How to Buy in Podcasting in 2026: Leaders at Bumper, Ad Results Media, and Crooked Media Talk Ads, Agencies, and AI

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: Welcome to Podcast Perspectives, a show about the podcast industry and the people behind it.

This is our second live recorded episode from South by Southwest at Podcast Movement Evolutions, brought to you by Sounds Profitable and Nomono. They're the little magnetic microphones that you see clipped to all of our shirts. They record in any sound environment and they sound great. We recorded this on a rooftop in Austin, Texas on a windy day with a bunch of speakers right behind us, and you can't tell at all. I highly recommend that you all check out nomono.co.

Today I'm thrilled to be joined by three guests, Bumper co-founder Jonas Woost, Ad Results Media director Taylor Bradbury and Crooked Media VP of sales, GIancarlo Bizzarro.

The three of you represent a combination of publishers, buyers, and data. And I'm gonna break this conversation into four or five different buckets that I want to talk about that really covered different ways in which people can think about how to buy in podcasting with all the changes that we're seeing today.

The first bucket is the why and the how. So I wanna start with you, Giancarlo. Brands have a lot of choices on where they can spend their money. Why podcasting?

Giancarlo Bizzarro: I think podcast. Is mainstream. That's, let's just get that out of the way, five years ago, 10 years ago. made it like we're here. We're at South By. I think that if you look at the media channel as a whole, we've come to a point like in time where our content is now, you know at Crooked we just announced to deal with MS Now, like we have a, we're gonna be on their traditional television. And I think that you look forward, like you're gonna see podcast out of these types of spaces to compete. I think you're seeing it across the board. I don't wanna name names, but I, know that big holding holding codes, media, holding companies best lot of money into this. And I do feel like from an advertiser perspective, like people that have been in on the ground floor, like the two of us, you know, we've seen the success of this and we know what the validity and scale can be. So I would absolutely advocate for brands and others to come into this space right now.

Jeff Umbro: And what, when you say validity and scale, like what specifically?

Like what's the difference between a podcast ad buy and like buying an ad on LinkedIn or something? Well,

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Well, I mean, listen, if you're buying it on LinkedIn, definitely, you can spend a definite amount of money. If you're buying a podcast ad, you can, I'd say you get that audience right, like these are fragmented media's fragmented for, and when you look at podcasting as a whole, you're trying to reach people that you may not.

We reached a lot of the people that buy from us know that our shows are probably one of the only places they can reach our audience demographic. Obviously you get that social, not gonna deny that, but at the same time I think a podcast by is more effective in the sense that you're that's who's engaged and want to in room having a conversation, you know, we're doing right here with the people that they admire, trust and respect, and to get somebody to convincingly tell you about a product, I think is lot more beneficial. If you're just watching a show, see an ad or scrolling through LinkedIn or whatever social media you decide to choose, it's gonna have a much more effective impact on their day to day.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, and mostly people who are hearing an ad on a podcast, somebody has sought out that podcast as opposed to just like finding it as through scrolling their feed or something.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: They've opted in.

Jeff Umbro: We have two different ways to buy podcasts on this panel that are represented. You can buy it directly from a publisher, crooked Media, or you can go through an agency like Ad Results. So why would somebody go through an agency as opposed to going through a publisher?

Taylor Bradbury: Yeah. Really I think it comes down to an agency has been in the game for a long time, we know what to look for. We have all the relationships. We have fully developed teams in all departments, so you know, anyone, anyone could go out and buy a podcast that's, that's not hard.

Like you make those, you can talk to someone, you can get your foot in the door, but an agency is going to help make sure you're showing up in the right spot. You're negotiating the rates, you're getting the audio QA’d, and we get air checks, and we're making sure that things are dropping on time. You have someone who's doing the billing side of everything for you, which I know is a really big thing because we have a whole team dedicated to billing, whereas these direct brands are trying to funnel it all themselves, And so that's taking a lot of their attention away from what they could be doing because the agencies are there to make your life easier.

Essentially, at the end of the day, we treat the business. It's our money too. So we're gonna do everything on behalf of the client in the same way that they want to. And we're not gonna do anything without approval first. So approvals, we're not just gonna go out and just wing it and do what we want to.

So those are all the reasons that I think agency's good.

Jeff Umbro: So big brand comes to you. They wanna spend a zillion dollars. You guys have already spent 10 zillion dollars on these 500 shows. So you already have the data of what works really effectively and what doesn't. And going back to you Giancarlo, like big brand comes to you to spend a zillion dollars, what can you do that an agency can't?

Because you guys have like this intimate knowledge of all the shows that you represent at Crooked.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: I want to caveat like, you know, a results are our clients and we do a lot of business together. We greatly appreciate.

Jeff Umbro: And, and, and it's not either or, like it's you can do both. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: The agencies that we work with, I think that.some of the brands that come to us are first time podcast advertisers are very, very aligned with us, either to content that we make or because they align from a political standpoint, political, we do political news and talk. Right. And so from that perspective, having been on the agency side, I'm gonna give a plug to the agency. We kind of operate as if we were an agency. So our job at Crooked, I'm not sure how many other podcast leaders do this is the way we set up our team, is to act as defacto agency. 

Obviously, we love working with agencies because it makes our jobs a lot easier. At the same we have to  be the first foray for somebody to come in. We can sometimes offer things that, you know, maybe an agency who's buying 500,000 types of shows isn't going to have the nuance of knowing who the host is, knowing what they like, like we can provide them that information.

We, they do a really good job of asking that. We try to give them as much as we possibly can, but when you're dealing with a lot of properties you might not necessarily have specificity, but I don't think that's an agency problem. I think that's, you're looking at a big network selling a thousand shows. They're not gonna have those relationships.

So if you come to me and you ask me, Hey does your host have a pet? I tell you, yeah. You know, Jon Favreau, Tommy, and Lovett, they each have goldendoodles and you know, they're in the office running around, you know, so I can, I can.

Jeff Umbro: I can provide, do, do they all actually have goldendoodles?

They all have goldendoodles  Pundit, Luca and Leo, and they come around the office and play, that's a really good data point that I can tell someone. But obviously we do things outside of just podcasting.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro:  I think if you're looking at the industry as a whole, we have, we have live events. We've got this thing called Crooked Con, 2,500 people, we're gonna double it this year. You can sponsor these things so that you can get a little bit into what our community is accessing. But you know, we do act as if we are an agency and it's nice to have agencies acting on our behalf because it's just less work for our team, which is far smaller than some of major networks that have hundreds of salespeople.

Jeff Umbro: Sure.

Jonas Woost: It remarkable how hard it can be, how hard it's to spend money in podcast s the amount of times that we, because we do a bit of media buying ourselves, not that much just in service of our clients to grow their shows. We help clients grow their shows, and sometimes we buy ads, kind of makes sense. The amount of times we've sent out emails to people and tell them like, we have a budget.

We would like to buy ads to promote this one, and we hear nothing back. We’re talking like a serious percent of people just never even responding. So having agencies, having people to help can really help. Of course working with you is very easy. Of course, Crooked is an amazing partner. Sometimes it's just a lot of work, a lot of back and forth, and the ad checks and et cetera, et cetera.

Taylor Bradbury: Yeah.

Jonas Woost: Makes complete sense sometimes to use an agency. 

Taylor Bradbury: Yeah. I think there's a lack of understanding of how much work there is and how much back and forth there can be, especially when you get into those larger kind of events and going a little bit beyond the podcast and working with the partners in, you know, social or events or custom segments like that.

That's a big lift and it's not something you can turn around in one or two days. Like in a lot of cases you go back and forth for weeks before you get something set up.

Jeff Umbro: And Crooked is an example of a publisher that's very advanced. Often if you're trying to buy ads on some publishers, like they may not know how to set up a pixel or like what a brand may be looking for on a buy or something. So that's where like an agency can come in and be really, like, really helpful.

I wanna move on to the second bucket and, and really look at like the data and the analytics here, which Jonas is, is kind of the, the front runner in my opinion of kind of how that works in the space. I think a lot of people make assumptions on how podcasting works, how a listener is engaging with an episode, how much of that episode they complete, how many episodes of a show they listen to.

Some of those assumptions are not correct. You, through your Bumper dashboard at your company, you, Dan, and everyone else involved has a lot of insight into a lot of different shows and how people are actually engaging with these different podcasts. So I was hoping that you could share a little bit of some of these new learnings that you guys have come up with in the recent days.

Very broadly, can you like, speak to some of what you found?

Jonas Woost: Very broadly, we see a big, big problem in those industries, which is many brands do not invest or do not invest enough into our medium because the data we give them; it's not good enough or good enough maybe does not quite match the data that would get from other places. If I go to Meta, it's easy to spend money. I'm getting data and has a lot of insights that I'm, I'm getting. I’m not suggesting Meta’s the best place, but at least those people can spend money getting the data. We can't match that. We think we're missing out on a lot of dollars. Anecdotally, we've heard that from many people saying they're not. Please jump in.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Can I ask, like on that point, do you think that we're gonna solve that with the continued fragmentation of video?

Jonas Woost: I think we can solve that. Yeah. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: You think we can solve that? And in your expert opinion, would you say that we're gonna be able to solve that through the IAB, through Bumper? Like how you get everybody to agree. That’s the key here, right?

Jonas Woost: Indeed, that is the biggest problem. I don’t have a really good answer for that.

Jeff Umbro: The previous interview that I did on this stage was with the CEOs of Acast, Lisbyn, and the head of podcasts at Audacy, and I asked this exact question.

I had the same, the same response.   And their response was, was really fun to listen to and who knows if it'll work, but was basically that all of the hosting platforms need to go to the distribution platforms with the same asks, and they all need a concerted effort to get the same data back and make sure that we're able to like, show up and ask for the same things that the brands want, that the publishers want. Sounds a lot like pie in the sky, hopes and dreams. So we'll see

Taylor Bradbury: Did they give any insight to how they imagine that working out? Because we didn't even get DI figured out after all these years. Like everyone's still doing everything differently, so how.

Jeff Umbro: I want to come back to that.

Jonas Woost: I would argue, going back to your original question.

Jeff Umbro: Yes.

Jonas Woost: The data’s already there. We don't actually need to ask anything else. Okay. Let's start with the big problem here, right? Yeah. We don't give think brands the same data they can get somewhere else. At the center of this problem is the following question, how many people have heard my ad? How many people have seen my ad?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Jonas Woost: Sure. We dunno. We know how many ads were inserted, we know how many times a YouTube video was watched that had a midroll ad somewhere. How many people made it to that ad? Question, how many people have heard my ad? Seems like a super reasonable question. And as an advertiser, it’s not a really good answer to say, We don’t know.

That’s the thing we need to figure out. And then from that as some derived sort of data points that we also look at. 

Jeff Umbro: Well, you have come up with a lot of data points that show like, you know, generally speaking, how many people are downloading an episode, how much of that episode they've listened to. And on average you're seeing that most, most shows are seeing like an average consumption rate of, you know, 70 to 90% depending on the length.

And most ads are not being skipped, is that generally correct?

Jonas Woost: All that's correct, yes.

Jeff Umbro: Okay.

Jonas Woost: So the question is here; why are we not doing a better job communicating all those amazing stories?

Ad skipping is not really a thing. Often just 10% of people skip ads. On average, people listen to 74% of an episode and for short episodes, that results up to 80 something percent. Like these are some really cool stories that we have that can really show advertisers when you buy with us, you know, people. People make it to that point, especially in audio. They make it to that point. Why are we not sharing that right now? 

But the data's available right now. We don't actually need to go to anyone and ask for data. I could get that right now. From Spotify, from YouTube, from the data's right there. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: So given that we've kind of like, to your point, kind of solved RSS audio attribution for the most part. And now we're fragmenting video in a way that's essentially pushing people towards it, which we have less visibility and people are buying up vibes. How do we build that into an attribution? That's my next question.

Jeff Umbro: We're gonna talk about video in a second. But I want to ask Taylor, like when you are selling ads to all the brands, like how often are people coming back to you and saying this didn't work or this did work really successfully. Like I know you have pixel tracking on the RSS and everything, but like anecdotally, how many times are people coming back to you and saying, we saw a huge lift in sales because of this?

Taylor Bradbury: Well, I mean, in a perfect world, all of our clients are seeing a huge lift and, and they love what they're seeing, but I think there's a misunderstanding in terms of the kind of performance that you can expect to see in a channel like this versus what you're gonna see in something like digital where there is like a one-to-one like click ratio, you can see exactly who clicked on your Meta ad. Whereas for podcasting, how many people actually heard it?

What is my reach? What is my frequency across my whole campaign? How does that actually relate to the conversions that are coming through. So there, there's a learning curve for a lot of those new brands that come in who have never been in this space before, who are expecting something like a $10 CPA that they see in digital. It's, it's not gonna be the same. It's just not; it's a little bit of a more premium product. You're getting oftentimes that host endorsement. You're paying for that. You're like building that trust and that relationship that is, that is what podcast is here for, to really. Convince your audience that they need to try this product.

So that's a very long-winded answer to get back to your point, if it's all, it's, it's never the same for any client. We just have to, we have to come to them with the facts, the figures, why we expected these results, why these results were good or not good, what we could do differently. You know, as an agency also taking the ownership when we do something wrong,

Jeff Umbro: Going back to video, like buying on vibes.

Taylor Bradbury: I love that.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Well, I, I'd add something to what you said, in the sense that I have clients that come to me and they say they're spending a lot on digital.: Right.

And then they'll come to me and they'll be like, well, maybe we didn't see exactly what we wanted, like one to one or getting digital. We noticed is like our digital costs purse have gone down since we started out doing podcasts. It's of course because people are hearing your ads, they're seeing the endorsements. Yeah. And then they're going on social and it's this model that's speaking to each other. Right. And I hear that all the time from advertisers and I think that, I dunno if your data backs that up. 

Taylor Bradbury: Yeah. Spot on. I mean, really looking at a mixed media like Outlook. You have to. 

Jeff Umbro: Are advertisers like asking to buy on your video properties? 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Yeah, we ave some advertisers we do some social with. We have standalone video series that you know, Ad Results Media has gratefully bought. We've launched this thing called PSA Breaking News; CookUnity was on it. ZipRecruiter's about to be on it.

Actually very grateful because we rolled it out this year and they’ve bought a lot of it. And bluntly what we do is, it's very hard for us, obviously when you’re doing sort of rapid response videos; it's different than the podcast model where it's like, you know when the episode’s gonna drop, you can measure it. So yes, there's a little bit of a “vibey” element to buying it, but from our perspective, we know these videos are gonna pop, right. It’s so relevant. It's the Epstein files, it's war, it’s all these things. And you know, we want to not cede the the floor to traditional news. So we want to, we want to create something and you know, we give an average of what we think it's gonna be. You'll buy against it. And you know, the first advertiser we had on in January was CookUnity, and they bought a number that we doubled, and obviously we had a crazy month in news 'cause when the world goes to hell, our stuff generally crushes.

Jeff Umbro: Love that.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: It's sad. but it's true. But yeah, I think that on the video front we're approaching things that way. All of our pods are simulcast. 

Jeff Umbro: So I wanna ask you how you buy video ads. And I want to, like you, you just said you can estimate like what they're gonna do, but. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: For our standalone video series. 

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. But like, how are you guys, so how are you buying it and how are you selling it in terms of like actual dollars that you're spending?

Taylor Bradbury: Yeah. So we look at it in a few different ways. One is if it is a show that is simulcast, we, we try to loop it together with the normal baked in ad reads that we're having.

If it is just.

Jeff Umbro: Same CPM?

Taylor Bradbury: Yes. Most of the time, yes. When, when you get into the split CPMs, that just gets into muddy waters. 

Jeff Umbro: And you're estimating like how many impressions the video will do based on what the previous videos did?

Taylor Bradbury: Yes. Yeah. And so, you know, it, it is a gamble. Sometimes you're gonna have a video that just takes off and you get 2 million download or views and it's just incredible. And then you have one that maybe the guest isn't as great, so it gets half the views. And so you look at the average too, to see how you, how you wanna come into the space. If we're looking at it, so the measurement part of this is the hardest part, right? Because.

Jeff Umbro: Jonas, get ready. I'm gonna ask you about this.

Jonas Woost:  I'm aware. I'm aware.

Taylor Bradbury: He's excited. 

On the podcast front, we have the pixel attribution, which makes it a lot easier.

And, you know, Podscribe does their modeling. Magellan has their new feature that they have for video. So we're getting there, but there's a lot of uncertainty. We have some clients who don't necessarily trust the Podscribe video.

Jeff Umbro: How does it work?

Taylor Bradbury: Oh goodness. I don't want someone from Podscribe to watch and be like.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: I can talk to it. In fairness, 2022, they came to me and they're like, do you want attribution service.

And I was like, for your clients? I was like, guys, I have. At the time there was Podsites and Chartable. 

Jeff Umbro: Neither of those exist now. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Bought them and shut them down. Obviously they still have analytics.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. Very different now.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: And I said, they said, what's your biggest problem? I said, I can't, like I have to go into YouTube and take my numbers and report them together. They solved it on the call. I was like, alright, we're gonna use you. I've worked with them significantly to try and figure this out, to build what I think agencies direct clients want. They'll take a model of what's happening in our process, kind of and they'll kind of position that over what’s purportedly happening on video but like to Taylor’s point it's not hundred percent efficient.

I think that they do the best that they can given the information. I love the fact that if they could get into YouTube and measure my shows as a publisher, if you could do it on Spotify video, that'd be fantastic. But I'm sure that Jonas has any insights into this I’d be all game to try it.

Jeff Umbro: And, and Jonas before you, you jump in, I'm very curious here. If you're comfortable, I'd love for you to also talk about the other solutions out there, what Flightpath is doing, what Podstock is doing and like how, what Bumper is doing compares to that in terms of forecasting and everything.

Jonas Woost: There are a lot of different things going on now.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Jonas Woost: Video. I can't solve the video execution problem right now, we don’t have that.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Taylor Bradbury: Well, Magellan is doing something very interesting, and I only read something about it earlier this week, so I don't have all of the data, but Magellan and I know that they just launched a partnership with YMH to try to roll this out for clients to test, but it's not necessarily a one-to-one because that doesn't exist, but it's a little bit more ingrained than just an estimated model number like Podscribe. So Magellan is something to keep an eye out on as they continue to roll out more. 

Jonas Woost: The attribution side is tricky and companies do a really good job. We're much more focused on the audience verification. How many people have seen the ad? How many have heard the ad. It's interesting what you say about the CPM for video and audio is the same because I get it. It's sort of, have to mix it together and we see very, very different consumption pattern video and audio. Like on two fronts, right? First of all, you're buying impressions on audio, to RSS that might not turn into actual listening. IE there's downloads happening that might never, when everyone hits play, but that doesn't happen in video. Right? When you buy like views, you buy impressions and you're basically using the views as a counter there. Well, you know, like views are views. But what you have on YouTube is that the retention curves are very, very different. Most people that are there for the first second are not there anymore after five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes.

Average retention on YouTube is very, very low on audio.

On the other hand, it's great the midroll on audio, I love; the midroll on video, not quite as much, so we were mixing different things together right now in the morning. Becomes very different, difficult until we get to a point where we can use a different metric. Maybe that is not based on downloads or views, but based on well, how many people make it to the ad. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Do you see differentiation between standalone video versus I'd say. We do our things, our shows are basically, you can watch it or you can listen to it, and I'm curious if there's a differentiation between those two factors. Because I do feel like if I'm at the office and I don't want to get out my iPhone, I wanna listen to something, I'm just gonna throw it on. I might not watch it and I still might be consuming it in my ear. Right? 

Do you see any metrics? Do you have any data on whether people actually screen open or not?

I feel like the consumption habits on the video version of the show. If people are just listening to it. 

Jonas Woost: So this is what we're seeing with videos in terms of consumption habits; when someone has a lot of followers, subscribers of course, on YouTube, and we see that a lot of the, the behavior seems to be driven by subscribers. People already follow the show. I love the show. I'm gonna listen to it. Right now. We see these, these retention curves. They look great.

Jonas Woost: Average listen time, 20%, 30% for a full length hour. Half an hour, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. Great.

When it's a video that goes quote unquote viral, completely tense. You know, as soon as it shows up somewhere, which is great for the, you count, Hey, I got a million views for this, for this video. That's amazing. How many people made it to the midroll? Not always as amazing.

I'm not sure I quite answered your question.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: And we see it on some of our stuff that popped, right. It could pop for a variety of reasons. The YouTube algorithm is a beast within itself because as we both know. I think that what we try to do is when we're selling at least giving a very, I hate to use this word, conservative average, because we don't want to ever underdeliver and until we can solve this, it's basically what podcasting was 12 years ago and what YouTube was ironically, 12 years ago as well. People are buying on last book attribution, vanity URL code redemption, and those things can get leaked as well as, yeah.

Jeff Umbro: This goes back though to my initial point where it's like. How do you gauge success here? Like if, if the brand is happy with the vibes or like what they're seeing in terms of results, does any of this matter, like if they're seeing conversions on what they're trying to sell or if they're seeing brand recognition and awareness, like who cares?

And at the same time, like they should be getting what they pay for. And, and Jonas, to your point, I, what I will say to that and I've seen this across not nearly as many shows as you have, but apple and Spotify always have much, much higher consumption per episode. YouTube is always a, a much worse curve.

And when an episode goes viral or is has a big ad campaign behind it or marketing campaign you see a much closer to like a hockey stick curve on Apple and Spotify too.

Jonas Woost: Can I speak to the, does it even matter? The question earlier was does any of this even matter if the campaigns perform? And I think it's such a great point. I love talking about audience verifications and who was there. Well, if the brand spends money and then because of the spend, they make money over here and hopefully they make more money than they spend. All good. There is no problem. Don't worry about it. Don't wait. You don't have to know how the sausage is made. If you campaign performing, and you can measure that, good for you, don’t do anything. However, there are a number of products available out there that do not require coupon code where people do not go to a website.

If I'm making a decision between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, we don't work with any of those companies. Happy to work with them. I'm not using a coupon code, right? I'm at the store and I'm like. One of them, right? Those are the kinds of advertisers that we believe are currently not investing because they don't have the attribution, they don't have that data. They at least wanna see like when someone heard the ad.

Jeff Umbro: There it is.

Taylor Bradbury: Let me jump in there, because we work with Molson Coors, which no one's buying Coors Light online. That's crazy. But a client like Molson Coors, they're fun because they actually really invest in audio. Like they, they really enjoy the audio and what they're looking for is more of that engagement creator kind of content.

They look for the sponsorships. They wanna be involved in the World Cup or in baseball, and they wanna have their name connected. So it's not necessarily something that's as performance driven as most of our clients. They still care about it in some way because they're a brand and at the end of the day they need to provide positive ROI.

Jeff Umbro: Somebody has a boss summer who's gonna want to see a number right?

Taylor Bradbury: Right? Right. And so it's just a little bit of a different narrative when, when we look at those kinds of campaigns where it's not necessarily we're gonna bring you a CPA, that is X, X. No, it's, here's how we're showing up. Here's the kind of content that's being created. Here's the kind of involvement that we need to have. It matters.

Jeff Umbro: So. I am also curious with all the changes that we're seeing; all these platforms just integrated Spotify video to make it a lot easier to publish video to the platform.

Everything that's happening next month with Apple, every podcast under the sun trying to move over to YouTube and figure out like their, all, their video strategy. I mean, we just talked a little bit about like how you guys are selling and buying ads on video, but. And I know that this is only gonna apply to the lucky few in the beginning.

And then eventually we're gonna see a lot more people who are buying ads on the platform. We're gonna see programmatic, hopefully, or dynamic at least at some point soon on video. What do you guys think we're gonna be talking about in two years or in five years? If we have this exact conversation.

Taylor Bradbury: I think the CTV integration; I think all these podcasts showing up on Netflix and Hulu and Tubi. That's, that's starting now. We know that's starting now. I think that's gonna be, I mean, we started talking about video five years ago and here we are still talking about it.

So I, that's, that's not. Hopefully video by that time we have a better hold on. But I think the, the how we're monetizing cross channel in that way where it's still a podcast, but it's now in a new, new space. I think that's gonna be a conversation that's still gonna be very top of mind. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Yeah. I think we're gonna be replacing television. I said it on stage earlier with you. I do feel like, shameless plughere. We're, we're on MS Now at 9:00 PM. First thing was last week, and I think a lot of these shows are gonna be replacing daytime talk.

Jeff Umbro: How did that perform by the way?

Giancarlo Bizzarro: I can get you the data and get back to you.

Jeff Umbro: Were you all happy with it?

Giancarlo Bizzarro: I think we were, yeah. You know, I think for the most part it's a interesting dynamic, right?

In the sense that it's a lot of the late night news channels, demographic are my parents, and they're in their seventies and eighties, right? Our audience is millennial to Gen Z, right? And so these people are starting to see that they need to make investments in content that's already able to, and if they don't, it’s existential for their business models. Right? Because these people aren’t going to be around. I hope my parents are there for a long time, but to your point, to yours.

We need to be able to see what's happening across these things. And the fragmentation and the diversification of media makes it a little bit more complicated. So like we would love to be working with Pepsi, Coke if we did something with Molson Coors in the past. Probably shouldn't say that, they get in trouble for it. But you know, I think for us, like it's about our content becoming, it took us long enough to get people to believe in this challenge.

As a whole, this channel is here, right? You need to be aware of it. You need to be involved in it. You need to work with people like Taylor and Jonas and hopefully myself to make sure that the audiences that we are delivering towards, you're  reaching. Because if you're not you're gonna be left in the dust by your competition, a lot of the brands that you've launched, that I've launched, even these performance brands, like they become mainstays, right? They did that through podcasting. This election was decided but was heavily influenced through podcasting.

Right now this is becoming television. And if people do not consider that consider that a place to be. Then, you know, that’s on them.

Jeff Umbro: I think, well what are your predictions?

Jonas Woost: Okay, I'm avoiding the question by, by maybe talking about what's not gonna change. Okay. So podcasting will still, will still build strong, meaningful relationships with audiences that are just different than, say, my opinion, a relationship between a social influencer audience; people could keep coming back to our shows.High retention rates, high We measure that, how often people came back, And that's worth financial values. Now in the in the audience that we go through the content. Right. It’s not gonna change. Might be video, might be audio, it's probably gonna be both; people have been using and I think it's important that that YouTube likes to use, People have been using TV sets as radio for many, many years.

Like my parents, TV sits on the background, been watching that thing was just like sort of, you know, used the sound in the background. So video, I’ve avoided the question. We're gonna continue amazing relationships with audiences and we can monetize that and we'll monetize that and it's gonna be worth.

More than other media channels. This is great. Oh, this is great news. Of course, biased on the data side. We're gonna use a different currency to monetize that. That actually doesn't mean like people are gonna make more or less money. It just means better money and the data. The big thing about data that we have is that there are some actors in this industry right now that use systems to buy a bunch of downloads and then sell those downloads to advertisers we know because people do that. We all have worked with these people. We've all heard these kind of stories. Fine. They can do whatever they want, but they're messing up to the rest of us, right? 'cause an advertiser buys over there and they say well, podcasting is cleaner, not working for me, and they're out.

Right? No, no, we can't have that. Right. We need to continue to build the trust with the advertisers as well. So I think they, the dataset we can do and we'll do a lot over the next two years.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, the distribution model doesn't matter. It's all about building a community and then selling ads to that community or, or whatever you're gonna do with that community. 

Taylor Bradbury: I actually have one more here. Something that I also think we're gonna be talking about is more of the talent contracts. And what I mean by that is we've seen in the past couple years a lot of these big name people who've come in who didn't make their start in podcasting, they made their start in something else and they're like, oh, I'm gonna launch a podcast.

And that's great, you know, brings in more people. But they are not creator first content. They are celebrities or wannabe celebrities who wanna have a podcast. And I think one of the things that we're seeing is as these big names keep jumping from network to network and these contracts get signed, we're, I mean, what we have seen is those DR brands who care about the performance and who care about the relationships are getting booted by these big, big brands who don't necessarily care about that kind of thing. So there's a lot of over insertion. 

There's too many ads in episodes because there's too much monetization. So I think that's part of it. But really when it comes down to the talent itself, they don't care about as, as much as these creators who care about their podcasts, who care about their audience. And so we've seen a lot of struggles trying to get things on behalf of our clients and, and these contracts that these big networks have with these talents don't account for what, what the industry is doing and what the industry wants to do.

So Crooked is actually great at this. Like your creators are creator-first kind of people who care about the client, who wanna do right, who are easy to work with. But you know, then you have these big name celebrities who come in who, they don't care that we're, you know, even if we're dropping like $50,000 in their podcast or more, that's, that's nothing to them. And so we're having a hard time with some of the contracts and negotiations that we're doing because at the end of the day, the network talent contacts are not signing in the ways that they need to. So I think, I think we're gonna see a shift in how some of these big players enter this space and how, how a lot of the brands can work with them.

Jeff Umbro: And I've heard a handful of horror stories where big celebrity signs a contract with a publisher, and publisher forgets to include anything about them reading the ads and then they lose a ton of money on the podcast.

I wanna move on to the next bucket. I'm gonna go quick on this one 'cause I hate this topic, but how are you guys using AI in your day to day right now? Let's start with you Giancarlo. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Just answered this on stage, hour and a half ago. At Crooked, we believe in innovation we want to use. The tools at disposal. We also are, our production is unionized with WG East.

Jeff Umbro: Pro human. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: We're definitely pro human. What makes our content and our sort of ecosystem, and our, our, stuff unique is the fact that we do not want to AI replace people. But at the same time, we realize that it's an absolutely useful tool. I use it. We’re using it to track airchecks, sometimes send emails or you know, review data sets. These are things that we use it on the daily. And obviously we want to be additive, not replacing.

Jeff Umbro: Okay.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: For the most part.

Jeff Umbro: I like that answer. 

Taylor Bradbury: We typically use it most in our produced audio for our different advertisers. So if we need something that we can turn around quickly, client's open to, it doesn't need an actual voiceover. We've used it in that instance. We use it to QA.

Jeff Umbro: Are these like generic voices that you're using?

Taylor Bradbury: Yes, yes. We work with a company, a third party company that produced AI ads, which is pretty crazy. How sometimes they sound really good. Sometimes you can tell that they're AI. 

On the flip side of that, we've also had to include language in our orders that we send out about the ads need to be human voices. It can't be AI. Because we've had instances where the ads come in and we're like, hold on, this is not right. Like this is not, this is not a real person. So that's been an interesting thing to kind of navigate too.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. Okay. Would you ever consider having AI generated voices using the host voices? Would you be okay with that?

Taylor Bradbury: Yes. For the right client. Yeah, for the right client. I think it's very interesting, but I also think you lose that authenticity that we love so much in podcasting.

That's why we're here. If it is a really, really low rate and I'm trying to test something new, sure. I'm open to it

Jeff Umbro: Is, is that an answer for the celebrity issue that you were just talking about? 

Taylor Bradbury: Yes and no. The celebrity issue is more in terms of like exclusivity and something a little bit more custom. So I definitely would not use anything AI for anything custom People are gonna see through that.

If it's just a normal, I wouldn't use it at all if there's any kind of video component at all. 'cause again, that's gonna. Feel fake. I don't want it to feel fake. If I do something host AI, I want it to be very believable.

Jeff Umbro: Are you guys using it for like research at all, like maybe like on shows that you wanna book on or something?

Taylor Bradbury: We use it in, yes. Yes and no. We do have some publisher partners that we use who use AI, who can search the, the, oh my God, the client's webpage. And you can put in demo information and it will go through their entire roster of things. It'd be like, Hey, we think these are shows that would be good for you.

Jeff Umbro: Like Headgum has something like that.

Taylor Bradbury: Yeah. Like Headgum has like something like that which is really neat. So those kinds of research tools are super helpful.

Jeff Umbro: I really like Gumball.

Taylor Bradbury: Oh, I do too. I think they've done some incredible things. Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: Cool. Jonas.

Jonas Woost: A large part of our business is consulting. As you might know, people help them grow their shows, help them figure out how to use data better.

That's actually for us, a limited application for AI because we've learned that people hire because they want to be human.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Jonas Woost: It's actually like kind of for people that wanna interact with someone and sort of solve the problems between humans. I think that's a personality thing. I think there's certain things people ask us where they, they just ask AI, but they don't want to.

Just like when I have a thing, I want to talk to doctor, I don't,and I guess they could ask ai, but I'd rather just just a personal choice. Think thought clients, I think make that choice they want to talk to. So on the would you like some research and actually the usual stuff that people might use AI for, it's not that relevant for, for the consulting side, but of course on the platform side dashboard essentially piece of software, software development is interesting in 2026, spent a lot of money on. Nothing making it, I guess quite easy to replicate now. Right? If we had that two years ago. But of course we started using it right now. But I mean, we, like any other software company right now, needs to acknowledge that.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. Speaking of vibes.

Jonas Woost: Speaking of vibe. That's right. The value of the software itself that we, at least we build and many other people build is maybe not zero right now, but heading towards zero.

Right. could dispensate it quite easily. Right. So the value that we are adding, luckily. It's actually, we added the value, like the actual thing. The code is cool and we always spend a lot of money on it, but it could be replicated, it’s more like the install base and the, the sort of knowledge behind it. And so it's an interesting space for us, AI.

Jeff Umbro: Interesting. I didn't expect you to say that. But good answer. Next bucket is consolidation. And typically when we're talking about this, we're talking about Spotify buying Megaphone or, you know, ART19 going to Amazon and wondering and all this stuff. I feel like people speak less about the acquisitions on the sales side. Libsyn buying AdvertiseCast Veritone, Performance Bridge, Oxford Road, Omnicom and IPG. My question is, should publishers be worried about all of the consolidation in the industry on the sales side? Like are there, are there going to be fewer buyers and more publishers?

Giancarlo Bizzarro: I don't think so. I think that there's definitely pool of people that I wish I had more time to talk, like personally, at Crooked, I'm spread so thin that I don't have enough time to field calls from every single person at Ad Results or our other partners or agencies or our clients we work with. I think there's always a space not to steal from you for, for the people interactions and connections. When you can prove something out to someone or do a client, for instance, you is almost more so. I think, listen, like as long as we're transparent about what we're doing and we're able to deliver that message as an industry, there will always be people. We can, you know, show case studies for why they should be advertising. 

Listen, if there are ways that we can help other places, come in through consolidation, great. If it's consolidating and putting money towards one thing I'm worried about junior people, not trying to get back to AI, having the skillset because all of us have had to do our jobs from the ground up. And that's not a bad thing to say, but when you're, when you're limiting those positions, I think that's potentially an existential crisis. Not for the ad agencies, but for us all. We're using that knowledge share. That's, you know.Something that they may not, they may have that done for them, but they might understand why it's different. 

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. So they have, they have the answer, but not the process.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: Exactly. 

Taylor Bradbury: I think the mergers just, or the consolidation. I don't think we need to be worried about there being less people to talk to or, or because this space is still growing, like audio is still growing.

We still have brands who come in who, this is an experiential space for them. We're not, we're not slowing down anytime soon.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. Put, put, put another way for both of you guys, I guess. Are there going to be the lucky few publishers, like the 1% of the publishing world, the favorites of, of the fewer buyers?

Taylor Bradbury: There'll always be favorites in this industry. That's, that's gonna just happen. 

Giancarlo Bizzarro: I think what works works, right. That's not to say that it’s gonna be challenging to launch, but I do think that given how fragmented spaces, it's probably gonna be more difficult for buyers to find the next big thing without trying things that they're maybe not accustomed to doing right out of the gate. I don't know if you agree with that.

Taylor Bradbury: I agree with that. I agree with that. Let me noodle on it.

Jeff Umbro: Okay, I, I'll come back to you 'cause Jonas, I have a slightly different version of this question for you. You have been experimenting with your baked in version, your verified listen version of the buys. I hope I'm not spilling any beans here, but I know that you have kind of come up with a little bit of resistance to those buys. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jonas Woost:  Okay. So what's happening right now? We multiple campaigns right now in market where we are buying ads. These ads are typically promoting other podcasts, our client's podcasts, and we are measuring differently how many people we're reaching. And we actually make this verified impression and we measure how many times someone actually make it through the end. Whether that's a preroll or postroll, it doesn’t really matter, verifiably how many people have, so we do this right now. We talk about resistance. There was a moment, and I'll be very honest and transparent here, where we thought you know what? We need to blow this whole thing up, let's get rid of right now, rid of impressions. They were right now, download. Let's just this is not what we do. We should trade and verify impressions. This is all we should do. That was a little naive, is naive resistance. We realize the resistance from the publisher side is sort of not surprising because there's a system that works, like blowing that up. Ugh. But from the buyers’ side we had the same resistance. People saying we built these systems and these price sheets and the trust. That's where we got the resistance and we were a little naive. Right now, the way we are looking at what we call verified impressions. We are looking at as a post-campaign measurement tool saying, we're gonna still gonna trade exactly the way we're at now, and you can negotiate the price as you always did. Nothing's gonna change, but after the fact, let's just measure this kind of more, even that doesn't measure attribution by kind of more like a Podscribe or Magellan, where after the fact you would see okay, the campaign is done all good. This is great. Let's look at what the numbers actually say, 'cause that can then inform future campaigns. That's the way we look at it now.

Jeff Umbro: So the reason I ask that question now is because, and maybe this is too big of a leap for me to make, but I'm wondering if there is like a bigger resistance to change in the way that things are working today on the buy side and if that gap is going to widen if we have fewer buyers. So that is a fear of mine and I'm wondering if the consolidation is going to kind of, just continue that trend.

And again, maybe this is too big of a leap, but, but that's one thing that I'm, I'm kind of worried about.

Taylor Bradbury: Yeah, I don't necessarily think it's something to be worried about in any kind of near future. I think that there are always going to be different go to market strategies, no matter, I mean, even if everything converges into one, at the end of the day, like there's always gonna be a different go to market strategy because each client comes in with different goals and expectations and how they wanna show up.

So. While it might come from fewer places, if there's more brands in the space and there's still the need, you're still going to, you're still going to have you know, it might not be your favorite people that you're working with anymore, or it might be a different way that we're looking at it, but I don't think that we're losing out on, on how, I mean Okay.

In front of the agency side, I hate it. Right? I hate it, but, but I don't think that it should necessarily. Scare the publishers or the network partners really?

Jeff Umbro: Okay. I'm satisfied with that.

Jonas Woost: What about this? So if there's consolidation, this is your fear, right? Consolidation is too much power in that and they can sort of dictate not just terms and also how we trade?

Jeff Umbro: Drive prices down, buy from the same hundred shows.

Jonas Woost: But doesn't that also open up some space for someone new to come in?

A boutique agency could do some buy that maybe does it differently. Yeah. Only buys a certain way or buys certain shows, or does a certain?

Jeff Umbro: A silver lining.

Taylor Bradbury: I also think you open it up to the brands who wanna buy direct, who don't wanna work with the, the big names.

Giancarlo Bizzarro: I would also say we, we've always in this industry, has changed, forced upon us.

Like when I started buying, probably you as well, we were buying baked in ads, like we didn't have a ton of visibility. And then everyone's, everything's dynamic now. We're like, okay, how does this work? You don’t have enough ad ops people to put my little pixel in there. Half of my ads are going out without that. Are you gonna fix this? No, we're just gonna, you know, I think that obviously change is the key to innovation as you just rightfully pointed out. And there will be people who come around.

Jeff Umbro: Well, thank you guys for easing my fears. I don't like change. But so thank you. Thank you guys so much for joining us. This was really, really amazing. I appreciate everything and we'll see you guys in a little bit.

Taylor Bradbury: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Jeff Umbro: 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, Erin Weiss, and Sheeba Joseph, and a special thank you to Dan Christo.