The AI Problem Nobody's Talking About in Podcasting

Well, welcome. Thank you for joining me tonight. Uh, we're going to do another deep dive into podcast tips and insights. And I'm hoping to really kind of dig deep into the, the current tension that's out there and opportunity and change that's happening in the podcasting space right now. Really, I think the key topics that we're going to talk about tonight are the tension around video coming back into the podcasting space, and I know I've talked about that a lot on this series. Especially in the OG community and seeing where podcasting has come from and where it's been like the last few years as an audio-only platform. So we got Spotify Video, YouTube Video, short-form video content coming into the space increasingly. And so this is a period of change, I believe, in the podcasting space. So thank you so much for joining me. My name is Rob Greenlee and I'm a 20-year podcasting veteran. I've worked for lots of podcasting companies like Libsyn and Spreaker and Microsoft, who used to be in podcasting, and I've been around the podcasting space a long time. So thank you for joining me here. And we're also going to talk about, is AI, kind of AI-generated content now potentially damaging to the podcast space in the industry? And is it something that listeners are going to accept? And that's kind of what we're going to talk about tonight and maybe come up with some ideas around AI safeguards and rules around audio cloning and, you know, taking people from the human side and transferring it over to the AI side and all that stuff. And then also, I hope to talk about brand safety and suitability to some degree and how that fits into the ad side of podcasting. And also to kind of dovetail on that too, the programmatic automated ad insertion kind of technology that's been kind of rapidly developing out there for the last few years and the best approach to take with that. And I've got a terrific guest with me. His name is Glenn Rubenstein, and he's the founder and CEO of Adopter Media. It's a podcast advertising agency that's been around the medium a long time, and Glenn has spent a lot of time with a very early pioneer in podcasting, the TWiT Network at TWiT TV, and has worked with luminaries like Alia LaPorte, who really kind of, I think in a lot of ways, kind of pioneered the podcast advertising space. So I thought Glenn would be a perfect person to have on the show. So let me bring Glenn up to the stage and we can, we can talk to him at a deeper level. So Glenn, thanks so much for taking some time out tonight to join me.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Yeah. So, so anyway, let me turn off some, some possibly annoying music here. And that's always the thing about doing things live is you sometimes have to do things in the middle of the show that disrupted a little bit. But, but anyway, let me, um, I think I thought I turned off the music here, so let me do that so it doesn't annoy people. I've done episodes in the past where running that music for too long kind of distracts people. But anyway, um, so Glenn, uh, let's, let's kind of dive into it and talk about kind of a little bit of your background, but You know, in the context of our conversation and kind of that lead-in that we had, I mean, you spent quite a few years working at Twit and doing things with that network in the early days, which really kind of probably taught you a lot of things in the early days about podcast advertising and kind of podcasting and video and all this kind of stuff like that. And then now you've transferred and have been working with podcast advertising at Adopter Media for, for quite a while now. So, so go ahead and kind of, kind of jump in and tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So, I mean, let's start with the present. For the last 8 and a half years, I have been the CEO of Adopter Media. We're a dedicated agency specializing in endorsement ads across podcasts and YouTube. We're talking about host read advertising, the stuff that we love, right? When the host of our favorite show takes a moment to tell you about a product or service that they enjoy using and they recommend. And we, as the listener or the viewer, are so motivated, we go immediately to that website, use that offer code, and place an order ourselves. Um, what's interesting about this is, you know, here we are at this stage. I mean, we're in the top 5 of agencies in this space doing these sorts of ads. And we're a team of 13. We've doubled in size in the last year. It's been really a phenomenal journey, but that, for me, that chapter started in 2016 when I left TWiT, This Week in Tech, with Leo Laporte, where I'd been around starting in like 2011, but really 2012 through 2015, I was the director of marketing and worked with them. I did some of their in-house ad sales And prior to that, what's funny is I'd actually met Leo Laporte back in the early '90s, I think 1990 or '91, when I was a teenage video game journalist writing for the San Francisco Examiner. And I worked with Leo on a radio show called On Computers. I monitored the chat room and I was sort of the, I don't know, second co-host after Gina Smith. It was a very fun experience. I did stuff with Leo over the years on tech TV. What's funny is I actually did some stuff with Leo about how to play MP3s in your car. I had a in my car at the time before we had those MP3 players. And I even did a segment on the screensavers about Shoutcast for Winamp, which was an early precursor to podcasting. In fact, I was, I was the one originally that Leo credits with telling him about MP3s. So Leo and I had gone back this really long time. I had always been into whatever the latest and greatest was, especially when it came to audio on the internet. And when I really wanted to do something in the podcast space, I made it my mission in 2010 to to reconnect with Leo. He brought me into Twit. Originally, we tried to do a video game show that didn't quite work. Somehow I stumbled my way into becoming the director of marketing, and then Lisa Laporte, the CEO who I reported to, recruited me to work on ad sales with her. And between Leo and Lisa, I really learned the ins and outs of how podcasts are monetized, how advertising is bought, and was having so much success with brands that in late 2015, I was just constantly, constantly, constantly getting brands I was working with saying, hey, can you help us find and buy other opportunities similar to Leo and Twit, that I decided to leave and start Adopter Media in 2016. And the rest, as they say, is history.

So where did the name come from? What was the concept that you were thinking about, about the concept of Adopter Media?

So going back to the early '90s, in addition to doing my journalism career, I was also consulting with marketing agencies, PR agencies. People wanted to understand, um, you know, like with younger people, what was it that they were looking for with video games? What was this medium with the internet? What was this medium? And what was really drilled into my head, um, writing for The Examiner, writing for Wired, doing all these things was that the, the early adopter is the most powerful consumer for a brand new product or service because the early adopter is not only going to become a customer, they're also going to become an evangelist of your product. And so when I was thinking about what to call my agency, this idea of Adopter Media, I loved that it had the word ad, it had the word opt as in optimize, and I love that it really embodied this idea of the early adopter, which had always been in my professional career preached as the most important audience. And for what we do with endorsement advertising for podcasts, for YouTube, and these brands that are emerging brands that are coming into the space, it's just, I think Adopter Media made the utmost sense as far as what to call the agency.

Got it, got it. Yeah, I think that does make sense. I'm gonna have to, I've got two cameras, but I haven't figured out how to use it yet, so.

Yeah.

Experiments that's going on to hopefully add some dynamics to the, to the show. But, but yeah, I think that's, that's really, really interesting. And what I wanted to talk a little about is kind of leading because, please, Leo really kind of pioneered really the early days of video podcasting.

And absolutely.

And certainly the industry has— I've been around long enough, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years myself. So I was around in the early days when video podcasting was, was really kind of— and I'm sure you remember this too— was, was pretty dominant, um, in the podcasting. It was a big chunk of the medium. And then, then obviously YouTube started, and that siphoned off a lot of the, a lot of the video podcasters, uh, went over and made their shows available on YouTube. And subsequently, we've seen a kind of a decline over a few years in the video podcasting side. But with YouTube deciding to get involved in creating a playlist called Podcasts, it's opened the Pandora's box again. And then now with Spotify adding the support for video podcasts too, it's kind of changed the conversation. Then research coming out about how, you know, video podcasts is like one of the most popular ways people are finding new shows. So it's created this kind of this spin of interest that may be founded, maybe unfounded around the power of video. What's your take on this conversation?

So it's interesting, right? Because if you think about the history of this medium, podcasting really started with the idea that we had the MP3 and we had the ability to put audio in an easily managed small file format that you could take anywhere. Um, but the, the catch was you had to download it to your computer, load it onto a device, and it was a bit of a cumbersome process. When that was happening, this idea of video, of having an onboard player, of, okay, video, maybe I don't want that on the go, so maybe instead of having to send that to a device, I could just sit at my computer and watch a show. Um, there was the home theater PC as an idea, which is something I still believe in, but I think it was definitely very popular 20-some-odd years ago. So this idea that you could watch a podcast, and again, early adopter medium, uh, these were people that had their computers hooked up to a television. They could watch Leo, um, and enjoy his content that way pre-YouTube, because before YouTube, um, we were going to BitTorrent sometimes to download video podcasts. We were, uh, people were complaining about bandwidth costs. It wasn't just you click the play button and if you did, it was real video or something in really disappointing quality. Um, so what's crazy though is that when the iPhone came out and then streaming audio on a portable device, audio had this renaissance that almost snuck up on us. Right. And remember, um, it's, it's funny. I think about some of this in terms of, uh, my time at Twit, but remember that, oh, uh, video is going to be the future, Rev3, these other networks that are doing essentially podcast video. And then the iPhone basically was the sneak resurgence to where Serial and Startup and all these shows took off, it was like, oh yeah, having a device where I can just click play and listen to my favorite shows, that's so much more convenient than having to offload something from a computer to hooking up, you know, something to your USB port, wait for it to transfer over. So audio had this amazing comeback. And then what we saw is, again, and I think the pandemic helped with this because people being at home increased video consumption, and you started realizing Hey, a lot of these podcasts that I like listening to are also streaming on YouTube and there's a video component to it. And it's interesting when you look about where the overall aggregate audiences in the United States, save population growth, they haven't really changed, right? I mean, there are people that want to watch video content. People want to listen to audio content. Podcasts took away from the radio audience.

Yeah.

And YouTube has taken away from the TV audience. I would argue a lot of these simulcasts are taking away from the TV news audience, the cable news audience, and, uh, the talk show, the late night talk show or afternoon talk show. Because you can't tell me that like what Theo Von does isn't more compelling to a younger audience than watching, um, Jimmy Fallon. You know, they would rather watch Theo Von hang out with the guests and you look at the numbers. These shows are getting, and in many cases they're beating linear TV.

Yeah, yeah, I agree that the, the whole mainstream media is totally in trouble.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Going down fast.

So the funny thing about it is though, then you think about how it relates to advertising, and this is why I love what we do and the brands that we work with, because when you think about advertising, it's— it is really old school. It's going back to, you know, the 1950s style of television where Jackie Gleason would then take a moment and tell you about, you know, his motor oil, or I guess at the time his cigarette brand perhaps. Um, or what radio kept doing, and Leo was doing this back when I was doing radio with Leo in the early '90s, where it was endorsement advertising. It was these host-read ads where, you know, this personality that you love and you watch or listen to would then take a moment and tell you about product and service in a way that was much more personal, entertaining, and unique than, um, any pre-produced advertising. And it's funny now because if you look at the pre-produced ads you see on video, a lot of times you go, oh my God, these ads are annoying. And they're purposefully so because they found that's what you're going to remember them by.

Right.

You know, and then when you listen to audio, it's kind of crazy that so much of the audio podcast audience comes from radio and they were tired of the same old boring content, too many ads. And you've seen this weird I want to say self-destructive streak, but, uh, I'd just say it was never a good sign for the podcast industry when a lot of the same companies that made radio unlistenable decided we're going to now try and control podcasting because they took a lot of the same worst instincts that they applied to radio and applied them to podcasts where, you know, you've got some shows that are going out with 16 ads across, uh, 4 ad breaks. And you, you wonder why people, uh, skip ads. It's— they don't hate ads, they hate bad ads.

Well, and we've seen over the last probably 6, 7 years a lot of the large radio companies get involved heavily in podcasting, buy podcasting companies, and really start producing content. And I always thought in the— even the early days that they would bring a lot of the advertising ideology over to podcasting. I mean, they're seeing that as kind of like their future. And so why wouldn't they, right? Is to try and push what they've done for years on the broadcast radio side into the podcast side.

Yeah.

And to some degree, we've seen that happen. And I think that there is maybe a little bit of sensitivity to the differences between the two mediums as far as the willingness of the audience to embrace heavy ad loads, but I don't know that it's— I think we're heading in the wrong direction on that.

I don't know what you think, but yeah, I think, um, I am not interested as someone who owns an agency and we place, you know, considerable 8-figure sum each year on behalf of our clients. I am not interested in giving money or reinforcing the bad behavior of any network that wants to over-monetize something at the expense of a good listener experience.

And what is that balance? I mean, I think that's the question that I hear all the time is that, I mean, obviously if you're playing in programmatic too, this is a whole nother component of this conversation is once you start getting into automated advertising, it becomes really easy to overload your show with ads. And I think it's just one of those things, you know, it's like a multiplier effect, right? It's like, you know, you add 2 ads, that's, 2 times $5 per 1,000. And if you had 3 ads, that's $15 per 1,000. I mean, you can see how the podcaster would think about this, right? It's, if I can put in another 5 ads, I'm gonna make, you know, another $25 per 1,000 downloads, you know? And it becomes very easy to slip down the slope.

Maybe though, I mean, this is where it becomes a weird game of Jenga though, because once you destroy that listener trust, you're not getting that back. Once you run too many ads and your listeners say, you know what, I don't want to listen to the show anymore. The content versus listening experience, the balance just isn't there. Um, and it's funny, you know, so the same way I still hear Leo Laporte's voice in my head whenever I sit down to write ad copy for one of my clients—

oh, you know, he was a master at it.

Yeah. And I would— because I would be in that studio, we had an open workspace in the studio. But the same way I always remember something that, uh, Lisa Laporte, the CEO of Twit, would always say, which is one ad for every 20 to 30 minutes of content. That's the sweet spot. And I think that a lot of podcasters violate that because again, they see the opportunity to make more money. But you are sacrificing ad efficacy. I mean, we forget often that this medium— look, and we love brands coming in and wanting to do brand awareness advertising, but this medium, both YouTube and podcasts, any form of endorsement audio, has largely been a direct response medium. So when you start overstuffing ads and trying to run one host read ad and then, uh, 4 ads of backfill at a low CPM or programmatic markers and just make it unlistenable for your listeners, like that's going to drive down ad efficacy, which is going to hamper your ability to get good solid CPMs from direct response advertisers. Because if they don't see a response or result, they're not going to keep working with you.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I 100% agree with that. I think that it's, it's definitely, um, it's a balance. I mean, so what's your recommendation? I mean, what's your philosophy when you work with a show to represent them? What kind of ad loads are you looking for in, let's say, a 15-minute, 30-minute, 60-minute show?

Yeah, so, so we represent the advertisers, not the podcast or the YouTubers, but when we are buying inventory, yeah, we want to see, okay, Yeah, we want to represent the, the, the brand brands, correct? Correct. So when we look at a show, we're trying to make sure they're not overstuffing it. And if they are, that's going to drastically alter our opinion of what CPM we should be paying. You know, if we're looking at somebody that's running 16 ads in an episode, that tells me that that was a better business decision to them to run 16 ads at rock bottom rates than it was to focus on getting 4 advertisers and try and charge them a $20 CPM.

Wow.

Well, you know, not a good sign. And then we get into the contract side of it because you have to start then mandating things, um, that if you're going to be stacking ads, we need to be first in that stack. If you're going to be doing 5 or 6 ad breaks in a show, we need to run in the first 2 ad breaks and first in that stack. Um, you don't want to pay for something and then just realize that they over-monetize their show to the point of efficacy where it's just not effective for anyone.

Yeah. So not everybody can go first, right? Sure, sure.

But again, same thing, right? So go back to this idea. If you can get, and I'm using just this for loose math, right? If you can get 4 ads at a $25 CPM, run 4 ads in your show, you advertise who goes first, but you do them in islands. You do each ad. And so at ad break, you're making $100 combined. Per thousand unless you're making $100 CPM in aggregate on your show. I know a lot of podcasters that even doing backfill programmatic, they're not clearing $100 CPM on their show.

Right.

You know, I think less is more. And if you can focus on long-term relationships, that's also predictable revenue. This is the other thing that I think, um, podcasters, individual podcasters understand this. Networks don't always understand this. And many of them do, but I'm going to specifically talking about, some of the larger players in the space that they're not really networks. Twit is a network. QCode is a network. MTV back in the day was like a network. You had a sense of, I watch MTV, I love all these shows on MTV. You watch Comedy Central, that was a network. A lot of these larger entities are clearinghouses. They're a place where you can go and they represent maybe 1,000 different properties across different genres, geographies, et cetera. And you can go to them. You could spend your money with them, and that's the value proposition that they're offering you. They're offering you the convenience of doing something at an incredible scale. But when you do that, you have to remember some of these organizations, again, that came from radio, they have some of the largest salesforce, uh, organizations in all of advertising. So when you look at this, they're not looking at the shows that they have as individual shows, like Rob, you've got a show, Glenn, you've got a show, we've got a show about cars, we've got these 5 shows about politics. They don't think about it that way as, oh, I want to sell these shows. They look at it as this umbrella and say, we represent a billion impressions, right, per year, right, combined.

They're just trying to reach, you know, ears is what they're trying to reach. Yeah, so if that's what they're trying to say, whoever hears as they can, as long as the ears are somewhat targeted and pre-qualified somehow based on the content or, and I was gonna talk about this later in the episode too, is around this brand safety and suitability platforms and wanted to hear your thoughts on that as well. You know, those brands will buy ads, but they're also still spreading their ad buys across lots of different, you know, television, radio, and things like that. And not all the budgets that are in traditional media have moved over to podcasting quite yet. I'm sure that's always the struggle that you're trying to go face every day, is to try and get more of the budgets that they have in other media to move over to podcasts where it makes sense and where it works.

I'm actually— I've always had this weird philosophy about sales where I never want a brand to spend more with us than what can be spent effectively. Yeah, it's very interesting. And if brands, if TV is working for them and some of these things that they're doing for larger awareness plays make sense, as long as the dollars that we're spending, if those are direct response dollars, it's like, I think you should test. I think you should increase your budget. I think if you, if you were seeing, you know, 200%, 400%, whatever runaway returns, you should increase your spend to the point of fatigue because that will tell you how much scale opportunity there is. But beyond that, I don't think there's a reason to spend just to spend. So it's interesting sometimes because the way that I see people sell podcasts more so than YouTube, but the way I see people sell podcasts is this idea of, um, you know, they almost have this, this, uh, faulty thought that there is just unlimited budget to go around without any sense of accountability or results attached to it. And I think One thing that I feel really, really strongly about is that results for dollars, you know, like in my history and well over, you know, $150 million closing in on placed in this medium personally, like I feel that those dollars have driven results and I take a lot of pride in that.

Yeah, it's actually a good topic to talk about, about the concept of ROI and in results for brands as they look at these content plays that are out there, podcasts. What is the role, do you think, as you look long-term that the brands have to have a little bit more, I think, transparency with the content creators around ROI? Is there any thoughts that you have about that?

There's this weird fear— not so much anymore, Rob. We've been doing this a long time. I will tell you, 10 years ago, when there were, you know, maybe 500 podcasts total that had advertising on them, limited competition, there was a fear that, oh my God, if these podcasters or YouTubers knew how much money the brands were making They would jack up the rates. It would be insane. Um, I can tell you that if you don't, unless you have a time machine, you are not seeing the ROI right now that you were seeing even 5 years ago on podcasting or YouTube.

It's, it's dropped.

It's dropped because there's so much more inventory. There's so much more available. And so when you get into attribution, which isn't to say that the medium doesn't—

ad load too, on top of that.

And ad load. So, and I'm not saying that the medium doesn't work., but it used to be more directly attributable. So if you were listening to Leo 10 years ago and you were advertising on Leo's podcast, that was probably the only podcast you were advertising on. So you knew that those results were directly tied. I mean, the attribution metrics were phenomenal 10 years ago. Um, now if you're trying to reach men through comedy podcasts, you could have customers that are listening to Theo Von, Andrew Schultz, Shane Gillis. Um, Joe Rogan, uh, uh, you know, across the board on down. And what happens is they could be hearing your ad across 4 different podcasts. Which offer code did they use? The pixel attribution might show you that they consumed, you know, 2 episodes of this, 3 of the other one, and only 1 of this other one. So pixel attribution can actually help you break that up and attribute it better, more directly. But it's a much more sophisticated ballgame now. And additionally, We've also seen the rise of a lot of D2C brands that were super successful in podcasting in the last 5 years, um, have also now gone retail. So they know that the direct sales are only a fraction of what they're getting as opposed to Amazon retail. They know that podcasting is driving that and putting wind there, but it's not as tight of a direct attribution method. Uh, pardon me. It's not as tight of a direct attribution medium as it once was.

So is the, is the video side kind of taking, taking a stronger hold of the, of the path for ROI for the brands?

It is. And the reason why, um, I have a lot of issues with dynamic ad insertion technology. I've been very vocal about that because it, because it's not the technology I have an issue with, it's that it became a means again for some of these larger players for them to enact their worst instincts about how to monetize audio. Ad load is one of them, right? So our agency helped discover the iOS bug that was just recently fixed.

And the iOS 17 bug that caused all these companies to lose money.

Sorry, I feel like I should duck or not take credit for this, but, um, right. Look, PodScribe does a really— and I'm an advisor to PodScribe. Previous to that, I was an advisor to PodSights before they got, um, acquired by Spotify. But with PodScribe, we were looking at the data and we were saying on dynamic stuff, and we don't do a lot of dynamic impression-based buying. We buy episodes, not impressions. And the difference between that is if I buy an episode with Theo Vaughn, Theo Von does a unique read in each episode, where in every download of that episode, that is an episodic buy. With an impression buy, you could be running across the full catalog of a podcast. And what we were finding is we were— one day we were looking at a Podscribe report and we said, huh, this is really interesting. Of all the traffic in this report, when we start looking at IP addresses that, that can listen to these shows, we were saying 10% of the aggregate downloads of these shows was coming from like the same 500 IP addresses. And at first we said, is this a player that's caching? Is this somebody trying to game the stats? What is this? And then we said, no, they're— it's the same IP addresses, but they're actually downloading 200 episodes at a time of this show.

Wow.

So we took this, we went to another large advertiser in the space, um, and said, hey, can you Can I double-check this and see if you're seeing the same thing? They said yes. Verified with PodScribe that this was a problem. PodScribe started looking into it, talked with Brian at Sounds Profitable, ultimately went to Apple and identified that if you listen to an episode of, let's say, Pod Save America 5 years ago, and you were still subscribed and you didn't listen to any episodes since, but then you listened to another episode, you know, that day. Apple, trying to be helpful, would say, hey, you're interested in Pod Save America again. Let's catch you up on every episode you've missed. So if somebody was running an impression-based campaign on that episode, boom, there was 500 impressions that instantly we hit to the same IP address hearing the exact same ad. These were phantom downloads. These never translated into listens, but this is because Apple was trying to catch you up. On Everything You Missed. And if you had an impression-based buy on this show, served your ad against every one of those downloads.

Well, I guess if the ad was served and it wasn't baked in somehow, you know.

Yeah. So what's— and I feel for the industry, and I know the industry was very, very affected by this. Um, yeah, but there have been other corrections. There was a correction with Libsyn, uh, 5 or 6 years ago. About how downloads were chunked in streaming when multiple chunks counted as separate impressions when it was really chunks of the same episode.

Tech—

there have been tech improvements before that have affected what we— how we qualify impressions. These things need to happen to strengthen this medium. And I will say that for us, we were minimally affected because maybe 5% of our buys were impression-based buys. Um, but the more a company was invested in this, the more an advertiser was invested in impression-based buys, like they definitely felt the pain the most because this is what changed with how these impressions were, were being overserved. And I think it's an important development for the sake of the industry going forward. So with that in mind, for us, we've been bullish on YouTube for years because when every network was saying, oh no, no, no, we're selling things by impression now and we need to Have it where everything's dynamically served. And we went, eh, we're not seeing that that's working. We're seeing that that's performing really poorly for advertisers. And we found out why. We then discovered something, Rob. We said, you know what? Every podcast that also publishes to YouTube does it the old way. Your ad goes out in the episode and your ad lives in the episode forever. Meaning that this bug didn't affect any podcast that was simulcast on YouTube.

Right. Well, it wouldn't, right? Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense.

So we've been over, uh, like YouTube has been more than 50% of our business through simulcasts for the better part, I would say probably 5 of the last 8 years that I've been in this business, because we found that simulcasts were protection against innovation, which, uh, was causing these problems with impression-based ads.

Well, also on the download side, if you're calculating impressions, is that really something that you can be 100% sure is accurate?

We'll be 100% sure of anything. Maybe a Nielsen family got up and fixed themselves a snack when the show was on.

Even, even 60% accurate? I mean, I think it's a sampling, right?

It is. But this is what I love about direct response. I know if a podcast has an engaged audience, right? Because I look at the data. If I spent $1,000 with them and they put up 2 sales, it's not even $100 in revenue, their engagement's not real. Something's up. Sus, as the kids say. Um, but when we run on a show, I know within 48 hours, I don't know the full extent of how well it will work, but I know that there's something there. I know that it's real. Yeah. You know, and I think as an agency where we get a lot of business and advertisers choose to work with us rather than doing it on their own is that we've got this massive database of performance data. So we know we have a huge head start and a big unfair advantage in knowing where there's real engagement with podcasts and YouTube channels.

And it's also challenging with the, you know, with the response advertisers versus the brand advertisers that are not necessarily doing, let's say, a promo code or trying to drive a direct transaction. I think that's what's really driven a lot of this impression-based ideology is because they want to know that the brand was heard.

Yeah, well, and that even part of it too, and this is again, I mean, I'm not meaning to just completely set impression-based advertising on fire, but it's like we look at the report sometimes and some networks, bless their hearts, will say we have a shortfall of impressions What if we just run the same ad twice in the same episode? There you go. I don't like how much of my job on a regular basis is having to police bad actors in this space. Right. But once we find somebody who's doing this, we do not do business with them anymore if they do not change their ways. Ways. And I think that, um, you know, we could talk a little bit about AI. The reason why we made that statement and really wanted to put that out there—

yeah, I wanted to— yeah, good, good transition. I wanted to transition to that anyway.

Yeah, we've caught and reformed this industry so much and not taken credit for that. Um, we've kind of done it subtly. And don't get me wrong, I do think that there is a competitive spirit in agencies sometimes where if we know to avoid something, we, you know, but it's not proprietary, but it becomes, okay, this is part of our playbook and we know that we need to make sure these 20 things are avoided. And we assume other agencies might know most or all, and I'm sure they have their own things as well. But I think that given what, how seismic that iOS correction was and we saw that this industry had so bought in on impression-based buying, the, the pain that it caused. Um, we felt that with the quick evolution of AI tools, it was time to be forward-thinking publicly about how we could prevent something that could destroy this industry., when it comes to using AI for personal endorsements, because if that were to happen on a large scale, it would destroy trust in this medium from listeners, from advertisers, and it could possibly get the FTC, and legislation involved in this space to regulate aspects of endorsement-based advertising. And the FTC already has. I mean, look at the headlines we had a year or two ago. About the issue they took with a large advertiser doing a campaign where they had never even sent the product to the host they were asking to do an endorsement. Like, in my mind, that's podcast advertising 101, you know? And again, this goes back to what I learned from Leo and Lisa Laporte. I mean, that credibility is everything. And let me be clear, I'm not against AI. I probably I don't have a lot of hobbies, but messing around with AI tools is something that keeps me up at night. And I really find them to be a fun outlet for my creativity. I enjoy learning how to prompt better, how to generate better results. But specifically, when I look at the— in the last 6 months, what has been achieved through voice cloning and messing around with those tools and what has been achieved in AI music with Suno and Udio and the lawsuits the record companies filed against them. Look, video's not ready for primetime. I think we can all agree on that. If you look at what Luma Labs or some of the Sora or some of these things, it's impressive, but it's not there. But I guarantee you, Rob, I could send you— I've sent people— I could send you some songs I made on Suno or Udio that you would not think were AI. The fact the first one someone sent to me, I was like, oh, how'd you record this? And they were like, no, man, this was AI. They did it all. So between that and voice cloning, the technology is there. And it was very important to me that through my agency that we take this stand and say that we're going to put contractually limits on the use of AI and voice cloning in endorsement ads going forward. And there's a couple of reasons for this, but let me be clear what these limits are. We believe in accessibility. If someone has limited speech, um, or has issues with talking or something that prevents them from expressing themselves, then absolutely AI voice technology, we are 100% in favor of that for however you want to use that. Um, if you want to do post-production fixes, let's say you're a podcaster and you just did a great ad read. And you said, go to use my URL or offer code and save 30% off. And you realize later, oh my God, it was 20%. I have to redo the whole ad. Or if the ad goes out wrong, the advertiser is going to be mad at me. They're going to demand a make good. If you want to record and edit and drop it in, or if you can't record and edit and your staff wants to use a voice clone and say 20% instead of 30%, that's a-okay. Minimal little post-production fixes. But Rob, I've seen demos. I can't say who. But I know people in this space that have said, hey, look at what I was able to do. Look at what I messed around with. Look at this ad, which is AI, both audio and to a lesser extent video. Look at what I've done with this ad where the host never even had to set foot in the studio or record a word because I had their voice going. I knew what the advertiser wanted. I did this. Seeing that. And again, knowing that there are people in this space, the same people that overinvested in impression-based ad sales and ad stuffing and again, all these other worst instincts. It's a very short matter of time until somebody gets this idea and says, hey, you know, I can close this ad deal if I can get this host to record, you know, to use AI, if I can use an AI voice clone to get this host to do, you know, 500 different versions of this ad for 500 different DMA markets. In the US and this will allow me to sign this big ad deal. Like, that's coming if it hasn't happened already. And not to be a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, but I guarantee you there— I don't keep up with very much popular music because I'm old, but I guarantee you there are hit songs out there that have AI. We've already found that Hollywood studios have used AI in major productions. There's there's AI that we recognize because we go, eh, something doesn't feel right. There's also good AI that we don't recognize. So the reason why we made this announcement of putting this in our contract language, I'm not telling you anyone's doing this yet. I'm not telling you there are even tools to detect it yet. But if somebody signs this and they agree to these limits, when those tools become available, or if we—

it ever does happen, they're going to have to reveal it, right?

Well, there's, there's recourse, there's accountability. And, um, you would be amazed. This is like a secret to podcast advertising. Um, terms and conditions matter. You know, if Rob, if you sell me your podcast and you tell me you get a million downloads an episode, and then I look at the numbers and you got half a million downloads, I'm going to say, okay, so you're either running another ad or you're adjusting my client's invoice on this. If I buy a 60-second ad from you and you give me a 40-second ad, I might not be happy with that and I might want to talk about a make-good or some sort of bonus there. It's like these terms absolutely matter. So putting in this limitation on the use of AI and voice cloning, I do think is important. And I do, again, like I said, I urge every other advertiser and agency to get on board with this. And I would think it would show great leadership from networks to say that they're also going to draw a line. And the thing to remember is, I learned this as a journalist covering the video game industry in the 1990s, the ESRB was formed because the government said, if you don't start disclosing and rating the appropriateness of video games based on violence, sexual content, and language, if the industry doesn't take leadership and regulate themselves, the government will get involved in doing so.

I think they did to some degree. Yeah, I used to work for Xbox, so I saw that they had a ratings thing that came out of the FTC.

But the ESRB was right, meant to circumvent that. So the ESRB is an independent industry organization. And, you know, I thought it was also a little weird that, you know, the IAB hasn't been, uh, at the forefront of this. I think that, yeah, we really need to uphold a standard, um, an ethical standard as an industry for the ads that we do in this medium, especially with endorsement advertising.

So I would say, Glenn, that, um, if you combine the programmatic dynamic ad insertion, obviously Programmatic utilizes the dynamic ad insertion technology. So if you combine that with the ability to spin up AI-generated ad copy that's ready to go, you can see where the perfect scenario starts to develop, right? Where you can have instant buys of ads that sound like host reads.

Yeah.

Why does Joe Rogan ever need to set foot in a studio again to record an ad? Well, there's a lot of incentives for this to happen. And I think that's one of the things, like you said, I think the only thing that's really holding this back is the fact that AI is still not good enough. And it's going to create a problem with authenticity with audiences that's going to impact campaigns. And I can see where you would be upset at it, but at some point, whether it's 5 years from now or 6 years from now, you won't be able to tell.

I do think there will be tools, but also these things devalue, yeah, the what creators are able to charge for ads. Think about, Rob, 15 years ago, right? The 50 podcasts that existed that took ads, half of them hosted by Leo Laporte, um, would brag about the triple-digit CPMs they were able to charge advertisers.

Right.

That's true.

Or, you know, $50 or $70 campaigns. I know, I'm sure Leo got some of those, right?

John Lee Dumas published that blog post saying $25 was the industry average, and somehow that became the industry standard for a period.

I think it's right now it's probably $23, $24.

It's lower than— I mean, I see what Libsyn publishes, but I could tell you as a buyer, no, that is not the industry standard. That might be the average of what Libsyn charges, No, that is not the average. There is no standard CPM. Has it come down here over the last year? Come down significantly, come down significantly over the last 5 years. You know, and by the way, let me tell you this, Rob, there are some shows that have such a great connection with their audience. I have clients that would gladly pay $100 CPM based on the results they see.

I have some shows, probably on the audience, right? It depends on who you're reaching.

But Rob, I have thousands of shows I have tested over the years. That I would not advise my clients to buy even at a $1 CPM.

They would still lose money.

Yeah, because they're not going to convert, right? Yeah, it's not going to convert. There's no there there, you know. So, so what you're talking about here, so it's like, okay, so, you know, whatever Spotify charges for Joe Rogan, I probably shouldn't say the exact number. I think it's out there, but it's premium. It's premium, premium CPM. If they did this with AI and just rolled it out there with a clone, I guarantee you that's going to bring that number down substantially. Um, and it has a ripple effect. You need to have value to keep that industry standard CPM in the double digits. You need to have that North Star that is the high end to, to keep that average. If you start lowering that and diluting that, it's going to just get really sad what people are going to be able to sell their content for.

Yeah. So this whole convergence of audio and video kind of complicates this conversation too, because if they did it with the audio side and they were trying to create, you know, the same content, right, as video versus audio, they would have to do it for the video side too, which means that they would have to auto-generate AI-generated host reads on the video side too, right?

Although, do you remember, it was really in fashion about 15 years ago, do you remember all those viral sites where they figured out how to stitch in on-screen graphics?

Not audio, they never figured out audio. Oh, that's right, that's right. Layering the graphics on top of the video, like behind it or something like that. Like a product placement.

Yeah, yeah, well, they did that, but I remember there's that viral site, maybe it was in the 2008 presidential campaign, where, you know, you get a thing from your friend, it's like, can you believe Rob Greenlee is running for president? And it would show somebody with like a Rob Greenlee tattoo on their back, and it was like they were layering that all in. Uh, me running for president, there you go. Hey man, uh, but no, I think that so technology, people will find ways to, to do this, but again, it's, it's like This is really an old school idea, but it's like by entering into a contract, again, you have accountability, you have enforceability, you have recourse, right? That's true. You know, and we need to protect this industry. Those of us that have been doing this long enough, like, we need to be the ones to say, okay, there has been acceptable compromise that has happened, but there needs to be a red line on some things that I'm telling you. Like, I thought about what it is I really do. Right? Like, um, I really work in endorsement advertising. That phrase has never caught on. Um, I, that the easiest.com I've ever bought, like, uh, like endorsement advertising, endorsement audio, endorsement video. Like nobody thinks of it that way, but what we're selling is credit.

We're in the business of buying and selling credibility, which is really old school actually to podcasting and why podcasting developed the way it did and why podcast advertising exists today. Yeah.

We need to preserve that. And, um, yeah, I'm a little side-eye, uh, looking at some of the folks that haven't jumped in to be like, yes, I agree with everything Glenn said about this. Like, it's like this should be a no-brainer to just say we're going to start— this is our opening position on this.

Well, I think what we're seeing is a lot of the big, big tech platforms or the big tech media companies, whether it be on the radio or, you know, like Apple— I mean, Apple's not really into advertising, but Spotify and those folks and YouTube, whatever, they, they're all in on the technology solution here, right? So they're going to be probably the ones that do this first. You know, I think we're already seeing on, on YouTube them roll out the, the kind of AI to make all the content in all the languages of the world, right? And even change the video to some degree to synchronize with that. And so I think a lot of this stuff is already happening, and I'm sure it's going to happen on the advertising side too, I would imagine.

And let me tell you, as someone who's messed with a lot of AI tools— and remember, Rob, when people start doing this or trying to do this, right, they're not going to be checking their work after the first go, because again, if you're doing this It's all about the speed of transaction, right? You're not really about details. Here's a really fun fact about AI. About 7% of the time, it starts off okay and then starts acting weirdly possessed.

Well, it's got a reputation already for kind of doing its own thing, right? So maybe it's more intelligent than we give it credit for.

Maybe. And it's neat. And I'm not saying, by the way, and I'm not saying Don't run your ad copy through ChatGPT to make suggestions on improving flow.

Don't—

I'm not saying don't use automations to help with generating clips. So again, I'm not anti-AI. I'm just saying, like, if we're calling something an endorsement, personal endorsement, let's keep the personal part of the personal endorsement.

Yeah. So I've got a sample You said it, you raised the topic. I'm just kind of bringing it up to the stage here, but I created an example script that I created in ChatGPT-4 Omni here, as you can see. So below here, if I can scroll down a little bit, I asked it to create a 30-second audio ad script for a podcast for a local pizza restaurant, right? So as you start thinking about how this stuff might be used in the future, you know, they could create automated ads that would take this medium down towards being able to do local ads, right? I mean, think about, right, the possibility of radio wanting to generate local ad buys, right, for local advertisers, which is what's been their bread and butter for, for years, this might be kind of an example of what, what they could do is that they would basically tell it to create a, a, a script, right? So I told it to generate it, it created this script talking about Tony's Pizza It voiced the whole thing. Actually, I've got it here prompted in a— no, that's the wrong one here. Let me go to— I believe it's Murf is the AI platform. Here, let me pull that over. This is it here. I took that same script, that was generated by ChatGPT, and I ran it through this AI audio kind of creation platform, and it created based on that same script. Now, I don't know if you're going to be able to hear it or not here, but I can try and play it here.

Maybe not on my end, but we'll try. Upbeat music. Narrator: enthusiastic. Hungry for a slice of heaven? Look no further than Tony's Pizza Palace, your neighborhood's favorite spot for mouthwatering pizza. Whether you're craving a classic Margherita, a loaded meat lover's, or our famous veggie delight, we've got something for everyone. Sound of sizzling pizza. Narrator: Made with the freshest ingredients and a whole lot of love, every bite is a taste of perfection. Dine in, take out, or get it delivered right to your door. Visit Tony's Pizza Palace at the corner of 5th and Main, or order online at TonyPizzaPalace.com.

Cheerful music.

Narrator.

So that's just an example of what I'm talking about.

Oh, Rob, I know some networks that would have played that as is. Right, right. Yeah, and that's the thing, it's like quality control matters. I mean, so again, this is, you know, this— the point of this episode isn't me to put over my former employer. But let me tell you what was great about working at Twit and why Twit does some of the best podcast ads in the game. Leo records the ads, and when he is done, there is a team that they have continuity that, uh, that reviews every ad. They either got the ad copy and talking points up in front of them, and they listen to the ad, and they listen to Leo's endorsement, and they go over and they sign off and say Leo hit all the points. That was really good. If there was anything he could have done better, they would have Leo re-record it. He needs to drop something in. Like, quality control matters. Twit is one of the best in the game at that. And, um, like, that's what I want a network partner— you know, if we're doing an ad buy and you've got some of these larger podcasts, even a $20 CPM, if someone's got an audience of a million, Rob, that's $20,000 for a single ad on their show. They better review that ad after it's recorded and make sure that it's perfect, because my clients are not going to be happy with a mediocre effort, uh, at a 5-figure price tag. You know, it's like— and so, but now the argument from some people— I almost slipped and said some of the names of some of these, uh, uh, networks that came from radio— but their arguments were like, yeah, but if someone's doing 1,000 ads at, you know, $50 a pop, they're not gonna scrutinize, you know. But it's like, is that the kind of life in the business you want to be in? I'm trying to do something at volume for people that don't pay very close attention, right? Like, that's— I don't know, that's not how I want to live my life. That's not who I want to give money to or work with.

Yeah. And here's another one too I found that has a bunch of samples of the audio that they can create. It's called resemble.ai, and Here's one of the spots that's created.

Hello and welcome to Claire's, where we increase your beauty one brushstroke at a time.

So it just gives another sample. I think that the, you know, the ElevenLabs and those kind of folks that are out there that actually enable you to kind of create a clone, right? So you could take your voice talent that you have or your podcaster and have them just go in and train this clone, which I think is going to wind up happening here. Sure.

Oh, it's already— I mean, I've got a clone of myself, right?

Yeah, I do too, through Descript, right? Right now that helps me edit some of the audio that I do. But it's— I just think it's, it's definitely coming. And as it gets better, I think, you know, these, these trained premium versions, because there's kind of like free versions that aren't quite as good now that are out there that people are using too, because they don't want to pay for it, right? But as people transition over to using these things that are more premium, higher quality, whatever, it's, it's going to be increasingly difficult to distinguish between these two things.

And let me tell you, Rob, if I put that contract in front of someone that says they're going to limit AI and they refuse to sign it, I'm also going to have a lot of questions. Right.

Okay. Fair enough. I think you have every right to do that. But I guess in the long run though, if you can't tell the difference between the two, is your ROI in the long run going to be any different?

This is an interesting question. I'm sure at that point when I've uploaded my consciousness and I've become a sentient being merged with AI in a computer, I will ponder. The best way to, uh, to approach that. But I'll tell you also, I will tell you one thing that's very interesting about generative AI for creative purposes. Even the script, uh, that you post, uh, that you posted that ChatGPT came up with, whether it's music, movie plots, fiction, or advertising, remember AI knows what you feed it, what it's learned. And I thought it would be funny. Yeah, a year ago, 2 years ago, I was like, oh, I'll post ChatGPT, you know, I remember, remember that meme 5 years ago where it was like, we forced an AI bot to watch 5,000 hours of Seinfeld and had it write an episode. And most of those were human written. It was just a joke at the time.

Yep.

But I was, 2 years ago I was like, oh, we should publish a blog post. Like we asked ChatGPT to write a podcast ad and this is what it came up with. And I was like, no, because it's funny. But again, we saw even then the potential harm for this industry. But the other thing was that. The punchline was just that the ad that it wrote was the most clichéd, overused— I mean, everything that just sounded so insincere and inauthentic. And as someone who also hosts podcasts, like, I wouldn't have— I would have reworded that in my own words because it just seemed so hackneyed and repetitive to every other ad, you know?

Yeah, I think you do have to do that. And I also found a site, it's called Synthesia, that actually will create full videos too. So let me pull that up here and I can share that really quick too. And so I found a short video that would be kind of at the length of, let's say, a video ad, right? So this is a personal intro, the video.

So I'll click that and you can kind of hear. Hey there, I'm Samuel, part of the marketing crew. I'm here to tackle challenges, find smart solutions, and yes, sprinkle in some fun along the way. Making our projects successful and reaching our targets is what I'm all about. Really excited to meet everyone. I'm all for sharing knowledge, learning new stuff, and enjoying the journey together.

Let's create something awesome. Yeah, so, you know, that actually sounded pretty good, um, but I think that would create a situation where you have to create, um, different ad insertion abilities in the video versus on the audio.

Yeah, it's, um, it's interesting. And I think that the— I mean, the funny thing about this business. And really this is since maybe 2017, 2018, when people realized there was money. Rob, do you remember how great it was 10 years ago when this was a thriving industry, but nobody outside of the industry really figured it out yet?

Yeah. And most people didn't even know what a podcast was back then. I think we all, if we were early in the industry, spent a lot of time trying to explain what podcasting was. Those are the days.

Now I don't have to ever do that. Well, so I've said variations of this. A thousand times, but the worst thing that ever happened in this industry were people that got into it because they thought they could make money and they didn't even bother to understand what makes this industry so special.

Yeah.

Right. To them, it's like they, you know, if you were selling display ads before this and this is just another thing you're selling, like, yeah, you really don't care, but I'm telling you, the people that have done well in this business by and large are the folks that have respected that connection between the host and the audience. And I really, really hope going forward that continues to happen because this industry is strong, but I do not know how well it will survive if people are just hell-bent on destroying it at the sake of a quick profit.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess if, if the real concern is maintaining the impression of authenticity and, and realness, if that becomes, or if that continues to be something that audiences value, um, or are we gonna— I still have to wonder that if it gets so good, people will— I mean, unless there's legislation that gets pushed by the FTC or whatever where it has to be disclosed Like, yeah, there'll be like a little, you know, kind of like what Google had to do in the early days with their sponsored links. Yeah. Where it says, you know, sponsor ad, kind of labeled in the video itself or in the audio itself where it would have to voice it as this is an AI-created advertisement, right?

Yeah. And I think disclosure will be important as well. I think people should disclose the use of generative AI in commercial works.

Yeah. So that, I think that totally will probably be where we land on this, I think, long term. But the quality, I think, is going to continue to get better and better and better. And, and, you know, it's just one of those things. What audiences expect, you know, 5, 10 years from now when the world has changed so much based on AI.

Uh, I think it's a big question mark. It's funny to remember, it was like a year ago where it was like, oh, somebody did an AI podcast. Here's Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs. Right. And he was like, I'm gonna keep putting these out. But it's like, yeah, but aside from the headlines and the stories, like there was no audience to consume that.

Right.

You know, audiences don't like low effort content either. By the way, Rob, like, uh, you know, not, not to brag, but in AI I've generated some music that I'm actually like, reasonably proud of where I'm like, this is pretty good. I think the lyrics, you know, I wrote the lyrics, I think it sounds good. But it's like, have you tried to show anything you've made with AI to your friends? Like, they do not care at all. Like, if you say like, oh yeah, I made this, it's AI, like they'll listen to it for a second and just be like, yeah, it's nice.

Cool. Well, and it's also, Glenn, also the other factor that we're going to run into too is just the just the glut of content that was created.

Let me give you a great example of this. Rob Greenlee, do you remember back in the day if you had a friend or someone you were dating and you said, hey, I made you a mixtape? I sat down, I recorded these songs, I put thought to the order, and I gave it to you. And people, those were special. I still have mixtapes that I got in junior high that I've kept. Around the year 2000, if you said to somebody, I made you a mixed CD, They weren't, oh great, so you burned a Winamp playlist? Like, nobody cared, right? Nobody cared about mixed CDs, but mixtapes were sacred because it was too easy to do. Yes, and that's what I'm saying. Nobody is going to care. The more AI content, the more AI ads, it's just all going to become meaningless in the ephemera.

Yeah, yeah. So we'll, we'll see how this turns out in the long run. I, I do think in the short run I think, well, over the next few years, I think it does make sense to head down this path of identification and things like that, especially when it's created completely by AI. You know, if there isn't any kind of human creation involvement. Now, granted, editing, I think to some degree is a little bit of an exception here, but it's the first step.

Where's, where's our AI podcast host? Where is AI Huberman? Like where, and I'm not saying Huberman as AI, I'm saying, where is there an AI host that's built a big audience?

Would audiences tune in for a podcast that was all generative AI and an AI? Well, unless it's being done and it's not being disclosed.

Again, we don't know. This is why it's healthy to be a little suspicious and paranoid.

Well, and that may be, you know, like a proof of life on the video side, right?

I'm surprised we haven't gotten a great prankster. Maybe there's already one that exists that says, I'm going to create an AI fitness alternative health influencer that is using AI-generated content, interviews with experts that are also AI, to see if they can fool people. Maybe, maybe that's already happening and we don't even know it yet.

Well, so, so before we run out of time, Glenn, let's, let's talk about a couple other topics that are kind of tangential to this. And that is, you're, you're, since you're representing brands, um, where does this brand safety and suitability kind of AI technology fit in the realm of how you think about your, your buys?

I think it's great to be able to go through a podcast and see if there's something that's not known about content that might be hateful or threatening or harassing. Um, I think it's a very powerful tool. I will tell you though that the most powerful way to know who you're, who you're buying is just to Google the host name and the word controversy. Because these days, let me tell you, somebody's posted something, there's something out there, it's easy to figure out. But I do think brand safety scores are important. And, um, similarly, we also have language in our insertion orders that says if— that we do not tolerate these things. So if there are credible allegations or accusations, um, you know, we will cancel the order. Uh, if you have a guest upcoming that's controversial, we do not want to run in that episode. And our best partners do run that by us ahead of time.

Yeah, because it tends to be kind of retroactively looking at content because it's not possible. Well, it's probably a little bit possible to evaluate current content, but it's probably, it's not going to mitigate the risk that you might be buying into a show that happens to stray into the uncharted territory, right?

Or the unexpected content area. Right. But again, we're high touch in what we do. So I do think when you talk about stuff at scale, that's more low touch. And you talk about a network that's got tens of thousands of local podcasts and content that who knows, like then yes, you need somebody to ingest that and make sure they're not so far out there.

Their brand wouldn't wanna be associated with them. Do you see the tech moving towards being able to evaluate current published content and make quick decisions about those things?

Allegedly it can already with contextual targeting, but you know what we hear about the fails though, right?

I mean, we heard about Spotify had their kerfuffle with an alcohol brand going on. The New York Times has put out some information about them losing advertising, significant advertising revenue because of brand safety and suitability.

Platforms. Yeah, so you want to, you want to know, but again, context is weird, right? Like, yeah, and you need to also be able to screen content positive or content negative. You know, if somebody's talking about an airline crash, you don't want to run an ad for an airline against that thinking, oh, it's super relevant, they're talking about travel, right? You know, so you, it needs to have that sophistication because, by the way, you could have somebody condemning hate speech speech and maybe using some appropriate— not as appropriate, but using some softer examples, and they could get flagged for hate speech when they're condemning it.

There's nuance. Yeah, I think where it may be impacting podcasting in, in, in ways that maybe a lot of people don't realize is on the political advertising side.

So any thoughts on that? It'll be curious to see, um, you know this a bit, like networks in 2020 really thought there was going to be a lot of money to make through political advertising, right?

Uh, there was not. Why is that?

Because of brand safety, suitability platform? No, no, no. They thought like candidates were going to be wanting to reach people.

I actually looked at this, um, or, or those candidates just want to be guests on those podcasts.

They do want to be guests, yes, but Here's the problem. If you could— okay, so let's say, let's say your average congressional district in, I don't know, like Iowa, right? Yeah. If you were to target listeners of left or right, or maybe not even, you know, declared political intention, if you were to target them in that particular congressional district, to spend any decent amount of money, you would have to serve that candidate's ad like 30 times to that listener for it there to be enough dollars involved to make sense for all the people in the middle and the podcasters themselves. If the podcaster even approved the ad, um, you would have to overserve that ad so much to have that total any reasonable amount of money. That's the issue.

The issue is scale. Plus also, I would imagine some of those ads that the political candidates produce are pretty controversial just in themselves. And yeah, maybe the podcast wouldn't want to have those ads on their show. And that's the thing. So yeah, even if they, they align politically, I don't know. I mean, some of them are so over the top I'm amazed that the TV, uh, and the radio folks even take them.

Well, I'm telling you, I looked into this as a courtesy, um, and because, you know, we're always interested in, in working out the math. But when you figured out how many ears were available, how many impressions were available based on 435 congressional districts and the limited podcasters that would approve this, like, there just wasn't— there's no economy of scale there. Right. You know, but I think the industry would love to be able to make money from this.

Yeah, it's such a, it's just such a divisive area right now. It's interesting that the podcasting space even thought that there was even an opportunity there on the advertising side. I was very skeptical because it's always been that way. It's like political advertising was never, has never been a thing. Podcasting. And I think it gets back to the very nature of the medium. And it's fascinating to me that so many of the political candidates have seen being on podcasts as the strategy to reach alternative voters or to share deeper messages that a 30-second spot isn't gonna give them the same impact.

Well, and the earned media ripple effect is insane where if they say something even remotely provocative or insightful, it gets picked up on Twitter, the blogosphere, right?

You know, so yeah, it's interesting. I guess, guess it depends on the, on the platform, but it certainly doesn't speak to if— okay, if mainstream media is in a state of decline, right? Uh, cable television, um, even, even mainstream radio, it's in a state of decline. At some point in the future, those, those big mainstream media brands and networks are not going to have the reach that they even have today. Yeah. And if they haven't built their muscles around being able to buy into independent media, they're going to be out of a place to build, build their brand. And it's really interesting, is this kind of like having the candidates be guests on those podcasts? It's kind of like their pathway in. But I don't know, I mean, at some point, what do the podcasts do, charge the candidates to be on their shows?

Oh, what are they, a business show? Oh my God, when I learned— yeah, we, we used to be more heavily involved in, uh, entrepreneur and business interview podcasts because advertisers wanted to be there. Um, when I found out that many of the leading business and entrepreneurial podcasts were charging guests for the privilege of being interviewed on their show is when I said, yeah, more and more out there.

I mean, I get pitched about it too, and I know people that their whole business model is built around having guests on and having the guests pay them $500 or $1,000.

Yeah, that's more lucrative than selling ads, but by double dipping, it's just like, you know, we didn't ever see— you can do both, right? Yeah, again, And man, some people in this business just love to find a way to make an extra buck, you know?

Oh yeah. Well, I mean, I understand it, especially these days with so many people being out of work and looking for side hustles and things like that, right?

It's very interesting. Our COO, who happens to be my wife, Tiffany, she— it's funny, she worked for wide orbit in broadcast traffic software. She's a project manager. She actually taught me about average advertising, by the way, originally. When I worked at Twit, I wanted to host a show about video games. Um, and so it was— I was good at marketing. And then when I came to get into ad sales, she was like, oh, let me tell you about CPMs and how these things work. She taught me about traditional advertising. But she had a really good, uh, point the other day. She said, um, you know, people do not realize how short-term profits often create long-term problems. And I think that is the podcast industry in a nutshell.

Yeah, right. There's things, things never last the way you think they're gonna last. Also in this medium, you know, it's funny that this medium moves fast in some ways, but it moves very slow in other ways. And it really hasn't changed as much as people think it's changed over the 20, I've been involved in it for 20 years and the fundamentals of this medium really haven't changed that much. The technology's gotten better. You know, we're gung-ho. There's this whole advertising and monetization industry around podcasting and whatever, but that's certainly not where this all started. Yeah.

And we keep coming back to it.

I mean, when the fundamentals are what they are, right? I know it's a people business. This is a, you know, it's like the show that we're doing here. This isn't— I'm not monetizing this show. Um, this is just creating organic, uh, conversational content is what I'm all about with what I'm doing now. And that it's just what it is. I mean, it'd be great if I had a sponsor, and for a while I did. I, I had a sponsor in StreamYard here, here over the last year, but I'm, I'm independent now, so I'm not with StreamYard right now, even though I'm doing the show on StreamYard, but I'm not part of their kind of marketing promotions team right now. So, so anyway, that's, that's a little transparency on my side, but if But that's, that's the interesting thing about podcasting and how it evolves over time. And I've had to evolve in what I've done in the medium to— and that's why I'm doing content more now, is that I, I found myself falling behind, um, in the— on the content side and how to do this kind of content again. I mean, I started out on the radio for many years, built a huge show on XM and, and, um, and on satellite radio and things, but You know, the podcasting thing has been my, my thing for 20 years. So, oh yeah, it's an interesting, you know, time in the medium there. You know, I do a show called The New Media Show. You can see the logo behind me up there. And I've been doing that show for like 12 years, and it's talking about the podcast industry and the developments of it too. And, and I just see the industry really kind of moving, um, to a new era, um, that is increasingly, and it always has been, increasingly influenced by technology. And, and I, I'm not sure where the limits are on that, um, as we look to the future. There's more and more companies starting up, you know, Glenn, that are doing the whole thing with AI, doing everything. Oh, I know. And that's, you know, from writing the scripts, coming up with the cloning, the publishing, the all of the metadata, everything. Is done with AI, and it's like, that—

is that the future? So yeah, I mean, I mean, look at what peak streaming did for television in the sense that there were so many shows out there that oftentimes I would not even learn about a TV show until I was reading the news that it was canceled. Yeah, you know, the cancellation got more coverage than the actual show. Uh, and it's crazy, and I just think, um, Yeah, it's, it's a shame that we're allowing so much to become disposable. But again, you know, the, the glass half full side of me says in a disposable atmosphere, um, genuine human connection will matter more and more.

Yeah. You know, yeah, I, I think that there's a lot of hope that that will be the outcome here. I hope so too, but, you know, it's hard to know if that's really going to play out that way. We'll have to see. You know, it just depends on how much and how many people walk away from this concept of technology. You know, I think that there is some movement on that side where people, you know, kind of like saying, you know, I'm going to put my phone down. I'm not going to use technology as much. You know, it's getting a little too intrusive, um, that kind of stuff. And I, I just wonder about that. So Glenn, thank you so much for taking so much time out tonight to, to be with me. And if you wanted to see more about, uh, what Glenn's doing and, and learn about his, his, uh, ad sales platform— and I'm, I'm sure you're doing other content online, so yeah.

No, I host a wrestling podcast, a podcast about pro wrestling. But again, it's, it's like, it's good, but it's, it's funny. It's so small compared to the rest of what I do, but I love genuine connection and community.

Yeah. Yeah. So if you want to go, go to his website, just go, it's up on the screen. It's adopter.media. Um, and that's, that's a full URL right there. So just put that into your, your browser and that should take you to, uh, his website if you want to learn more about him. And Glenn, is there any other way that you would like to have people find you?

You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter @glennrubenstein.

Okay, terrific. Well, thank you so much for being on the show with me. I certainly appreciate it. And those that have taken their evening out to listen to us talk about the business side of podcasting to some degree and the advertising market, it's always interesting conversation that is always evolving. And Glenn, you know, it isn't, you know, we haven't talked that much in the past, so this is fantastic to get your thoughts and how this whole medium is evolving around AI.

So I appreciate it.

So absolutely. Thank you so much. Yeah, well, thank you. And so let's, I'm gonna All right, well, I want to say thank you to everybody that's been with me tonight, and, and, and just thank you for being here. And I'll be back next Thursday with another episode. And if you wanted to follow this, uh, show, I would, uh, go to my YouTube channel, um, youtube.com/robgreenlee, and that's a great way to find me. And if you wanted to reach out to me directly, I do have an email address, rob.greenlee@gmail.com, and then I'm on X as well, @RobGreenlee. So, and then you can also go check out my other podcast that I do with Todd Cochran called The New Media Show, and I do that live every Wednesday at currently at, I think, starting next week, I'm gonna be back at 3 PM Eastern on Wednesdays. And that, that would be noon Pacific. So if you wanted to, to join us on that program too, if you want to learn more about podcasting. So thank you so much, and I hope you have a wonderful evening and good night, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.