ART19 Head of Partnerships and Strategy Andy Slater on Podcast Ads and Partnerships

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Jeff Umbro: 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?

Andy Slater: 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.

Jeff Umbro: We will 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.

Andy Slater: Hey, Jeff, great to be here. This is quite an honor. There's a, 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.

Jeff Umbro: I appreciate it, but also long overdue. You were on one of my first lists that we put together for this show, so, so I'm glad we're finally gonna 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, in the best way, but you have been doing audio sales since the late nineties on broadcast, and then you moved into podcast sales eventually. So what brought you to audio sales in the first place?

Andy Slater: Well, first of all, I'll date myself even more. Really more to the mid nineties. 94 was when I got into radio, so thank you for trying to make me a little bit younger than I am, 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 this stereo department of Bamberger's at the Willowbrook 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 Bamberger's which became Macy's eventually.

I've been in sales my whole career. I, first job outta college, I actually sold phone systems and fax machines for AT&T. Crazy, fax machines, right? They were like, and they were like $5,000. I mean, it's sort crazy to think about it, right? And then I got into the travel industry working for United Airlines for a few years in sales, but I, 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 Katz. And I worked for McGavren Guild, which was one of the companies under Interrep, where we repped, you know, 450 radio stations around the country.

It was just such a, a great experience. You learned all about all the markets. You learned, literally, like if, if a buyer said to me they had a mar, a, a buy-up for Detroit and I had a rock station in Detroit, you know, I had to know what the other three rock stations were in Detroit and how you'd differentiate between them.

It was really just a, a, a wild world and a, a really great indoctrination into the media business, and 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, and the business was really expanding. That was my first entree into radio really as a professional, was, was at the rep firm and, and I just, just ate it 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, a, a heritage media business to be in.

Jeff Umbro: I was a book publicist before I started the Podglomerate and I had a similar experience where I had to learn the NPR, the TV station and the newspaper in 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 are you representing the radio stations?

Andy Slater: So we represented 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, an ownership group and you rep their stations across wherever they, wherever markets they had their, their stations in and rep offices were in all the, 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 are a media buyer and you are buying for Hershey's or for Toyota or for CBS, you know, you were, you were buying the whole country and you were buying stations in over a hundred markets, maybe 150 markets. 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, the rates and the information you need.

Jeff Umbro: It's so funny, it almost sounds like buying from a big firm today in podcasting, so.

Andy Slater: Right? Very much, very similar, which was something I noticed when I first got into podcasting. It was the rep business all over again. And in fact, I have a lot of, a 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 managed a relationship with the rep. So they were just a, 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. So we would always, always have, they called NSMs right? We always had an NSM come into town and we'd 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, 1, 2, 3 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 hour sports radio station.

So at the time WFAN was the number 1 billing radio station in America. They had Imus in the Morning, so very, you know, one of 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, on SiriusXM. And 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 Knicks, and this is the late nineties when they were all good. So it was just such an exciting place to be, and if you're a sports fan, you know, it's a dream job. I was very lucky to have that opportunity because it really, really helped me in, in just my media sales growth.

Jeff Umbro: 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 nineties 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 ART19.

So 2019 rolls around and you get a job at Midroll. 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?

Andy Slater: I've really looked at podcasting as, oh wow, you know, this is like just so 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 you're 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 in, you know, on demand digital platform.

Jeff Umbro: 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?

Andy Slater: 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, but it wasn't necessarily a change as to how I sold the content, because I'd say the big differences in radio, you're selling rating points. A lot of times, you know, that's sort of 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, the, the ability to spend the money on podcasting. Was it the, did it come from a radio group, an 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 was becoming a big thing.

Jeff Umbro: So you, you were at Midroll for a few years and then you moved over to Audacy. Did you have the same job at Audacy?

Andy Slater: Getting to Audacy expanded what I was doing at Midroll. I started out there as an ad seller. I eventually did become a manager there, and I manage a, an East Coast sales team as well. Went over to Audacy and that was a really, really unique opportunity. That was really exciting because that was right after they were still Entercom, actually, they hadn't even rebranded as Audacy yet, and they had just acquired Cadence13 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've expected it the other way around. But in that instance it was more the, the guppy swallowing the whale with this mid-market radio company really buying this behemoth. So with that came with radio.com, which had been CBS radio's 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 their EVP of digital. And Ken, 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 I was like, this sounds like a really cool opportunity. And, and they, we really were, I mean, to use a real cliche, I, I mean, we were building the plane as we 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 reorg while during that time period where then sort of became a national team where there was the sell, you know, the team was selling radio and digital and you know, as well as, you know, podcasting included in that. It sort of provided that long tail to what was already existing with the Cadence13 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 ahead of just the podcast sales for the national team where I was also help 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.

Jeff Umbro: What are you doing today at ART19? How long have you been there and what is your specific role today?

Andy Slater: I'm focused primarily on bringing podcast networks and publishers on board to use our hosting and to take an advantage of our, you know, ad monetization that we offer. Really, it's a, you know, it's a backfill to their, their direct sales, and I work with primarily enterprise level networks, 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, when I say people, companies that focus on, on larger versus smaller, because I think back in the day, you know, when we was a Midroll, it's like, yeah, you got 10,000 downloads. Great. Come on board, we'll take you. You know. Where now it's a lot different.

Jeff Umbro: How so? Like what? What's an ideal client for you in terms of bringing somebody onto the ART19 platform?

Andy Slater: An ideal partner for me is someone that brings on a large tranche of inventory that 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 buyer's remorse. They come on board and maybe it doesn't meet their expectations because we didn't do enough due diligence on the, the character of that supply. You know, that, you know, maybe the demand isn't there for them.

And we wanna 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 the inventory to us.

Jeff Umbro: 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?

Andy Slater: All of what you mentioned is obviously something that we definitely want to get. I wanna see the shows, I wanna 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, we need to understand.

You know, and at the same time is I'll wanna 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. I 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.

Jeff Umbro: What does the sales team look like at ART19? Like how many people are selling the show? Like are they part of the broader ecosystem or are they specific to podcast ads individually?

Andy Slater: So we've really made an effort to integrate ART19 into the whole Amazon ads media buying experience as we've been talking a little bit about before. So what's happening today is all of our partners that are on ART19 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 knew it as as TAS, 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 part of the Amazon ads organization, which means that you've got the thousand plus team of Amazon ad 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, those signals from those buyers and be able to really leverage our partners that are on ART19 and the inventory that they've made available to be filled in the network.

Jeff Umbro: 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 sell through rates or anything like that. Has that happened? Is that something you're worried about like bringing on too many folks and then not having the demand to fill it?

Andy Slater: That is probably what keeps me up at night the most, Jeff, is that I, you, I don't think there's a publisher out there that doesn't have that, that issue, you know, one way or another. Right? Sometimes you, 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 it 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 trench of inventory comes in and you're like, whoa, we gotta make sure that we can, you know, keep up with that demand. And that's also, you know, 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, and make sure that there's enough available to fill that.

But it, it's certainly something that is not always predictable and you know, 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 trench of supply, it's just gotta make sense and it's gotta make, we 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 ebb and flow.

Jeff Umbro: 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 a hundred thousand downloads a month with like an 80% consumption rate, so you know that you're gonna get 400,000 impressions on that show. Like how are you guys modeling that?

Andy Slater: 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 wanna understand first is, okay, so the scale of your inventory, what is the just, you know, downloads times ad markers, right? What does that monthly scale look like overall? Then we want to make sure we back out what your direct sell 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, 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 sell 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 sell through rate at XCPM and what we're seeing across of our, across our network for this type of content or for, for these types of audiences.

Jeff Umbro: The vast, vast majority of what you guys are doing right now is, you know, filling programmatic inventory. Are there any shows that you guys are doing any kind of direct sales for, or is it just 100% programmatic?

Andy Slater: It's 100% backfill, whether it's, you know, programmatic and then, you know, people say the word programmatic in that sounds so impersonal, Jeff. You know, it was also, you know, a managed service to a degree as well, where we're actually pulling avails against a budget for certain audience segments and things like that, as well as your, your, your general programmatic where, you know, things are getting filled in a waterfall via VAST tags that come in through, you know, through A DSP or an SSP.

Jeff Umbro: There are four or five hosting platforms that I would put at the same as ART19. You have Megaphone, Omny, Simplecast, and, and there's probably a few others that are somewhat close to what you guys are doing or like at the, uh, down a tier. So like, you know, your Acast, your Audioboom, your Libsyns.

Why would somebody choose to work with an ART19 as opposed to any of the other hosting services that exist out there?

Andy Slater: So I think there's a few things that publishers need to think about when they're looking at a hosting platform. First of all, the tools. Does it have the right tools? What does the UI look like? All of the, the, the basics of what's going to make their workflow easy. And 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 ART19 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 our, our customers know 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, if monetization is important, where does the monetization come from? So again, I think that's certainly an advantage working with ART19, being part of Amazon, being part of Amazon ads, and as I had mentioned earlier, being able to, you know, sort of be able, you know, being able to get into the Amazon media buying flow that you might be buying other, you know, other platforms for.

Jeff Umbro: 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, and one of them is video. So how is ART19 starting to think about how to or if to integrate video into what you all are doing in the podcast space?

Andy Slater: We're definitely putting 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.

Jeff Umbro: What are the other trends that you guys are paying attention to right now?

Andy Slater: 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, 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.

Jeff Umbro: Is there anything that you think advertisers still don't understand about podcasting? Is there like a misconception that you encounter like over and over again?

Andy Slater: Advertisers are definitely leaning into podcasting more. I just saw an Advertiser Perceptions study that came out that said, I think, what, 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 ranker of the top 100 shows or whatever it is, those don't change very much, those, those rankers. 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-read 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 podcasts at scale, buying audiences, maybe buying some smaller shows or groupings of smaller shows in a run of network basis using announcer-read 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-read ads that aren't host-read ads on their show, but are still very effective across the the advertising campaign. So.

Jeff Umbro: Just to be clear, this is a big, recognizable name, reading an ad that then is run on their show plus five or six other shows.

Andy Slater: 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.

Jeff Umbro: Like Malcolm Gladwell reading across all the Pushkin shows.

Andy Slater: All the Push, right. So, or 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-read 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, 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 at ART19 as a hosting platform, about ART19, how we fill ads. Do we sell shows direct or do we not, or anything like that? I think sometimes a buyer might come in and not necessarily understand the nuances, the differentiation of a podcast hosting platform versus the actual listening app where people consume the content.

And certainly there is a 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-read is understanding what are the capabilities that the, 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. And says, well, I streamed it. You know, I didn't download it. I streamed it because I, I just hit play. I didn't 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 listener is consuming it, they've kind of done their job. They've sent the file, they've inserted the ads, they've, you know, 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.

Jeff Umbro: What advice do you have for anybody who's entering the audio space today?

Andy Slater: If someone was entering the audio space today, I guess the first question I'd ask them, are you sure?

No, seriously, I I, if somebody was, was entering the audio space today, I would tell them that they really should make sure they, 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, the, the advertising market. If it's if, if they're going in on the, on the ad sales side of the business.

Jeff Umbro: 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.

Andy Slater: Yeah. Thanks Jeff. This was great. I, I, again, I can't believe the list of of names that I now join, so this is something I'll, I'll definitely feature on my LinkedIn profile.

Jeff Umbro: 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 Podglomerate. If you're looking for help producing marketing or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at podglomerate.com.

Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com or follow us on all socials @podglomeratepods. This episode was produced by Chris Boniello and myself, Jeff Umbro. This episode was edited and mixed by José Roman. Thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Erin Weiss, and Sheeba Joseph, and a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

Thank you all for listening, and I’ll catch you all in a few weeks.