Today on Podcast Perspectives, we are joined by Andy Slater, head of partnerships and strategy at Art19. How do you decide which publishers are the right fit for Art19? It's really important to understand what the needs are from the sales team as far as what type of audiences and content people are looking for, as well as making sure that it can scale to make it worthwhile for the advertiser and for the publishers alike. We'll talk about his journey from radio to podcasting, how Art19 is reshaping the hosting landscape, and what it's really like to sell audio at scale in the Amazon ecosystem. Welcome to the show Andy. It's Jeff great to be here. This is quite an honor. There's a very prestigious list of guests you've had. I'm not just saying that to blow smoke. I mean it. This is unbelievable. Thank you. I appreciate it, but also long overdue. You were on one of my first lists that we put together for this show. So I'm glad we're finally going to get to do this. We have these talks all the time. So it'll be nice to memorialize it. So just to start you have a funny career in the best way, but you have been doing audio sales since the late 90s on broadcast and then you moved into podcast sales eventually. So what brought you to audio sales in the first place? Well, first of all, I'll date myself even more and it was really more the mid 90s and 94 was when I got into radio. So thank you for trying to make me a little bit younger than I had a Jeff, but we can probably go back to my audio career. I mean, as a kid, I just always loved music and I used to sort of play DJ into a little tape recorder and play records, you know, with it. And when I was in high school, I worked in the stereo department of Bamburgers at the Willow Brook Mall in Wayne, New Jersey. Literally sounds like something out of a John Hughes movie I know, but people that grew up in the New York, New Jersey area would remember Bamburgers became ACs eventually. I've been in sales my whole career. I first job out of college. I actually sold phone systems and fax machines for AT&T. I mean, crazy to think about it. Then I got into the travel industry working pretty uniting airlines for a few years in sales. But I always loved radio. I always just loved the idea of radio. And I was able to get a job at Interrep, which was the big rep firm. It was always the two big rep firms at the time were Interrep and cats. And I worked from a gathering guild, which was one of the companies under Interrep where we were up to 450 radio stations around the country. It was just such a great experience. You learned all about all the markets. You learned literally like if a buyer said to me, they had a mark a buy up for Detroit. And I had a rock station and Detroit, you know, I had to know with the other three rock stations were in Detroit. Now you differentiate between them. It was really just a wild world and a really great indoctrination into the media business. That was also at a time where radio started to consolidate deregulation happened in what 96 so there were companies buying up each other and the business is really expanding. That was my first entry into radio really as a professional was was at the rep firm. And I just just aided up being surrounded by the personalities and the formats and the call letters and the history. It was just such an amazing business, just a heritage media business to be in was a book publicist before I started the Puck Lamar and I had a similar experience where I had to learn the NPR, the TV station and the newspaper and all these local markets. And it got to the point where I could just kind of like rattle them off. I can't today like I still know the big ones, but that's really it. It did feel a little bit like you were in a club when you kind of like were able to understand that, but when you say you know you worked at these rep firms, are you representing the advertisers in this instance or you representing the radio stations. So we represent the radio stations rep firms would have a deal with usually an ownership group. So that was really where it sort of started. It wasn't necessarily always consistent that way, but for the most part you rep the ownership group and you rep their stations across wherever they wherever markets they have their their stations in. And rep offices were in all pretty much your major cities. And we were calling on the ad agencies and the media buying departments and the media agencies, you know within those markets. You know, if you think about it, if you're a media buyer and you're buying for Hershey's or for Toyota or for CBS, you know, you're you're buying the whole country and you were buying stations in over a hundred markets, maybe 150 markets. It's so much easier to make a call to a handful of reps who can put these proposals together for you and give you all the rates and the information you need. It's so funny. It almost sounds like buying from a big firm today and podcasting. Right. Very much very similar, which was something I noticed when I first got into podcast, you know, is the rep business all over again. And in fact, I have a lot of lot of colleagues in the business that I worked with in radio way back when. So we were calling on the media buyers though and each of these station groups, generally they had a national sales manager that manager really should with the rep. So they were just. You know, kind of another member of that sales team, you had the local sellers in the local markets calling on, you know, their local businesses for the station and the national sales manager. You would always have they called NSMs, right. We always had an NSM come into town and we take them on on a dog and pony show for the day to all the different media buyers that bought their markets and they would come in based on the market one, two, three times a year, depending. I then said, wow, being on the station side is really cool. And that's where I my my first segue away from the rep firm was to the station side to infinity broadcasting working at WFAN, which was the first 24 hours for radio station. And the time WFAN was the number one billion radio station in America. They had I miss in the morning. So very, you know, what are the early, you know, could be considered shock jocks. And then the rest of the day was just other sports programming sports personalities, Mike and the mad dog, you know, mad dog is still can be heard on on serious XM. We also had play by play of all the major teams, but the Yankees we sold for the Mets the jets, the giants, the Rangers, the next. And this is the late 90s when they were all good. Yeah. So it was just such an exciting place to be. And if you're a sports fan, you know, it's a dream job. It was very lucky to have that opportunity because it really, really helped me in just my media sales growth. There's a lot of lessons there that we can learn from that apply to podcasting today structurally. It's almost identical. I think the big difference is that people were selling radio spots for 50 years, like prior to the 90s and even longer. I'm sure whereas podcasting it's a little bit brand new and you know, we're kind of inventing how these things are sold. Some of it is different. In part because of the different technology solutions that are available or are not available, which is, you know, a lot of what you're doing at our 19. So 2019 rolls around and you get a job at mid role. So that was as far as I'm understanding like your first real dive into podcasting. So what was that transition like for you when you first started selling podcasts. I really looked at podcast in us. Oh, wow, you know, this is like just selling radio on a digital platform. And more so than streaming. Yes, I know people had been selling ads and streaming audio up until that point. But what I thought was really unique about podcasting was your selling personality driven content, which really is what I was doing when I worked in radio was I was selling personality driven audio content. Now it's just on a different platform now. It's an you know, on demand digital platform. Was it difficult though because in a lot of ways you were training most of your clients on like this entirely new medium you often had to teach these buyers like why they should be buying with you. So was that like a big change for how you had been selling previously. So it was a big change from the standpoint is that it was a new platform. So we had to get them excited about the platform. It wasn't necessarily a change as to how I sold the content because I say the big differences in radio you're selling rating points a lot of times you asked for the measurement, which really backs into a percentage of the population of that particular market you're selling in. But with podcasting then it was just more you're selling more of an impressions. And that made more sense, especially if you were talking to a digital buyer. I think that was the big challenge actually was figuring out who's the one that would actually have the the ability to spend the money on podcasting was that did come from a radio group and audio group. Did it come from a digital group not unlike I think what TV groups and digital groups went through in 2007 when video is becoming a big thing. So you you were at mid role for a few years and then you moved over to Odyssey. Did you have the same job at Odyssey getting to Odyssey expanded what I was doing at mid role. I started out there as an ad seller. I eventually did become a manager there and I manage. And I was a really, really unique opportunity that was really exciting because that was right after there were still Entercom actually they hadn't even rebranded his Odyssey yet. And they had just acquired cadence 13 and Pineapple Street earlier that year. And that coupled with the fact that Entercom had acquired CBS radio the year before which was also a really interesting dynamic because that was people would have expected the other way around. But that instance it was more the guppy swallowing the well with this mid market radio company really buying this behemoth. So with that came with radio com which had been CBS radio streaming platform for the radio stations Entercom was going all in on digital audio and they had just brought Ken Lagana on board over there as a EVP of digital and can I knew through the business he came from megaphone and he and I knew each other.
So he had reached out to me and said he was building this digital audio team over there. And it was like, well, you know, Andy, you've done radio, you've done digital, you've done podcasting. What do you think? And it's like, this sounds like a really cool opportunity. And we really were, I mean, to use a real cliche, I mean, we were building the plaintiffs were flying it, right? It was, it was just really figuring it out. So I got over there. I was able to, you know, hire a team and go out there and sell streaming, sell podcasting and sell, you know, there was some broadcast tied into it. Sometimes we did partner with a broadcast group. What actually, how it evolved, COVID happened, like just three months after I started there. So that changed a lot of things. We did, did some reorgh while during that time period, where then sort of became a national team, where there was the, you know, the team was selling radio and digital and, you know, as well as podcasting included in that. It sort of provided that long tail to what was already existing with the cadence 13 network of those larger scaling premium shows, as well as all the time shifted radio content that is, that was available on demand as, as podcast listening. And that role actually, as it evolved, I wound up being sort of the head of just the podcast sales for the national team, where I was also helping working on partnerships too. And that's where I was working with other publishers to bring them into our network so that we could monetize their inventory. And that actually set me up for the role that I'm in. Now, what are you doing today at our 19? How long have you been there? And what is your specific role today? Focused primarily on bringing podcast networks and publishers on board to use our hosting, and to take advantage of our monetization that we offer. Really, it's a, you know, it's a backfill to their direct sales. And I work with primarily enterprise level networks and larger, or larger podcasters. It's just amazing how the business has evolved to where you have people that focus on large and small now. I'm going to say people companies that focus on on larger versus smaller because I think back in the day, you know, when we're as admiral, it's like, you know, you got 10,000 downloads. Great. Come on board. We'll take you, you know, we're now, it's a lot different. How so like what's an ideal client for you in terms of bringing somebody onto the R19 platform? An ideal partner for me is someone that brings on a large tranche of inventory that can be monetized. And also that brings in the right kind of supply that meets with the advertiser demands. So, you know, we are a little picky sometimes as far as, you know, how much inventory that we would be able to bring in. And as making sure that it's going to get filled to the level that we want that inventory to get filled, you know, we don't want people number one to get buyers remorse. They come on board and maybe it doesn't meet their expectations because we didn't do enough due diligence on the character of that supply, you know, that you may be the demand isn't there for them. And we want to make sure that we're that we're hitting out of the park for everybody for our advertisers and for our our partners that are providing inventory to us. What are some of the questions that you would ask in order to figure out like if this is a good fit from the buyer's perspective? Number of shows total number of listeners, are you asking about genre type? Are you asking about how many ad markers they have per episode or is it is it deeper than that? All of what you mentioned is obviously something that we definitely want to get. I want to see the shows. I want to know how many downloads they're doing. What the genres are that they're in, where their ad markers are. It's definitely, you know, all of that we we need to understand, you know, and at the same time is I want to maybe compare that type of show against things that we already have in our network. So, I can just see where the fit is. And again, I mentioned earlier, getting signals from the ad sales team too as to what they're looking for and making sure there's a fit there. And these are just made-up examples, but maybe someone will say, well, you know what, we need more male audiences. So, that might tell me, oh, so maybe I need to think about shows that would or networks like a sports network that would just tend to lean towards having that type of audience. Are you interested in creating a podcast for your company or brand? Why not check out the Pogglomerate. We work with some of the largest and most unique publishers in the audio space helping them to develop, produce, and engineer the podcasts that they put out in the world every day. Sometimes their goals are to monetize, sometimes it's to drive leads for their other businesses, or sometimes it is to pull a thread and provide some dot leadership to the world. Whatever your goals are, reach out to the Pogglomerate to see how we can help you today. You can check out thepogglomerate.com/production, POD, GLO, M-E-R, A-T-E, that is thepodglomerate.com/production to learn more about the services that we could provide to you today. If your career is how podcasts like this are made, or ways that you can produce, monetize, and grow your own show, then we have you covered. Head topodglomerate.com for expert podcast tips, actionable guides, and easy walkthroughs. That's podglomerate.com/podGLO-M-E-R-A-T-E.com. What does the sales team look like at Art 19? How many people are selling the show? Are they part of the broader ecosystem, or are they specific to podcast ads individually? So we've really made an effort to integrate Art 19 into the whole Amazon ads media by an experience, as we've been talking a little bit about before. So what's happening today is all of our partners that are on Art 19 that have opted into our targeted audience network, which we actually call Amazon's podcast audience network. There are some folks out there that have been with us a long time. They know it as a task, which is targeted audience solutions. Amazon's podcast audience network is exactly that is that we are basically able to fill impressions against specific audience or content segments. And we are a part of the Amazon ads organization, which means that you've got the thousand plus team of Amazon ads salespeople that are actually able to light up demand across all the supply that we have here. So as advertisers are coming in and talking to the Amazon ads team about buying video and about buying display, they're also able to have podcast conversations as well. And we're able to take those signals from those buyers and be able to really leverage our partners that are on Art 19 and the inventory that they've made available to be filled in the network. So your job is to bring publishers onto the platform. I'm sure there is a point in which you are so good at your job that you have too much inventory on the platform and other things may struggle in terms of like, shelter rates or anything like that. As that happened, is that something you're worried about, like bringing on too many folks and then not having the demand to fill it? That is probably what keeps me up at night the most, Jeff, is that I don't think there's a publisher out there that doesn't have that issue. You know, one way or another, right? Sometimes you don't have enough demand, or you have too much demand, or you don't have enough supply, or you have too much supply, and really is a give and take. I do my best to to juggle that and to make sure that we're not supply constrained and that we're bringing enough publishers on so that we're keeping up with the demand at the same time is that yes, you onboard a new publisher and suddenly this huge tranche of inventory comes in and you're like, whoa, we got to make sure that we can keep up with that demand and that's also why we always work closely with the sales team to make sure that they're aware of new content that's coming in and that, you know, and to plan for it so that the planning team would be able to make sure that they can sell enough, you know, make sure there's enough available to fill that, but it's certainly something that is not always predictable and as far as when it all hits and and again, it's it's all really about the match though. So even with that large tranche of supply, it's just got to make sense and it's got to make you just have to make sure that it's the right inventory with delivering the right audiences so that we don't have to worry about the struggle of the supply and demand up and flow. So I was hoping you could walk me through like how you guys model what a show could earn like pretend I come to you with a wellness podcast that does about 100,000 downloads a month with like an 80% consumption rate so you know that you're going to get 400,000 impressions on that show like how are you guys modeling that as we think about that you'd come to me in this example you say, okay, I've got this network and this is what we have so what I want to understand first is, okay, so the scale of your inventory what is it just you know downloads times ad markers right what is that monthly scale look like overall then we want to make sure we back out what your direct cell through rate is so see what's sort of available because really we're not involved in what you sell direct that's all yours we don't take a piece of that that's that's you know that's how you earn your living so we take a look at then what's left from that and model that against where we see cell through rates and average CPMs and come up with basically what that what that market looks like for for that particular publisher and and then that's and then we look to see does that you know seem realistic that we would you know be able to achieve you know the x percent cell through rate at xcpm and what we're seeing across our across our network for this type of content or for for these types of audiences the vast vast majority of what you guys are doing right now is you know fell
programming inventory. Are there any shows that you guys are doing any kind of direct sales for is it just 100% programmatic? It's 100% backfill whether it's programmatic and then people say the word programmatic and that sounds so impersonal Jeff. It was also managed service to a degree as well where we're actually pulling evils against a budget for certain audience segments and things like that as well as your general programmatic where things are getting filled in a waterfall of the vast tags that come in through you know through a DSP or an SSP. There are four or five hosting platforms that I've put at the same scale as art 19. You have megaphone omni simplecast and and there's probably a few others that are somewhat close to what you guys are doing or like at the downed tiers so like you know you're a cast your audio boom your Libsins. Why would somebody choose to work within art 19 as opposed to any of the other posting services that exist out there. So I think there's a few things that publishers need to think about when they're looking at hosting platform. First of all the tools does it have the right tools what does the UI look like all the the basics of what's going to make their workflow easy. That is subjective too because things that are important to one network or one publisher could be very different to what's important to another one just based on how they do their business. I've always felt that one of the things that really differentiates art 19 is our service. We have a team of CX professionals who have been here a long time. You have humans that you talk to to be able to train you to help you solve your problems. You send a support ticket in there's a person responding to you and they're generally responding to you in a very short amount of time and and are our customers no. Our CX reps they know the team they know them by name and know how to reach out to them. So I think that's really important too. I think also and where does if monetization is important where does the monetization come from. So again I think that's certainly an advantage working with art 19 being part of Amazon being part of Amazon ads and as I mentioned earlier being able to you sort of be able to get into the Amazon media buying flow that you might be buying other platforms for. So you've now seen a very healthy chunk of sales from broadcast and from podcast and it does feel like there's a lot of trends that are coming up in the industry and one of them is video. So how is art 19 starting to think about how to or if to integrate video into what you all are doing in the podcast space. We're definitely put in a lot of thought and effort into what we do in video and we have teams that are really deciding what is the best approach on how we can best serve our customers with video. Really TBD and we'll see more as 2026 goes on as to what we can do in the short term and what we can do in the long term to serve our customers but video is definitely something that's top of mind and certainly something we are working on. What are the other trends that you guys are paying attention to right now. Programmatic audio, programmatic and podcasting has certainly been top of mind for a lot of people and certainly something that everybody's digging into and publishers want to be able to take advantage of that and and that's where you we've already dug in. As I mentioned before being part of Amazon ads having this podcast inventory available on the Amazon DSP so buyers can transact there where they transact like they do with other platforms. So that's a really really big trend that we're already dialed in on and and supporting and and producing. Are you interested in growing your podcast. Did you know that there are teams out there that specialize in doing exactly that. Check out the poglomerate.com/marketing to see all about our award-winning services when it comes to audience development campaigns for third-party podcasts. We utilize our five-tier approach to grow your show including publicity, marketing, cross-promote, pitching the podcasting apps and paid acquisition. We have proven tactics to help you do all of the above. Reach out to the poglomerate.com/marketing to learn more about our bespoke approach. Love to hear from you today. Have you thought about submitting your podcasts for an award? The signals, the ambies, the webbies. Winning an award does a lot more than just giving you that third-party validation that you made a great show, which is true. But it also allows you greater exposure, the ability to use that accolade in press materials. And you can bring it to the sponsors that are considering buying an ad campaign on your show. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you submit to these awards and hopefully win them, head to the poglomerate.com/awards. That's poglomerate.com/awards. Is there anything that you think advertisers still don't understand about podcasting? Is there a misconception that you encounter over and over again? Advertisers are definitely leaning into podcasting more. I just saw an advertiser, Perception's study that came out that said, I think with three out of five advertisers that are buying audio, want to do more in podcasting. I still believe there's a lot of education that can happen in general for podcasting so that advertisers can understand thinking outside of just the the the ranger of the top 100 shows or whatever it is. Those don't change very much. Those those rangers, right? So it's more about thinking how they can certainly lean into some of these big shows that will perform for them as well. They should host red ads on big podcasts is how we got here. So I would never say that people should look away from that. But I think there's a way that advertisers can think about how to buy podcasted scale, buying audiences, maybe buying some smaller shows or groupings of smaller shows in a run of network basis using announcer red ads. We have data that we even did a study with Gumball, one of our partners and signal hill insights about right the effectiveness of an announcer red ads that aren't host red ads on their show, but are still very effective across the the advertising campaigns. So just to be clear, this is a big recognizable name reading ad that then is run on their show plus five or six other shows. Sometimes, right? It could be that right? It could be right or maybe the voice of a network, right? So it's a recognizable voice that runs across their own affiliated shows. But also Malcolm Gladwell reading across all the pushkin shows. All the push right. So exactly that's a great example. I think that type of advertising those those those work and that's one of the things we did in that study. But I think the other thing is just in general that announcer red ads also are still effective because podcast listeners are leaned in. And I would love to just see so advertisers can think about buying podcast audiences in tandem with how they buy specific shows. And I think that's really a really important differentiation. I also think that there's still an education that can happen just across the entire podcast value chain. You've asked me some questions today about us. Art 19 is a hosting platform about art 19 how we fill ads. Do we sell shows director? Do we not or anything like that? I think sometimes a buyer might come in and not necessarily understand the nuances of the differentiation of a podcast hosting platform versus the actual listening app where people consume the content. And certainly there is a differentiation there. I think what a buyer probably wants to understand is when they're buying from a network or buying from a publisher and thinking about how they're buying their ads and beyond host red is understanding what are the capabilities that the platform they use can provide to help aid them in their targeting aid them in their ad delivery aid them in their reporting. And what pieces of data they can get from it things like listen through rates. That's data that actually lives in the listening app not in the hosting platform. The hosting platform is downloading a file right and even download right that's a funny word because you hit play. This is and says well I streamed it you know I didn't download it I streamed it because I just hit play it and download it to my device. I mean technically you've downloaded it because what a podcast is is a file that gets sent via the RSS feed so you're not physically downloading it to a device but you are technically downloading that piece of content that's how it's being delivered. So once the hosting platform has sent that piece of content to wherever the listeners consuming it right they've kind of done their job they've sent the file they've inserted the ads they've done all the ad decisioning and whether someone has listened to the entire episode actually happens on the on the listening app not in the hosting platform. What advice do you have for anybody who's entering the audio space today? If someone was entering the audio space today I guess the first question I'd ask them are you sure? No. Seriously if somebody was entering the audio space today I would tell them that they really should make sure they understand the tech behind digital audio that to understand streaming understand who the players are where where people consume content and also make sure they understand the the advertising market if it's if they're going in on the on the ad sale side of the business. Andy thank you so much for joining us this was a blast I'm very excited for this to to go out in the world and I'm sure I'll see you at a conference soon. Yeah thanks Jeff this is great I again I can't believe the list of names that I now join so this is something I'll definitely feature on my lead.
in profile. Thank you so much to Andy for joining us on Podcast Perspectives this week. You can find him on LinkedIn under Andy Slater. For more podcast related news, info and takes you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Pogglomerate. If you're looking for help producing, marketing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at poglomerate.com, shoot us an email at
[email protected], or follow us on all socials at Pogglomerate pods. This episode was produced by Chris Bonnello and myself, Jeff Umbro. This episode was edited mixed by Jose Roman. Thank you so much to the marketing team, Joni Doige, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Aaron Weiss, and Chiba Joseph. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. Thank you all for listening and I'll catch you all in a few weeks. Sometimes it feels like red and blue states are just as divergent as post-World War II, East and West Germany. So what can the US learn from German political history in order to create a more perfect union? Find out on the new season of the future of our former democracy, the Signal Award winning podcast from more equitable democracy and large media, hosted by me, Colin Cole, and Heather Villanova. It's time to rethink democracy. So follow the future of our former democracy wherever you get your podcasts. That all darkness is dangerous. Sometimes it's the doorway to becoming whole. On the brand new podcast, The Shadow Sessions, hosted by me, Hibba Belfa Ke, a psychologist and trauma expert, we should light on the hidden corners of the human experience. Through raw, unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing, The Shadow Sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change. Follow The Shadow Sessions wherever you're listening now.
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