all transparency, that it was other people, and again, this is why I have to be somewhat careful because there's people at IAB who may not be super thrilled with the fact that I'm about to point to people outside of IAB, but there really were people outside of it. Sharon Taylor was one of them.

Jeff Umbro: And this is public. Anybody can look this up. Brian Barletta published a letter on Sounds Profitable, and there's a list of all of the partners that had a part in this. So this is public. And also another guest of the show, Brian Barletta. You can go and listen to that episode if you'd like.

Matt Shapo: Whether it's in podcasting, connected television, display, whatever it is, I think what IAB does is we look to people that are taking leadership positions on important issues and try and bring them into a conversation in a roundtable fashion with one another. So I can't describe the number of times Brian has helped drive conversations forward either. And some of those podcast technical working group meetings that I was talking about, or in audio committee meetings where we're talking about things of consequence. 

I don't know if others would agree, but I think it was the IAB as sort of like a year round Podcast Movement, a year round Podcast Upfront, right? Where everybody gets together once or twice a year [at] these events, and we all talk about the big topics of the day. At IAB, we do it more often. 

But my point is, on things like iOS 17, I'm not going to pretend that IAB is the only entity, or in some cases even the best entity, to make specific progress on specific things.

And so when it comes to iOS 17, yeah, Bryan, Pete Bersinger at Podscribe, Sharon at Omny Triton, I mean, these are people whose wisdom we're simply trying to reflect back into the industry. A lot of the change was driven by the commentary from people like Sharon and Bryan and Pete.

What I have tried to do is kind of synthesize and distill what the impact of those changes were and why, despite your rightful commentary about some impacts to monetization that we wouldn't prefer, why long term, I think it's ultimately to the net benefit. Because again, you have a standard that people can trust.

Jeff Umbro: No, I agree with you and I promise I'm not trying to beat up on the IAB or anything. I think you guys are doing amazing work that is hugely beneficial and necessary for the industry to thrive. 

Matt Shapo: Just know this: I didn't think that you were looking to be overly critical at IAB, but we're not afraid of criticism. We're really not. 

Jeff Umbro: You guys get some of it. So I get it. 

There are a couple of growth platforms that have recently popped up that many publishers across the industry are using to drive high traffic and, in my opinion, not necessarily high quality downloads to podcasts. And they are doing this, in a way, by extorting a loophole in these standards that the IAB has created.

In order to get an IAB certified download of your RSS hosting platform, you need somebody to listen to 60 seconds of a show. So there are a lot of platforms that are out there that are coming up with incentivized ways to get people to listen to 60 seconds of a show. Their argument is that if people like the show, they're going to keep listening or go download it on another platform. But at the end of the day, they are selling 60 seconds of listening to a podcast in order to generate a download, which will trigger an advertising impression. 

Is this something that the IAB is looking at and trying to find a way around in the future? 

Matt Shapo: I'm going to be very, very clear in saying that I do not speak for IAB as a whole on this topic. I don't. What I will say is that it is a conversation that has come up more than once that I've had with people who I care deeply about in this industry, whose business can be impacted by what you described.

Jeff Umbro: Just to clarify, I do want to ask you, are you talking about the publishers who are using this service or are you talking about the advertisers who are buying against that?

Matt Shapo: I think interestingly, I might be talking about publishers who are not using it. 

Jeff Umbro: Okay, great. I love that. I'm one of them. 

Matt Shapo: And oh, by the way, again, speaking as Matt Shapo who works at IAB, not IAB, I am not casting aspersions on any company, any technology company that is assisting people in growing their shows.

Jeff Umbro: I agree with you and can genuinely tell you a very, very clear explanation of the value of what these companies are bringing to podcasting. I can just as easily give you an explanation of the harm that it's doing.

Matt Shapo: Yes, but to answer your question specifically, you wanted to know whether or not this is the kind of thing that could potentially be addressed in Tech Lab with respect to standards writing.

Jeff Umbro: To me, this is the exact kind of thing that you guys should be paying attention to. 

Matt Shapo: Again, speaking for me, I agree. Trying to figure out the most trustworthy way to measure downloads is why IAB even got involved in the business of standard writings in this channel. 

Jeff Umbro: To begin with, one of my questions though, just to make that a little bit more concrete, how would you do that with this particular platform? Because they're following the rules, like how do you change the rules to address that without penalizing everything else? 

Matt Shapo: I want to repeat that I am not here to judge or prejudge. I am not an expert in exactly how those downloads are being acquired. I do not take any position on whether or not the majority or minority of those downloads are or are not things that we might question. I'm just not here to do that.

What I am here to do is to say that I know there are people out there who wonder about it. So what we do is come together in groups like the Podcast Technical Working Group to reflect the industry's opinion about what we might do to address it, assuming people want to do so.

So you asked a question, a very specific question, a pointed question. What can you do? I'm going to return to something I said quite a while ago in our conversation. IAB Is not making rulings from on high. We are not doing this because of something that we decree should be done. We are doing this in collaboration with, and by listening to all of the many players in the space who come to these meetings and share their concerns and tell us what they think we can do.

So the short answer to your question is as we get ready to move from version 2.2 into our 3.0, or 2.3, whatever you want to call it, update, these kinds of questions are, I promise you, exactly what will come up. And it's going to be through the shared intelligence and brainpower of the people who might want to change the standard to account for these sorts of things to say so, describe what that means, what the changes might be, and then we all get to collectively decide if they go into the next update.

Jeff Umbro: When version three comes out, I would love you to email me. I will bring you back on this show and I will ask you this exact same question again. 

I don't think that there is a perfect silver bullet solution to how we measure this stuff, and I agree with you that there are conversations that need to be had. I also think that I stand by the idea that I think the advertisers are often the ones that win in these updates that keep coming out. And, you know, that's neither a good nor a bad thing, but it is a fact. 

Matt Shapo: I think it is a fact of human existence that people with money to spend often get to set the terms of whatever engagement might be. Whether that's internet advertising or just life in general.

But what I want to say again, and I don't mean to be just a mouthpiece for the industry here, I think there is this perception maybe sometimes on the part of some folks on the sales side, that people on the buy side are only out to beat them up on rates. I don't believe, by the way, that that is the attitude of many, if not most people on the buy side, or rather on the sell side. But I can tell you that my own sense is that they're simply looking to know a little bit more. Have a little bit more confidence about the mediums in which they are transacting.

And by the way, every one of the folks on the buy side that invest in podcasting or any other channel that we represent at IAB, they care deeply about these channels and they want them to succeed and they want their money to be a part of that success. They really do.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you, Matt, so much. This has been a true pleasure and we'll definitely have you back again.

Matt Shapo: Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to it.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you again to Matt for joining us. You can find him on LinkedIn. To learn more about the IAB's role in podcasting you can visit iab.com/podcasts and check out the links in the show notes. 

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 thepodglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listenatthepoglomerate. com or follow us on all social platforms at 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.