The Power of Predictive Podcast Analytics with Flightpath’s Sean Howard

Sean Howard: My favorite is you bought the Super Bowl and then you get a call on the last moment, like the Super Bowl is about to end. It's five minutes away. I'm watching the Super Bowl and where's my ad? And my sales guy calls me in five minutes to the end of the whole Super Bowl. It's wrapping up. They're walking off the field, shaking hands.

And he's like, Hey, what do you think about the next NCAA? I'm like, what are you? Like? What?

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 Sean Howard, the founder and CEO of Flightpath, a predictive analytics platform for podcasting. What does that mean?

Essentially, Flightpath will assist you in optimizing and making your business operations on your audio properties more efficient through a third party technology solution that lives on top of your hosting platform and allows you to see things like your available ad inventory in the future, your average CPM based on show or network, and how you can optimize your future sales.

Sean is also the founder of Fable and Folly, which is an independent network of fiction podcasts. And he was a buyer previously at Pacific Content. These two jobs allowed him to actually build the tools that later became Flightpath. Full disclosure that I am an investor in Flightpath. Sean is a truly unique person in our industry in that he is a publisher, a salesperson, a tech person, a marketing person, and everything in between.

And Flightpath is a tool that really marries all of those skills together. In this episode, we'll discuss the future of advertising in the podcast industry, the different tech solutions that he's keeping an eye on, and how Flightpath is helping publishers to achieve their goals. Let's get to the interview. Would

you mind please introducing yourself to our listeners the way that you might at like a cocktail party or something?

Sean Howard: So my name is Sean Howard. I used to be a professional juggler. I run a small publishing network called Fable and Folly. It's an independent fiction space. I think that's where I first bumped into you.

I also was a buyer in the space where I built a buy group in the podcasting space specifically up to, well, over 2 million a year and climbed well over that. And that's where I also interacted with you. And then I basically developed some software called Flightpath, which is basically the predictive analytics platform for podcasting and other platforms soon, hopefully.

But yeah, so basically, and all of that came out of being both a publisher and a buyer in space.

Jeff Umbro: Where did the software part come in from?

Sean Howard: We were running Fable and Folly with one part time individual doing operations, right? Ad operations, Russ Moore. And, and I was helping, but I had a full time job at the time, you know, doing buys in the space.

And so I started just writing software to help us automate growth. Where did you learn how to write the software though? I was a hacker in the 80s. College, you know, so I was in computer science and I sort of went away from that for most of my career and then, you know, been in digital and then, yeah, I just started throwing stuff together to help with our now CTO, an old friend who I've actually, yeah, worked with a lot in the past, but it was literally just little automations and things at first, right, that we were just building for us.

Jeff Umbro: What was some of the tension that you would occasionally run into on either side of that, that like you then brought to Flightpath?

Sean Howard: So I think as a publisher or a network representing in our case, right. We had some originals, but we're also representing. At first, I thought it was just us, right?

We didn't know how much we had to sell. And then I realized on the buy side, nobody has an effing clue how much they have to sell. And being on the buy side, it's hard to not become jaded and be like, everyone's lying to me, you know, but you would meet some amazing, you know, that's how we met, right. You meet some amazing publishers that are working really hard to, you know, provide value and work with buyers. And so I started to realize that, Oh, wait a minute. Me as a publisher, I'd be like, I have no idea what there is to sell. And it's the only industry I've ever been in when that's the case, right? It doesn't, any other form, that's not really as much of a problem.

Jeff Umbro: Are you suggesting that like, you didn't know how much, how much inventory you had to sell based on like pre roll versus mid roll or, like which show or how frequently it published or something?

Sean Howard: Yeah. So I think like before DAI, digital ad insertion, you would just have a calendar and a view and you had, it was like talk radio, right?

You have three spots, spots, ship things to read. You read them at the table, you're done, right? That's it. Baked in. It's done. But with DAI, we had buyers asking for US only. We had buyers saying, I want a frequency cap. We had buyers saying, Oh, I want to do a tag based buy or run of network on certain parameters and there's no spreadsheet you can develop that will tell you what's left, but all of us, because we're all trying to run our business, right? We're all building these ridiculous spreadsheets. And then you had to constantly under pitch. Do you know what I mean? You had to leave extra unsold inventory out there because you just, you want to make sure you could deliver and even then sometimes you wouldn't deliver and then a make good happens and suddenly all your other campaigns are now in, you know, you're just in this endless. It was horrific at times, right, trying to figure that out. And as a buyer i started to realize everyone else is feeling the same pain and suffering with the same issues so then I realized some of the tools that we had built to help Russ be able to give answers faster and reliably were a value potentially.

And that's how it started.

Jeff Umbro: So when you're trying to solve for collecting all of this data, you're presumably pulling this from a, the hosting platform, but also like, you know, you have multiple hosting platforms to work with. They all have different ways in which they store the data. They have different kinds of APIs.

There are different integrations that you may one day want to do with Spotify or Apple or something. How do you think about that? Because presumably these companies, they want to be helpful because they're building something that is helpful for their customers, but also like you're kind of competition too.

Sean Howard: Something changed this last PM.

I don't know what happened in LA. We started up some amazing conversations with Art19 and Amazon. We had conversation with a range of platforms that in the past, I don't know, it just, it was very strange to have them reaching out to us. So yeah, we are not competitive. Like we've always been very clear, right?

We're an analytics platform to help the business sitting above. And if you are a large company, like any of the really large players that everyone knows the names of, you have a data science team. You have people trying to do this. We give the tools to even make them be able to do it easier, but also give it to everyone that has a network.

I think early on there was some sensitivity, right? I do believe that there was this weird moment in our industry where podcast hosts were like, well, why aren't we the dashboard for the executives?

Jeff Umbro: The entire podcast ad sales ecosystem is new. You know, it's like, 20 years old max. And a lot of the technology that powers that is built on sticks and glue.

So you and Flightpath are one of the first people that I have seen who are coming in actively trying to solve that problem. And people have done it before with like, you know, DSPs, SSPs, AdsWays or Triton would be great examples of this, like, you know, building kind of the pipes or the shell where you can insert the ads, but you came at this with the prioritization of making everything more efficient, not rebuilding what already existed.

Can you talk through a little bit about like how you thought about doing that?

Sean Howard: We started as a publisher, right? So what would be worse than having to migrate your entire network and all your producers to another platform next to nothing?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, it would take a long time to do that. And you just constantly be questioning like, did I just break this?

Sean Howard: Yeah. And you have to manage all your big, you know, big shows and your producers and concerns. And it's just. I've done it twice and I was like, I'm never doing that again if I can help it, right? So I think that was the first thing. I didn't want to build another. We don't need another hosting platform out there, I don't think. I mean, obviously kudos to anybody that wants to do that. But the second thing is I wanted to build something that was platform agnostic. At Fable and Folly, we once had to say no to an amazing opportunity, like one of the biggest shows in the space. We needed them to move to our hosts in order to use our, you know, to do everything.

And that was just our systems and our tools. And so part of what I wanted to sell for was, what if we could all have whatever hosts was whatever, and still manage our business on top of that. There's this weird thing where I think our industries, some of the hosts, podcast hosts in our industry have conslated, for some reason, the value of what they offer with also having to run the business.

And I think there's a place for an amazing platform to deliver ads and give us lots of tools. But there's also an opportunity for a way to see our business, scale our business, get availability, you know, do all the other things that help our ops team and our sales team, and also maximize revenue. Right? And so that was my, my dream was, and I'm still not there, my dream was to be able to support multiple platforms, right?

So it was really a starting focus was minimal impact to the operations teams.

Jeff Umbro: You know, I know a lot of networks and publishers are using Flightpath right now. Flightpath is essentially like a layer that lives on top of your hosting platform. Podglomerate hosts the shows, this show that you're listening to right now on Megaphone.

And Flightpath has access to the data pool that, you know, Megaphone is providing, and allows us to, you know, use these algorithms and tools that Sean and his team have built in order to determine like, hey, how many impressions are available on this show in the next six months? Is that pre versus mid?

Like what can you sell that for historically? What are the CPMs that you've sold on that show? It's forecasting. It's predictive forecasting in order to determine like what kind of sales you can make. And that solves the problem that Sean was talking about a moment ago where you are trying to sell a show, but you have no idea what you're actually selling in the future.

Sean Howard: I don't know if I ever told you this. Did you know you were the first person to sign up for Flightpath?

Jeff Umbro: I knew I was one of the first two. I didn't know I was the first.

Sean Howard: You were the second person to say yes, but then the contract negotiations went so long and anyways, yeah, you, Podglomerate was the first to sign.

Jeff Umbro: I'm honored. I don't think we could go back at this point, even if we wanted to, which we don't. But it's like, we've transitioned our entire system to rely on this. And assuming I got everything right with that explanation, like, what are the kinds of things that you are enabling by empowering publishers to understand this stuff?

Like, do you have any examples or concrete examples of that?

Sean Howard: I don't know. I can talk some examples, but what I, I think what's really wild is the timing of everything, right? So I think COVID was, well, it was such an upheaval for all of our lives, but for a lot of people, it allowed them, I think on the publishing and the network side to double down on this side of the business, right?

Suddenly that was this thing where people still wanted to hear from us, right? In podcasting during that time period. And so I love that era of that time. Don't want a lot of the negative of it, but the positives from that time are so many amazing little networks met. And they started by maybe two or three people meeting in someone's kitchen or over Zoom.

And now they've got a multi million dollar business, gross, right? Some quite large, but started as like an off the side of the desk thing is now a full time job for a lot of people, right? Where they're building something that I think is amazing, right? We have a connection in audio that's unlike anything.

And I, by the way, I want to talk about this with you. I think that there's a bridge to brands from audio. I think it's going to start happening. But now we have publishers that were like, Oh, this is just, this was a side thing. Now it's a full time job. Now they have staff. You can probably relate. But now they're also like, how do we scale this thing? Like.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Sean Howard: We have publishers that, you know, it's not uncommon to have one or two or sometimes three people copy and pasting most of their days of a week data from one system to another. There weren't a lot of tools in podcasting because we weren't big enough of an industry, right? We're like, Hey, we're going to be six, what US is going to be 6 billion dollars in a few years. Right. I think that's the projection. I think it's going to be a hundred billion globally by 2028, if I remember correctly, someone's projection made up somewhere.

Jeff Umbro: It would be amazing.

Sean Howard: Right?

Jeff Umbro: I would not mind that.

Sean Howard: But those are tiny numbers compared to like social video.

That's going to be one point something trillion, but we're still such a microcosm that most of the enterprise tools or business tools aren't, they're not really paying attention to podcasting still because it's not enough. There's just still not enough revenue here. I see such amazing publishers creating these amazing brands that I think are going to be the future of, you know, what we call Omnichannel now, where Omnichannel is the traditional thing, Oh, it's the big media companies are going to add podcasting. I don't necessarily think that's the truth. I think it's going to be some amazing podcast brands are going to start moving Omnichannel in the other direction because we have such an unbelievable connection, right?

With our fans and our listeners.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. We're already starting to see that in a lot of places.

Sean Howard: Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: Pre Flightpath. What is the journey of somebody buying an ad on a podcast, what is the process that a buyer and a seller like usually, the dance that happens there?

Sean Howard: So when we onboard a client, we generally see, because we're going to turn on something that nobody's used to seeing, which is predictive campaign performance a year into the future.

And so when we bring a client on, we're going to show them the current nightmare that the ops team is living and is probably trying to communicate every day, may not be getting the air it deserves internally. And we're going to show that, we're going to be like, everything's in the red future, meaning not going to complete anywhere near like under 70 percent projected completions.

And that's normal when we bring that client on. Now that's not always the case, right? We do have some cases where they've got campaigns that are great.

Jeff Umbro: Is that because people are overselling these shows or is it something else?

Sean Howard: You've got the Apple downturn event that we helped our clients pace through, but you've got overselling because you're selling the download numbers and you can't sell the download numbers because of people skipping ads and where they start streaming.

Even if you're selling the right number, how can you keep it straight in your head what's left with, let's say you have on one of your top shows, you have 15 campaigns running with frequency cap, 12 of them are U. S. Some of them are pre or mid. Most are locked to different, it's just, it's impossible to know.

And you can't even see sell through rate on most platforms, right? So what happens is at the top where you are, right? You, you're probably sitting there and looking back at last month where the team is telling you this is in meltdown and you're like, I still have 50 percent unsold inventory. Like. Like what's going on here, right? It doesn't make sense.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. The solution is not for me to then go in and like figure out that answer. It's to like give people the tools to empower them to do it, you know,?

Sean Howard: But if you don't know those tools exist, what do you, it's just right. You're spending all this time. Then you start checking in on orders and campaigns.

You're like, well, why is this one? And you're like, Oh, and then someone in ops can explain every single thing, but you don't have that visibility. And pacing on actuals doesn't work. Like it's just, it's never worked in any industry, but our whole industry runs on it.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Sean Howard: Pacing on actuals is where you like, someone's typing in the number multiple times a day or once a day and everyone reviews it.

And so in the first quarter of every flight, it's green because you got spikes coming later. Don't worry that it looks low now compared to where it should be. Then in the mid, you're like, Hmm, only one more spike to come. You're right. Maybe it's a yellow. And then in the last quarter or fifth of it, you're like, Oh no, it's red.

We can't do it. And so now your sales team is having to scramble back to a buyer who thinks everything is good, or maybe they don't because they got a pixel and they're not happy. And now you get the last three days of a run that I try and get an extension. It doesn't work. I was a buyer, but giving your team tools to reach out to a buyer and go, Hey, We see a small issue.

We have a plan to fix it. And the buyer's like, what are you talking about? And they're like, Oh, sorry. I'm talking about the August campaign. And the buyer is going to be like, but it's May, right? As a buyer, if someone reached out to me for a problem in August, I'd be like, yeah, I can clear anything you want.

That's amazing. Cool. Let's fix it. Right?

Jeff Umbro: Yep. I can tell you, cause I am operating currently as a buyer and a seller, very similar to you, and I don't want to exaggerate when I say this, but like, I think it's accurate that like 40 to 50 percent of every single campaign I buy is delivered late or it under delivers or it doesn't deliver and nobody tells me that it didn't deliver. And you know, if you did that in any other industry, like you just wouldn't fly. Like imagine going to buy a Facebook ad where they tell you it's going to get a million impressions and it gives you 500, 000 impressions then.

Sean Howard: Or better. My favorite is you bought the Super Bowl and then you get a call on the last moment, like the Super Bowl is about to end. It's five minutes away. I'm watching the Super Bowl and where's my ad and my sales guy calls me in five minutes to the end of the whole Super Bowl that it's wrapping up, they're walking off the field, shaking hands. And he's like, Hey, what do you think about the next NCAA? I'm like, what?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Sean Howard: Like, you know what I mean? I've had that. I've had buyers come up and, you know, it's like at the end of the run, they're like, Oh, we ran it on a different show or.

Jeff Umbro: Or how does it sound if we add pre roll or something or, you know, Oh, we'll give you all the post rolls for the month, you know, that's so kind of you. Thank you. You have these buyers from all these like big publisher or big brands and stuff who are like spending this budget because they need to hit their goals every week or month or year, and this is the way in which they're doing it. If they can't trust you as a seller to deliver what they bought, then like, they're not coming back. And that impacts jobs and publishers and shows and hosts and everything.

Sean Howard: And what saddens me is, and I get it, a publisher's, you know, we were talking about youth or a person sitting at the top going, this is a mess.

And then there were certain buyers out there that are pressuring publishers to bring back baked in. And I won't start a flame war again, but I have a very jaded view of why they're asking for that. If you could buy something that was going to deliver forever for no additional money, wouldn't you want that?

Jeff Umbro: Oh yeah.

Sean Howard: Right. Right. As a buyer, but as a publisher, it cuts your revenue by literally five times. You're going to make 20 percent of your revenue on baked in. And so one of the things that I'm most excited about with Flightpath is we've just brought, like, I don't know if I call them out, but we just brought a client on who was trying to launch their in house sales team in 30 days.

And they were moving from baked in to mixed DAI world. And it was so amazing to watch it where they suddenly realized it was all baked in, you know, there's something, whatever I call it, but episode locked, like a baked in, everything was sold out on their top show. And I said, all right, I'm going to show you how you can keep selling on that show with valuable, right placements and watching the sales team be like, Now we get it.

My concern is that there are publishers who are seeing it not working. There's no tools. Right? And so then they're considering moving back to baked in, but there's that pressure to do it. And that's, I hate to see that. Cause I like, I want to see these publishers succeed. And obviously I also want to see buyers succeed.

I was a buyer, right? We're only going into growth. There's room for everyone to make money.

Jeff Umbro: I'm going to rant for like 60 seconds because this is something that has like been on my mind for, the last two years. And I think you would, I hope agree with it, but I have this idea in my head that you have publishers who are, you know, doing their best and trying to put this stuff out in the world, you know, really great content that people want to listen to, and they've been getting hit left and right with historically bad ad markets.

The new IAB numbers. The new iOS 17 update. And these publishers are getting kicked when they're down and they're losing all kinds of numbers and metrics that they rely on to sell these ads. On the flip side, you have all these buyers who are basically getting everything at a fire sale. Because they're able to spend the exact same CPMs that they were two years ago, or even cheaper ones, like smaller CPMs, lower CPMs, where they pay for fewer impressions because of this new, like, you know, I was transitioned and everything else that happened, but they're actually getting the exact same buys that they were two years ago, because all that changes the way in which these downloads are measured, not how many people were actually listening. So you're getting more efficient ads for cheaper.

That is a big part of the reason why you were seeing all of the layoffs that occurred in the last 18 months across the industry. Cause if you're selling less ads, you're going to make less money, meaning you can employ less people. It's not fair in my mind. And like, it is a big ecosystem and everybody has space in it, but there needs to be a balance between buyers and sellers and, and I don't think that it's been on the seller side in the last few years because the buyers could just go elsewhere.

And anyway, that's the end of my rant. But the reason I wanted to say all of that and, you know, regular listeners of the show have heard me say that a bunch, is that the answer is not like getting mad at the buyers. It's building tools to proactively encourage them to look at this in the right way. And also like sell them better products.

And I think Flightpath is doing exactly that.

Sean Howard: I think there's a few things that are happening right now that give me hope. No disagreement with anything you said. And I think there are buyers that are verging on taking advantage, right? They know everyone's down, right. And they're going for that cheaper CPM.

I think there's a couple of really neat things happening. One is, we still don't have most big brands in the space yet, but that's starting to happen. We're seeing it. We're seeing budgets that are insane compared to what this industry is used to seeing, right? And it's because to date, if you've got a new entrant, that was a big brand, you're like, Ooh, look at them.

It was someone doing an experiment. It's someone way down the line in a marketing group that has a small budget for them that in our space is like, what, how many hundreds of thousands are you spending? But when those brands start to be like, Hey, this is working, this is an amazing space and connection opportunity with the people we want to reach.

When those brands start to turn on through their buying groups, right? Those shops. And start spending in the space, that is going to be an influx of revenue and new opportunity that has not existed. The second part that I think is a really interesting thing that's happening. I predicted, by the way, this would be the year, so I'm hoping that works out. I'm coming up on May so knock on wood. Then the other one that I haven't talked about as much is stop with the representation, bringing sales in house is something I'm seeing happening more and more. It's something I'm even considering at Fable, right? I think there's a growing recognition that in order to do, your rant was perfect, to do all those things, to package, to sell the value of what we have and why it's different, you need that team. You need that, you know, you need that role inside your organization. And so I am seeing a number of organizations looking at the world. And I hope with Flightpath saying, I don't have to scale up with more and more AdOps people. I love AdOps people that, you know, we can keep a small team with the right tools and we can start adding in a direct sales team. What we see happening when that works is they're going to sold out on key shows. Like really sold out. Like we're like threading the needle to find another five points, right? And when that happens, they control the CPM. They control whether it's CPM or not CPM.

They can do other forms, right? Of seasonal sponsorships or whatever. That's, I think, in order to conquer the rant, that second part is going to be needed, where we're able to sell and package in a way that, Right. Proves the value or really pushes the value.

Jeff Umbro: Yep. And anecdotally, we had a, we had a very funny situation like two, three months ago where we sold a fairly large package.

And we actually had to go back to the brand because like we did not have the inventory to sell to them on the timeline that they wanted. So we had to like cut it in half. And that's a different problem than what you're referencing, but like,

Sean Howard: No, but I'm working on something around that, but yes, a hundred percent.

Yep. Right. We, we're going to start moving to reach extension. We're going to see it in podcasting just like there wasn't others. When you get that kind of deal and you can sell other trusted networks. Most shops being repped are sitting at under 20 percent sell through on direct sold. That's what we're seeing.

And I, I'm using 20 as a high number.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Sean Howard: Like rep shops are lucky if they get over, some of them, over five to 7 percent sell through. Imagine, I know it's expensive to bring out a salesperson and cashflow. It's not easy for a publisher, but imagine a world where you're at 40 percent sell through. Like it would pay for itself, but it's a risk.

You know, I think there's the stages we go through as publishers where we're going. We keep trying like, Oh, let's try this rep. Let's try this. Let's try this. And then finally, you just hit this point where you're like, damn it.

Jeff Umbro: That is absolutely a conversation that I've heard before and been a part of and had other publishers talk to me about.

What do you think about like some of the more programmatic solutions or integrating like a waterfall approach to have multiple different sell points? How does Flightpath work with that?

Sean Howard: Vast programmatic on most DAI platforms is broken. It uses a waterfall approach and we are one of the few industries that does that.

So there is something coming that's called pre bid. It's here. It's starting now. It exists in every other medium, but we're just getting it now in podcasting and some of the podcast hosts charge you for every VAST tag and then they waterfall it. So they like, waterfalling VAST tags is a nightmare. That means, so you hit the point in your work waterfall, right, where there's nothing to place.

You don't have an order. There's nothing to run there, so you fire out a VAST tag, and then you wait half a second, basically, to see if there's anybody going to answer that fits your criteria for whatever. And then if not, then you go to the next one and you wait half a second to see if there's any there and something comes in, but it's below the floor.

So then you wait another half second to go to the next one. And then the first one that comes in above floor, let's say you set a two dollar floor. As soon as anybody in that pipeline figures out your floor is around two dollars, they could, they could just say two dollars and keep the differential. Who knows, right? It's, it's a marketplace.

And then the user, if you've ever hit play on an episode, a lot of times that endless spinning is somebody trying to do a vast waterfall one at a time. It's stupid. So pre bid means you will fire one VAST tag. It's a proxy. So you're going to put in one VAST tag with everything you want, like this is my criteria, my floor and only these categories and blah, blah, blah.

And then that pre bid proxy fires it out to everyone you want, all at the same time. So let's say you had 10 partners. It'll fire all 10 and go, you all have 200 milliseconds or you're out. And then it looks at everyone who comes back in, makes the choice and gives it back. And suddenly you've got a 200 millisecond delay instead of half a second.

You've got all these orders coming back in and now it's a marketplace. You're picking the highest. And unlike an SSP, DSP, I can never remember the difference between them. I don't care. You're not paying this ridiculous fee on top, right? For an SSP or whatever. I think pre bid is what's going to make programmatic work.

It also makes it a lot easier on our side, right? Like we can integrate with one pre bid feed. Better experience for the user. And I can now expose better information for you, a trusted third party.

Jeff Umbro: What's in the roadmap, like now that you've built the first version of this tool, you have all this amazing data from all your publishers that you work with, like what comes next?

Sean Howard: Two things, opportunity cost and YouTube is what we're working on now. So opportunity costs are working to roll out. So we now know historical, we know future availability and everything. But now the idea of being able to help your team understand also in programmatic. What's the value of a future placement that's three months out versus two months out versus this show versus that show?

How is your sales team indexing on a show? Hard to see that at most Salesforce automation platforms. So opportunity cost is a really cool thing that's going to help, a, ,quantify the value of your inventory, which I want to then leverage into other opportunities, partners and things, right, that we can help fill inventory.

The second part is YouTube, like that, when we went to L. A., right, we were asking, we sat down with everyone and we were like, we wanted to know what was the really hot thing, and I think we're seeing more and more interest in simulcasts, like selling a package, right? And being able to have reliable future, what are the views we can sell on a, on an episode or a show?

Jeff Umbro: That's interesting because we're, we're working with one simulcast partner right now. And for the last five years, they've just been selling everything baked in. And.

Sean Howard: And they will continue on Google, on YouTube, because otherwise you got to give Google 40 points or 50 points on something you kill.

Jeff Umbro: Then it's a situation where it's like, you know, we're going to guarantee you X number of views.

And if we don't hit it, we'll just give you another one in the future. And then you're back to the same problem. The whole reason that you.

Sean Howard: You're in to make good hell. Yeah. Now you're, you're, you're throwing it down the line. Yep.

Jeff Umbro: Have you exposed any information or like unique insights based on like, being able to view all of these different networks, uh, from the bird's eye view?

Sean Howard: Yeah. So it's something we all are working towards, but we're also very careful, right? I am a publisher. And so I know how sensitive I am and the publishers I represent to their data. So yes, we are, we do have some things that we are slowly pulling out high level, but also be honest, we're a small team.

And so right now, all of our time we can bring is on. Right? What's that next innovation that's going to help. But yes, we do have insight into things like how certain backfill programs perform.

Jeff Umbro: If you could go back to Pacific Content as a buyer, with the info that you have today, like what would you do?

Would you build Flightpath again?

Sean Howard: Well, yeah, I guess it comes down to whether or not Brian Barletta sees my tweet. Right? Like I was just building this for me. I got a sense that we were not alone, but early on the tools I was building was just for us because I don't know. It was just two compartments in my head that was running this network as a publisher network.

And then my day job buying and that I didn't connect them right away. Right? I didn't connect pain I was feeling was related to other people struggling to answer the same questions we were trying to answer. What's left to sell or when will this deliver or why didn't we put the pixel on it that we promised?

Like, why is there a tool that would just tell us you sold a pixel? There's no pixel. Like, why do we have to wait for the buyer? Cause as a buyer, I hate it. I used to send 12, you got some of them. I used to send 12 emails as follow up. Is the pixel on? And you know, like, I'm like, well, I don't want to do that.

Jeff Umbro: We have, I don't know, nothing insane, but like, we probably have 20 sales a month and we have to do corrections on like, and we have three people dedicated to this full time who I think are pretty good at this.

Sean Howard: They are. They're very good.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. And even with that, you know, like we're making corrections on like nearly half of those things.

That has gone down significantly since we started using Flightpath. But, like, you know, it is a never ending battle.

Sean Howard: It is. There is, I have nothing but love for people in AdOps cause it is, I've been there and it is a, it is a battle.

Jeff Umbro: Yep. And it's crazy. It's like half the time it's not anyone's fault. It's like somebody copy and pasted a pixel incorrectly or the system isn't working or whatever, you know, it is really nice to be forward facing and forward thinking about the problems that this industry has, because they do have problems or warts and everything, but we need to think about solutions as opposed to complaining. And Flightpath is a perfect example of like one of those solutions that's trying to make the industry better and more efficient. So.

Sean Howard: And there's many, but I, I, and I think it's a great way to end, like every industry has its problems. Like.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Sean Howard: Like, is Nielsen data really accurate? Like, I'm going to be attacked by Nielsen lovers.

Jeff Umbro: That is a future different conversation.

Sean Howard: It is. Fighting words, but every industry has its, has its issues.

I don't think media has ever been about selling the perfect number. Media has always been about selling a connection to an audience, right? That has rapt attention. And podcasting, we have something special, right? We have an intimacy that's rare. You know, I think it also exists maybe in social video, but I think the creator based media, which really podcasting is part of, we have something really special.

And I think we've only started to see what's going to be done with that.

Jeff Umbro: I completely agree. We will have you back. And you know, for anybody who's ever interested, Sean and I have these conversations monthly, at least. So you're welcome to join the next one, but thank you for joining us. This was awesome.

And we'll definitely be in touch for the next one. Thanks for having me.

Thank you to Sean Howard for joining us on this episode of Podcast Perspectives. You can find him on LinkedIn at Sean Howard. 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 at the Podglomerate.Com or follow us on all social platforms at Podglomerate or Podglomerate pods. 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.