Jeff Umbro, CEO of The Podglomerate, discusses podcast marketing for brands and businesses. He explores advertising strategies, host-read ads, and branded podcasts. Jeff shares insights on audience growth, measuring success, and cross-promotion. He also addresses common mistakes, thought leadership, and AI’s impact on podcasting. Listen for fresh perspectives on maximizing podcast strategies for brand awareness and engagement, emphasizing clear goals and targeted content.
Episode Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:
Jeff Umbro: In podcasting, you can get a lot of really granular data, which is counterintuitive because you assume that because it’s audio, you cannot do that. But there’s actually some really cool, robust and growing tools that do allow you to actually measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy: led, full: service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. In today’s fragmented media landscape, podcasts have become a powerful tool for brand marketers. By delivering targeted content to engaged audiences, podcasts offer unique opportunities for brands to grow awareness, support consideration and drive conversions. A recent study by ACAST and OMD highlights the effectiveness of podcast advertising, revealing an impressive long: term return on ad spend of 4.9. This means that for every dollar invested in podcast advertising, brands see a return on average of $4.90 in long: term sales. Even in the short term, podcast advertising outperforms other media channels with a ROAS of 4.2, surpassing social media and radio. However, navigating the world of podcast marketing can be challenging, with various strategies available and considerations to keep in mind. Our guest today is an expert in helping brands leverage the power of podcasts. Jeff Umbro is the founder and CEO of The Podglomerate, a company that focuses on podcast production, marketing and monetization. Since its founding in 2017, The Podglomerate has worked with diverse clients including major brands like Netflix, PBS, Freakonomics, NPR and Expedia. Jeff’s expertise spans various aspects of the podcasting industry, from creating branded content to implementing effective advertising strategies. Jeff is also the host of Podcast Perspectives, a bi: weekly podcast focused on discussing ways to build the next generation of podcasting. To discuss how brand marketers can use podcasts to achieve their goals, I’m delighted that Jeff is joining us today from New Hampshire. Jeff, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Jeff Umbro: Hey, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to chat today.
Adrian Tennant: Could you give us an overview of The Podglomerate and how you help brands leverage Podcasts?
Jeff Umbro: Yeah, for sure. The Podglomerate is a podcast services agency that I founded back in 2016. We do three things. We produce podcasts, we market them and we monetize them. And underneath that umbrella, we also do quite a bit of work with third: party brands that are trying to promote their products or their services or their individuals. We’re a podcast publisher, podcast production agency, podcast marketing firm, and podcast ad agency.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. What are some of the different ways that brands can advertise in podcasts?
Jeff Umbro: So there’s a lot of different ways that brands can advertise within podcasting and it kind of depends on a lot of factors as with every kind of media. You’re going to want to look at like your resources, your budget, what your goals are and what you’re hoping to achieve and there’s going to be some different ways that you can flex that muscle. The most direct way that most people I think have experience with is going directly to a podcast publisher and buying a podcast ad. Traditionally, that is going to be either like a mid: roll or a pre: roll. They’ll tell you the length of that ad, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 15 seconds. Everybody’s heard some version of this, even if it’s like NPR underwriting or something. You can get a host read ad or a producer read ad, which is basically just like a pre: produced spot. The reason that people really love host reads is that there’s this parasocial relationship with the listener and the host of the show. So there’s a lot more trust there. And a lot of the data really shows that it is X times more effective to actually like run a host read. But to take a step back, the different ways in which people can buy ads, would be direct to the publisher for something that’s more curated based on the content. You can work with a bigger firm like Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeart, or many others in order to buy something that’s a little bit more directional based on intention markers. So if you want to target moms in Ohio for a Unilever campaign or something, you can do that via programmatic ad buys with some of these bigger players. And then there is also the idea of organically approaching some of these different podcasts. So you can be a guest on a show to promote your services, or you can create a podcast in which you are promoting your service. But if budget is a concern, there are a lot of other ways in which you can reach the same audience in strategic and creative ways.
Adrian Tennant: Why are host: read ads often most effective?
Jeff Umbro: Anybody who’s listening to a podcast, your listeners on this show, Adrian, are going to be really familiar with you, and you’ve built up a certain amount of trust with those listeners. I have a show called Podcast Perspectives, and I like to think that I’ve done the same. But then, you know, whether you’re talking about Dax Shepard or Glennon Doyle or Krista Tippett or Joe Rogan, there are people who kind of tune into these shows on a daily, a weekly, a monthly basis. Maybe they’re only there for the guest or something, but they built a relationship and some form of trust with this person. So when Joe Rogan talks about BetterHelp and about how he uses that service in order to work on his mental fitness or whatever, there are a lot of people who listen to that show who already have bought into whatever Joe Rogan is talking about and are going to be more inclined to potentially purchase a service or a product because they have that relationship as opposed to hearing something from a voice that they might not recognize or seeing an ad on Facebook or something is not to say that audio is the only or often the best way to do this, but it is a very effective way to drive traffic back to whatever you’re trying to sell. And the host read is the secret weapon of podcasting because it’s just entirely based on these relationships and the trust that, you know, a podcaster has built with their audience. There’s a lot of data you can look up like white papers from folks like ACAST or SiriusXM that will give you a lot of different stats that tell you exactly how effective this stuff is as compared to other versions of like audio advertising. A host read ad can be like 1.5 to five times more effective than a non: host read ad because of those relationships.
Adrian Tennant: I’m curious what you think about some of the new AI tools that are available. I was just looking at one the other day that replaces the human voice with an AI generated voice, but based on the host that can scale the number of versions of ads across multiple podcasts, multiple platforms. Feels like that might not be quite working with the trust issue that you’re talking about, but I’m curious what you think about it.
Jeff Umbro: This is the million: dollar question. And I have a lot of thoughts on it. So it might sound rambly for a second, just fair warning. But ultimately, I think that AI as a tool is a good thing that is going to be very effective for people who are trying to do things like write their scripts in a way that might be better suited for a certain type of audience or to like A, B test different styles of that script. And to your point, you can do works in translation across different demos in different countries. You can do five different versions of the same script in the time it might take you to produce one version of that script. And you can use AI to actually clone a voice to make it sound good and sound real. So in theory, it is an awesome idea. In practice, I don’t think that the tools are where they need to be. I use this stuff every day as a test. Like we don’t publish 99% of this stuff, but we use a lot of really great tools. Wondercraft is one of my favorites when it comes to actual AI audio production work. You can use chat GPT to write some stuff. There’s a lot of different platforms that might even help you like pitch a podcast or something, or do some research into different targets that you might want to attack for whatever campaign you’re running. We at Poglomart buy a lot of ads as well on behalf of our clients. And I’ll just say that it’s very obvious every time somebody sends us an AI generated audio clip for that ad. I got one yesterday and there has yet to be a time where I did not send a note back to that advertiser asking them to give me the real thing because you can still very much hear it in the audio. Uh, I don’t know if that’s a popular and unpopular opinion. I think it will get to the point where it’s good and even better than what like a human being can do, but we are not at that point.
Adrian Tennant: I did start this podcast off with an introduction, citing some of the ROAS that advertisers might expect from consumer: based campaigns. How effective is podcast advertising compared to other digital marketing channels, would you say, Jeff?
Jeff Umbro: I mean, I’m biased, but I think that it is very effective as compared to things like social media ads or radio buys or TV buys. You know, I’m not going to say that it is like the only thing that works or that it’s more effective than like every other form of media, but it should certainly be a part of people’s media strategies when it comes to what they’re hoping to drive back to their product. And it’s going to depend on all kinds of different factors. Are you looking to actually convert to sales? Are you looking to build thought leadership? Are you looking to build brand awareness? There’s a lot of different ways to A, execute on that in terms of trying to hit your goals. And B, there’s a lot of different ways to measure how effective that is. The study that I believe you’re referring to is the ACAS study that came out a few weeks back that said that like host red ads can drive up to five times as many conversions as the cost that went into it. And that is true, but it also totally depends on what you’re selling. There’s a big difference between a $10 a month SaaS product versus, you know, a $50,000 service contract versus a new toothbrush. And there’s going to be different strategies based on the math behind that. And that math is actually really easy to figure out. So anybody who’s running one of these brand campaigns should sit down and they should run some test campaigns, like run some podcast ads. With things that you think are a great fit. And there’s a lot of different ways to do that. And you can email me at listen at the puglammer.com and I can walk you through that. But if you spend a hundred dollars and you drive 20 clicks to your website and two of those turn into conversions, then you’re looking at $5 cost per click and a $50 cost per conversion. And if somebody is spending 20 bucks a month for their Amazon prime account or something, then like that might be worth it for that advertiser, because every year you’re going to make five times what you spent. So it’s not a complicated math problem. And then you can compare that to what you’re spending in other channels, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or buying a billboard ad or buying a radio spot. The big difference between most of this is some of these things I just mentioned, like you can track conversions very easily. Some of them you can’t buying radio spots historically has been really tough to track effectiveness, buying billboards, buying TV spots. Whereas in podcasting, you can get a lot of really granular data, which is counterintuitive to a lot of how people think about it, because you assume that because it’s audio, you cannot do that. But there’s actually some really cool, robust and growing tools that do allow you to actually measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Can you share a success story of a brand that effectively uses podcast advertising either to grow awareness or drive conversions?
Jeff Umbro: Yeah. So there’s a few different examples that I want to give, because it goes back to the idea of like what your goals are. Are you entering the podcast space in order to drive conversions to a product, to a service? Do you want to build brand awareness? Do you want to build thought leadership? There’s a million different ways to tackle each of those. So I’ll give you the most obvious. We work with a podcast that is effectively a cybersecurity podcast. They talk about things that are happening in the world in that realm. We work with an advertiser that sells kind of like forget me software. It’s called delete me. And it will basically remove your identity from the internet so that you are less prone to being attacked by like a hacker or a scammer or something like that. Perfect fit. So they can very organically talk about Delete.me on this show and they can move a lot of units of whatever Delete.me is trying to sell, which in this case is a monthly or annual subscription to the service. Delete.me has that math problem figured out. They’ve said we can spend X dollars in order to get Y conversions. They know that we have some insight into that as the publisher that’s running these ads, but ultimately like they have a spreadsheet somewhere that tracks all of the different ads that they’re buying, what’s most effective and they determine if they want to renew. That is an example of a campaign that we’ve renewed through the end of the year. I imagine that they’ll probably be, I hope that they’re happy enough to do it again next year. And that’s a really simple example of how this can be really effective. Like BetterHelp is a huge podcast advertiser and they buy spots on hundreds of podcasts every month. You’ve definitely heard the ads. They do that because it works and they charge whatever they charge, which I don’t know offhand, it depends on the service, but they know that they’re going to get that monthly recurring revenue because people are going to continue using that service. So they might be willing to spend a little bit more in order to get that customer. Um, therapy is something that most people will continue to do for months or years. So it makes sense. We have worked historically with some bigger ticket items as well. And I’ll give two examples of that. We’ve done campaigns for Nissan and Nissan is not going to sell a car. Every time somebody hears a podcast ad, you know, it’s a really expensive purchase. So that is an example of a brand awareness campaign where they’re going to be running TV ads and Facebook spots and radio spots. And they’re also going to be targeting podcast ads and they might not necessarily be interested in any particular show. Although in this case, they are, they’re buying on a travel show that we represent. They might be more interested in men in their thirties or something with a household income over a hundred thousand dollars. I’m making that up. That’s not the case with this campaign, but like that is something that they could do if they wanted to. And you should assume that the more detailed of an ask that is the more expensive that campaign is going to be for like the CPM model. Traditionally, a podcast campaign will start around like $25 CPMs. The more specific you get oftentimes means the more expensive it will become. And then the final example of this I want to give is just touching on branded podcasts a little bit. We worked with a client a few years ago. They sold a software that was meant to make your team like 1% more efficient on their sales emails. That software costs about $50,000 a month. So it’s really expensive. And, but at the same time, like if they get one person to buy that, then it probably covers the expenses for a year or two of making the entire show. And in theory, they’re going to get a lot more than that one person. So they specifically want to make this show and target CMOs or decision makers at organizations who would be interested in actually purchasing this stuff. And they were really clever actually, because they didn’t necessarily care about the audience in that instance, outside of the idea of like, you need a certain scale of audience to bring in a certain type of guest. But what they were mainly concerned with was actually booking the right guests on the show so that they could then have that exact target audience that they were looking for in a chair, sitting across from them in a conference room for an hour or two. And they could do that four times a month with four different prospects that they were trying to reach. So I say that just to say like there’s a lot of really creative ways in which people are thinking about podcast advertising, paid or organic or branded podcasts. And I don’t know how immediately obvious it always is to people. So it’s good to think a little bit more broad about what you’re trying to achieve.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of The Podglomerate, about how brand marketers can leverage podcasts for growth and engagement. So moving on from paid advertising within podcasts, you did mention branded podcasts. So for brands thinking about creating their own podcast, what are some key considerations?
Jeff Umbro: Yeah. So the main things that you should think about if you’re considering making a branded podcast is what are you hoping to achieve? You should start with that. And the answer to that question might not involve a podcast. Maybe it’s like, I want to write a blog or a newsletter or build a social presence or something. A lot of people pursue podcasting because they think that they have to because it’s a little bit of a buzzword. One of the most important things you should try and figure out is like why you shouldn’t make a podcast before you decide to actually do it. Because as you know, Adrian, podcasts are a lot of work that takes time, energy, resources, money, and you really have to be committed and even committed for like a pretty healthy amount of time before you might see the results that you’re hoping for. So that’s the first thing that brands should think about. The second thing is like, what resources do you have to achieve those goals? Are they best put into making a podcast versus something else? Do you have the time? Cause time is a huge resource in addition to dollars. And then you should think about what kind of show are you hoping to create? Is it an interview show? Is it what I call a narrative interview show, which kind of provides people with a lot of how to’s or takeaways within the context of an interview. Is it an investigative series? Are you talking to customers, clients, potential customers? Are you speaking to just people out in the wild who might be interested in using your product? So there’s a lot of different things that you need to consider before you actually take that next step to building a podcast.
Adrian Tennant: Staying with branded podcasts, how can brands ensure their podcast content aligns with their overall marketing strategy?
Jeff Umbro: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I think there are a million different reasons why you might want to make a podcast, but some of the big ones that we hear often would be brand awareness, thought leadership, or tracking for conversions for whatever you’re trying to sell. whether that’s a product or a service or something. So brands should think about which of those items they’re really aiming for before they determine like what kind of show they want to make. If you’re looking for lead gen, that’s going to look really different than if you’re just looking for brand awareness. And that’s going to look really different than if you’re looking for thought leadership. A show like this is something where I would probably put in the bucket of brand awareness and thought leadership, which might eventually turn into lead gen. But the idea is that you want to be providing value to your community through thought leadership. And that involves chatting with people who might be relevant to what your consumers are hoping to gain. That involves being forward thinking and asking questions like you did about AI in terms of how people should be considering these big shifts in the landscape. Brand awareness is often something that means just looking for the biggest splash that you can make. And that can look a few different ways. Maybe you make something that’s just really interesting for like a broad swath of consumers, as opposed to something that’s really specific for like a CMO or something. Charles Schwab had a show with Pacific content called Choiceology, which was basically like a show about behavioral economics. And they had all kinds of amazing guests on it, like Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein and And it was just a great show. I didn’t care at all about what they were trying to push or sell. Like I just wanted to listen to it. But every time you turn that episode on and hit play, you hear like, Hey, check out charles Schwab.com for blah, blah, blah. And so it’s a little bit of kind of a below the surface push for you to like, be aware of this brand. And occasionally they’ll be able to, you know, take that goodwill that they’ve built up over the course of publishing the show. And maybe they drive you to like a webinar or a marketing vehicle or like a top of funnel situation. And then the third bucket for lead gen, that can look a few different ways. Like you can get scale and then use that scale to drive, or you can do what I was mentioning before with that SAS company to make everybody 1% more effective. Like you can use the podcast itself as a vehicle to build those relationships in order to then be more effective when you want to utilize those relationships. you know, Adrian, if you come to me next week and tell me, Hey, I’ve been thinking about launching this podcast campaign. I’m going to be a lot more receptive to that than I would have been two weeks ago before we had this conversation. So I’m sorry to keep using you as the example, but, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You know?
Adrian Tennant: Yeah. It makes sense completely. In your experience, Jeff, what are some effective strategies for growing a podcast audience?
Jeff Umbro: This is actually one of the specialties of the Podglomerate. So anybody can head to Podglomerate.com slash marketing and you’ll see a big breakdown of this. But we really focus on five buckets, publicity, marketing, cross promotion, pitching the podcasting apps and paid acquisition publicity. I’m sure everybody’s very familiar, but. It is the idea of gaining earned media on media platforms. So a review of your show, criticism of the show, a feature, an interview, a list of shows surrounding a certain topic. You can build a media kit. You can build what we call a media pipeline, which is a list of targets that you want to hit and can build relationships in that space and pitch your show for one of those features that I mentioned. And there’s a million different ways to do it. You can hire an agency like us or any other, maybe you have somebody in house who focuses on comms, like, and you can use that to grow the vehicle of your podcast. 99% of the time, it’s not going to do that much to grow like your total audience, but the audience that does come from that PR hit is going to be a lot more focused. And, you know, obviously there’s a big difference between something in like a trade magazine versus the New York times, but yeah, your audience is savvy. I don’t need to explain that marketing. We view that as like, how do you use your own two channels to grow the podcast? So email newsletter, websites, social media, live events, apps, how can you drive traffic from one to the other? How do you track attribution? What are the best practices to do these things? What kind of copywriting is going to work best? And I’m kind of glossing over some of these things because I know that we only have so much time, but I do encourage everybody to. Check out our website. We have a lot of blogs about this exact topic. One of the most effective ways of driving podcast listenership to your show is through what’s called cross promotion. So running an interview on another show, running an audio ad on another show for your show, running what’s called a feed drop. So publishing an episode on another show. It’s mainly done through relationships. It can be paid. You can track attribution on that. The best way to drive new podcast listenership is not having to teach someone how to listen to a podcast. The fourth bucket that we focus on is pitching the podcasting apps. And that’s really just like getting editorial or paid features on Apple, Spotify, pocket casts, uh, Sirius XM, Pandora, I heart, and many others. And then paid acquisition is exactly what it sounds like. If you have a budget, then there are a lot of different avenues in which you can buy ads to promote your podcast and use the same formula that we mentioned before, in terms of looking at your cost per conversion, and then iterating on that to make sure that your cost per conversion continues to go down. And as you do that, your scale goes up. And based on the goals that we talked about before, there’s a lot of different ways to actually look at the cost benefit of spending that money.
Adrian Tennant: We focused quite a bit on KPIs and metrics, which I think is really helpful. And people might not be associating those with podcasts, as you mentioned. How can brands measure the success of their podcast marketing efforts?
Jeff Umbro: So there’s a lot of different people that are playing in that sandbox. Probably the most popular is going to be something called Spotify ad analytics, SPAA. Ultimately, you can put a pixel on your website landing page, and then you can put a pixel on the podcast ad using dynamic insertion. And if this sounds like very foreign, that’s fair. That’s fine. It’s something that like, you don’t necessarily have to understand, like the people you work with to do this, we’ll walk you through it. But it essentially measures people who listened to this podcast versus people who went to this website. So you can then track your total number of impressions versus the total number of people who hit the website. So you can then track things like conversion rates. And if, depending on how savvy you are, you can build conversion tracking on the website to see who’s actually purchasing something. You can build all kinds of different tools in there to track this stuff. Then you can do retargeting campaigns using a pixel attribution for places like Tik TOK or Instagram. So anyway, Spotify Ad Analytics is the big one. Chartable is pretty good when it comes to measuring audio to click attribution or audio to audio attribution. And then there’s a lot of tools like Claritas, Barometrics, PodScribe that all also deliver similar tools for you to measure this stuff. So there is a cost associated and it is something that can be a little bit of a hassle, but the tools do exist. And to be honest, a lot of brands are not necessarily aware of that. So you can measure in the same way that you measure on other platforms.
Adrian Tennant: Thank you, Jeff. I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, which is cross: promotion opportunities. I used to work in TV, and it was something we did with cable and satellite TV in Europe all the time, essentially buying the same 30: second spot from each other’s inventory. Is it a similar kind of thing in the podcasting world?
Jeff Umbro: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of people who are well: versed and practiced in this idea. People are doing it all over the place. At Podglomerate, we have meetings weekly with 50 different publishers, everyone from iHeart and Pushkin to SiriusXM and all things comedy. It’s a tried and true method that a lot of people do often. Puglamer on our own has run about 150 million cross: promo impressions in the last few years. And you can get smarter as you do this, as you track all the attribution data. So you can say how effective it’s going to be based on genre, topic, timing, tech, et cetera. So yes, it’s a tried and true method that a lot of people utilize.
Adrian Tennant: When marketing with podcasts, what are some common mistakes you see brands making?
Jeff Umbro: The two big ones are not really like sitting down and writing down what your goals are, which seems silly, but it happens all the time. A lot of brands are kind of active in the space because they think that they need to be and not because they’re like really measuring the effect of it. And then the second thing when it comes to podcast specific marketing to grow your show, I think a lot of people assume that if you like post a tweet or an Instagram, you’re going to get a lot of traffic back to your show. When in fact, almost the opposite is true. You need to be a little bit more clever in terms of how you’re trying to grow an audience on an RSS feed, which is very different from growing an audience on other platforms. It’s a big commitment for somebody to listen to like a 30 or 60 minute podcast episode. So you have to be like really targeted with what you’re trying to do. And not to say that like social can’t work. There are a lot of incredibly effective social promotions for podcasts, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
Adrian Tennant: And what advice do you have for brands looking to build thought leadership through podcasting?
Jeff Umbro: I think step one is just make sure that if you’re launching a show and talking about something and publishing that on any regular cadence, like it’s something that people actually want or need. And step one is looking at what you want and what you need. If it’s not interesting to you, it’s probably not going to be interesting to somebody else. And thought leadership specifically is really important to be ahead of the curve there and not just repeat the same thing that you’re hearing from everyone else. It needs to be something unique to stand out. Otherwise you’re going to be publishing a podcast that is not really effective at the goals that you’re hoping to achieve.
Adrian Tennant: That’s fair. Well, when we were discussing what we might talk about on this podcast, you brought up the topic of being a guest on other people’s podcasts. Could you just talk about that option a little bit?
Jeff Umbro: So I think that a lot of people who want to operate in the podcast space immediately jump to the idea of buying ads or launching their own show. Something that is a little bit underutilized in my opinion is adding podcasts to like a media campaign or a media tour in the same way that you might’ve done a radio tour 10 years ago. I think there are often going to be really effective channels for you to talk about whatever you’re hoping to achieve on other podcasts. People who have already done the hard work to build an audience. Me being on this show right now is an example of that. you know, Adrian, you have X number of listeners who like already trust you. And hopefully they’re lending me that trust for this episode. So it’s a really good way to get in front of a lot of people. And you see it with celebrities doing media tours, like it’s moving more and more towards YouTube and podcasts, as opposed to like television and radio. And I just think it’s underutilized. And I would encourage people to look at both scale and niche when they’re doing something like that. You want to talk to the specific kind of person that you’re hoping to reach. And then you also want to look at the broader ecosystem, because maybe you don’t know about a certain sect of person that’s going to be interested in what you have to say. Now, when you’re pitching podcasts to be a guest, like it’s important that you do it the right way. Step one being listened to the show. So many people don’t do that. You might be pitching a show that doesn’t have guests or something. And so it’s really important to do your research, to take the time to know that this is something that a lot of people spend a lot of time on and it can be insulting if you pitch them on something clearly having not done the homework. So that’s what I would say.
Adrian Tennant: And then we talked a little bit about technology earlier, but Jeff, how do you see AI and machine learning impacting the future of podcast production and marketing?
Jeff Umbro: I’m going to tell you something that I wasn’t going to tell you, but a robot pitched me for your show. So we have a tool that we’re testing. We have not used this like more broadly, but there are a lot of tools out there that will actually like build press lists and take a bunch of input copy and write those emails to actually pitch a guest for placement on various channels. It was effective enough to put me in this seat right now. So I’ll say that. Thank you very much. But I will say my earlier point still stands. I think a lot of this stuff is not up to snuff as to where it should be. And even like the pitch that got me on this show, like I have notes, you know? And so I think that there are a lot of ways in which people are going to be utilizing some of these new tools. And I’ll give you a handful of examples of ways in which we are and are not doing this. But PR pitch tools, you can already imagine like Sision or Podchaser or Muckrack or Meltwater implementing the exact thing I just mentioned to you, like the auto pitch situation, being able to like really target shows based on topicality or demos. The second will be in podcast production, whether that’s using chat GPT to write your scripts or using Wondercraft to clone your host voice, or even using Descript to edit the episode after the fact. I saw an amazing tool at a podcast conference a few months ago that will basically, you can record your audio and they’ll do the mixing for you. You just click a button and it removes any background noise. And it wasn’t perfect. But, you know, to 95% of listeners, like they wouldn’t even notice. So there’s a lot of production tools that really are going to impact how people are engaging with the medium. And then when it comes to research, I’m kind of undecided as to how I feel about this. Cause I think that gets very scary very quickly. You hear about AI hallucinating sometimes. And you don’t want that when it comes to what in many ways is like the entire essence of the show that you’re putting out. So, uh, I think that these tools are going to get better and better. And a lot of them are going to be really great. They’re never going to replace humans when it comes to creativity and strategy and actually like building out a functioning ecosystem. But they might help a little bit with some of the stuff that we look at as groundwork.
Adrian Tennant: 100% agree. Jeff, what’s one thing you’d like people to take away from this conversation?
Jeff Umbro: I touched on this a little bit, but like the biggest thing that I want to say is it’s almost more important to figure out when you should not make a podcast than it is to think about when you should. Like if you have, depending on your budget, your resources, your time constraints, you can just as easily get your message out there in different ways, including on podcasts via paid or organic promotion without taking, you know, hundreds of hours to actually produce something that you’re going to be happy with. That said, it does require a lot of time and research to make sure you’re doing it properly. So you can always talk to Podglomerate and we can help you out. But there’s a million ways to do it and a lot of great firms like our friends, colleagues and competitors that you could also chat with.
Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. Jeff, if listeners would like to learn more about your work at The Podglomerate or listen to Podcast Perspectives, what’s the best way to do so?
Jeff Umbro: Yeah, thank you. This was a great conversation. Really appreciate you having me. You can find me on LinkedIn. That’s where I’m most active or at poglomart.com. You can email me. It’ll go right to me at listen at thepodglomerate.com. You can listen to my podcast at Podcast Perspectives, where I chat with industry leaders about what’s happening in the podcast space. That’s on every platform, including YouTube and sign up for our newsletter. But anyway, there’s a million places to find us. Just Google my name.
Adrian Tennant: And we’ll also include links to those resources in the show notes for this episode. Jeff, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Jeff Umbro: Thanks, Adrian. Really appreciate it.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of The Podglomerate. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:01: Retail Revolution study promo
00:59: Introduction to the effectiveness of podcast advertising
02:40: Introduction to Jeff Umbro and The Podglomerate
03:39: Overview of The Podglomerate’s services
04:11: Different ways brands can advertise in podcasts
06:10: Effectiveness of host: read ads in podcasts
08:19: Discussion on AI tools in podcast advertising
10:09: Comparison of podcast advertising to other digital channels
13:05: Success story of effective podcast advertising
17:43: Data Storytelling in Marketing promo
18:42: Return from the break
18:53: Discussion on leveraging podcasts for growth and engagement
19:07: Considerations for branded podcasts
20:48: Aligning podcast content with marketing strategy
23:36: Strategies for growing a podcast audience
26:25: Measuring the success of podcast marketing efforts
28:32: Cross: promotion opportunities in podcasting
29:18: Common mistakes brands make in podcast marketing
30:21: Building thought leadership through podcasting
31:08: Being a guest on other podcasts
33:01: Impact of AI and machine learning on podcasting
35:36: Key takeaway on podcasting considerations
36:16: Contact information for Jeff Umbro and The Podglomerate
37:09: Conclusion and closing remarks
