Podcasting’s Next Era: Chat Shows, Video Expansion & The New Advertising Landscape | Jeff Umbro
00:00On this episode, Jeff Umbro joins us to dissect the rapidly shifting landscape of the podcast industry.From the rise of programmatic advertising to the game-changing impact of video, we dive deep into the future of monetization and production.Exploring why understanding your audience and staying adaptable are the absolute keys to long-term success in this evolving medium.That starts right about now.A lot of people, when it comes to the audience development side, forget about the difference between attracting a new audience versus retaining the existing audience.They're two different arts and two different sciences,and there's different data that you're going to readin order to try and manage the expectations on both of those things.
00:37If you're trying to bring in a net new person,you should only be paying attention to that to the extent of,I don't want them to turn this off right when they hit play.And there is a way to address that in the finished product,and it's all about like AB testing and talking to your audienceand also trusting your own intuition and your gut.This is right about now with Ryan Alford,a Radcast Network production.
01:00We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month.Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes.You ready to start snapping next and cash in checks?Well, it starts right about now.Hello and welcome to write about now.We're always getting right.We're always talking about what's now.What's more now than podcast, baby?
01:24Hey, I told you eight years ago you better pay attention.I don't pretend into the future.I just create it.You know who created it before me?I like to bring people that know way more than I know.I just pretend I know everything in podcasting.I feel like I know more than most, but this guy has been doing it all.He is the founder and CEO of Podglomerate.
01:40He is Jeff Umbrow.What's our buddy?How you doing?It's great to be here and you know plenty.Don't count yourself out.Jeff and I've taken different paths and I've been fortunate enough to benefit probably fromhis leadership and passion for the industry indirectly.He's done a lot for the space.
02:01He's well respected by a lot of people that I respect.him and I are a lot alike and a lot different.This is a weird statement, jump, I'm going to say, you know, real, recognize it's real.I don't do everything perfect.I'm a trailblazer.I try to look behind me to see whoever it is, but I'm trying hard to do it the right wayand to just do it my way.You've obviously done the same and respect a lot of what you've done.
02:20Thank you very much.It's great to hear that from you.And I've also been a fan from afar for a long time.I always love seeing how other people are doing similar things to what we're working onbecause it gives me a lot of perspective and sometimes good, sometimes bad,but it always shows me something that I can be doing differently to take advantage of what's out there.And you're very much one of those muses in that regard.I appreciate that.
02:41And I love what podglomerate's done.They just seem to be sort of like one of the beacons like doing it right.You do production, audience growth, marketing.There's some crossover, but it's different.I've gotten as far away from production as possible except for my own shows.Jeff's willing to stay there.Give them credit because people need the good work their team does.It's just tough work.
02:59Production's funny because anybody who is listening who has a production background isprobably having PTSD right now. It's a funny thing because it's fun and creatively fulfilling or it can be.But at the same time, everyone has the same problems over and over again. It's scope creep to the max.You might have a recording that you're doing that gets pushed to a different date, which thencrunches your deadlines for everything else that you're doing. It's very much one of thosethings that you are at the whim of the people that you work with, whether that be a client, a guest,or even folks on your team. I can't tell you how many times somebody's like, oh, we'll just recordon a Saturday or can we do this at 10 o'clock at night or whatever.
03:34No big deal.They don't care.This is fun for most people, whereas for us, it's a job and hopefully also fun, but notalways.Production is such a funny business because when it goes right, it's an amazing business.But when it doesn't, which is most of the time, you just have like crunched margins.You have a lot of kind of scope creep that feeds into every part of the business.Just because you produce something great doesn't mean that you're going to find an audience for it.
03:57The person who's paying you to do it might not be happy with the result.And they may decide that in six months, once all the hard work is actually done, they don't want to do it anymore.And then you lose that recurring paycheck.I'm going to tell my own story, which answers that, my own experience.I came in the ad agency and production value and all that means a lot to me.Brand and all of it.At a certain point with my own stuff, I mean, it's had to go, is it good enough?And the answer in my mind, what I want when I had Verizon and Apple money, an unlimited seemingly time and resource to do 30 second commercial or a brand campaign.
04:30that the good enough or standard was different.But when you're working with $5 million budget,you can just go hire somebody that can do the work at night or on the weekend.Exactly.No big deal.Or moving the deck chairs around and getting every detail.And look,and it matters to me.
04:44This was a hard thing for me to learn.When to put it down?When is it good enough?Is it good enough to, again,keep and attract an audience versus your own ego,versus a perceived magical place of perfection in your own mind?and we can polish a turd all day long.And then you've got to nail it.
05:04I've done that.Look, I've done 700 episodes.There's some turds in my first 100.I was boring.I didn't know how to have energy on the mic.I'm a very energetic in-person guy.I'm the guy, you know, now was that same guy eight years ago.But I was like, hey, Chris, you know, we're here today hanging out.
05:17Number one, why did I invite my friend Chris down the road when I could have invited Steve Jobs second in command?I could have gotten test man on.I could have had the CEO at Audi.I played small ball and I sounded like small ball and really worried about the intro.outro when oh god it sucked funny to your point the first question i always ask what are your goals forproducing this show and the second question i ask is what are the listeners going to get from this show i stolethat from dan mizner from bumper he's incredible you guys should all read his stuff it's always a reallyinteresting conversation to have because maybe you are making a show because you just love talking to
05:51people and you want to learn more and this is the vehicle to do it maybe you're the big fortune 500organization that's trying to sell a product maybe you want to get 10,000people watching or listening each month, you can make some money on it. But whatever your answer to thosequestions are, it should determine what kind of show you make and how you make it. And to your point aboutan MVP or a minimum viable product versus like a really polished thing, what you make should beinformed by what you're hoping to gain from the thing. And that could be using this thing as a vehiclefor lead generation. You only want it to be good enough that you can get those people in a room thatmay buy your product or something. Or if you want to just have something that's entertaining, that a million
06:28and people are going to watch it, then that's a different show.And then on that note, a lot of people, when it comes to the audience development side,forget about the difference between attracting a new audience versus retaining the existingaudience.They're two different arts and two different sciences.And there's different data that you're going to read in order to try and manage the expectationson both of those things.You just mentioned spending all your time on the intro and outro.
06:50That might be really important for your show, depending on your existing listener base andhow much they're actually consuming of the show.But if you're trying to bring in a net new person, you should only be paying attention to that to the extent of I don't want them to turn this off right when they hit play.And there is a way to address that in the finished product.And it's all about like A, B testing and talking to your audience and also trusting your own intuition and your gut.But to your point, all of the reasons, all the things that we're talking about right now, just feed back into the original idea.To do production work really well is not the same thing as production work being a really good business.You might be able to charge a fortune for this stuff, but you might not, and you might still have to do all those things anyway.
07:31If I was hiring someone to do mine, I'd hire Jeff.They do great work.That wasn't pre-planned or, and this isn't a sales show.We have a really good team that does this stuff.We have an Emmy Award winner who runs our studio, and he does incredible work, and the team underneath him is just as good.Podcasting's weird, Jeff.You've been in a long time how you got into it.Where we are today and exactly what the hell podcasting is, isn't trying to.
07:56to be you've got these intersections of opportunity and growth and sustainability. And it's what I'mlooking at. All of those are here. There's positives and negatives, but I love that lens through yourjourney. Take all this with a grain of salt. I started listening to podcasts in high school. This isabout 20 years ago. A friend of mine burned a CD with five episodes of This American Life and gave itto me. I don't even think they were called podcast back then. That is the story that got me intothe medium. And then it was another 10 years before I actually turned to this professionally. II was working in New York as a book publicist.I decided for the creative outlet, I wanted to start a podcast where I would talk to authors.
08:33And I did it for fun.Byproduct of making this show, which still is out there.Nobody should listen to it.I won't tell you the name of it.Is that a lot of the authors that came on said some version of, hey, my book comes out nextmonth.I'd like to hire you guys to help me to grow this thing.And I bring this to my boss and she'd write me a check for commission on the referral.
08:51I'm like, oh, wow, this is cool.There is a whole business model here that has nothing.to do with advertising that is entirely engaged because of the vehicle that I'm doing. After a few years ofthis, left that job and started the pogglomer. In 2017, we started as an ad agency where we're tryingto bring together a group of shows and then sell ads as a package to advertisers across that group ofshows. Very quickly, I realized, I have to pay my rent. We started producing podcasts. And then becauseeverybody kept asking us for it, we started doing audience development work for podcasts. It quicklybecame this three-legged stool that has been a godsend in hindsight. It was all unintentional when we built
09:31the business. Now, like, if we have an okay year in marketing and a great year in monetization andbad year in production, everything can kind of help sustain one another. And the goal is always to havean amazing year for all three of these business units, but that doesn't always happen. We have beenable to kind of weather the storm and become like this fairly sustainable organization over the years,in part because we have those three different business org. It's really what every show needs.It's true. And some people will come to us for one of those things. And some people will come to us for two or three of those things. It truly is we will do all the same things for you that like a serious XM or an I heart would do. But you don't have to be of a certain scale to work with them. And you get to own your property and you can just hire us to help you with it. Or you can use this as a testing ground to try and expand your show in order to go and work with one of those guys. I'm happy with any of those solutions because it means that we're going to get some good projects along the way. Over the years, what I've realized is that the podcast,industry started as thing. Little magical bubble of people who were just making shows that they wantedto make because they were really interesting to them and they wanted to listen to them. You had a few
10:36thousand producers all over the country who were putting out stuff the memory palettes from Radiotopiaor This American Life or on the other side of that scale, you had like the Joe Rogans of the worldwho were doing chat shows. There was this whole ecosystem that developed over time where they createdthese things that suddenly somehow were getting hundreds of thousands and even insome cases millions of listeners or viewers, this entire ecosystem sprouted around those showsin order to try and monetize them and bring some revenue to those creators. I do feel likeit's frequently the other way around where somebody sees a business and then builds all thecontent around the business. And from my vantage point, the opposite happened here. That was really
11:15cool to see. Podcasting today looks really different from where it was 10, 20 years ago. There's a tonof consolidation in the space. Whenever an organization does get to a certain scale wherethere's real money there. They get snapped up by Amazon or Sirius X-M or I Heart or Spotify.Video has become this massive part of podcasting, which is great. It's like a really cool way to bringin new audiences. But what it also inevitably means is that you have a tech stack that was designedfor one thing and then being used for another thing. And it breaks all the time. You have this bigmove and shift towards like true programmatic advertising on audio and in the future video properties,which inevitably means that podcasting becomes a scale play
11:58where these programmatic marketplacesare looking to pump as much advertisinginto this impressions available as possible,often at a lower CPM in order to get people in the door.That's a big shift from what we've seen over the last few yearswhere a lot of people have been paying a premiumfor this ad space because of the quality of what they were buying.And then one of the other things,
12:19I'm sure I'm not going to touch on all of them,that I'm really paying attention to right nowis just the death of the narrativepodcast. And I'm making that sound much worse than it actually is. In essence, a lot of people cameinto podcasting because of these narrative serialized shows, Bone Valley or cereal or town or youname it. And because of all the things that we just mentioned, consolidation in the space,the changing from direct to programmatic advertising and the rise of video and many other things,the business model is just not the same as it was five or ten years ago. A lot of people who were
12:53previously investing in these big, crazy narrative stories that the listener loves are not able to dothat anymore because they don't have the same amount of money to put into these projects.And instead, they're investing in a lot of chat shows. And I love a good chat show. There's nothingwrong with that. That's a lot of what I listen to, but it's not the same thing. And or people arecoming up with clever ways to do a close to narrative series, maybe a monologue or something if they'relike subject matter experts. It's a lot easier to sell ads on shows that are less serializedbecause a lot of advertisers don't want that for any number of reasons.All of that to say, the podcast industry just looks really different than it did historically
13:31because of a lot of those changes I mentioned and more.And it's kind of transitioning the entire landscape into something new.And the question becomes then, do all of these millions of people who have really loved listeningto these shows, do they want video?Do they want chat shows?Do they want all of their favorite creators being managed by the same three or fourcompanies?I have my opinion on what that answer is.
13:53but that's the landscape that we're in right now.You crystallized all of it.When you're trying to create something for audio,there's a reason there's radio and television.It's a different medium.What's audibly interesting is not always visibly interesting and vice versa.It's not easy to create and win the day in both of those mediums at the same time.I'm not sure the audio audience was really asking for video,
14:13but the advertising dollars and the demand for this style of content on YouTube and others is getting attention.So it's like, hey, we'd love the audience.We love more people.We love more money to be made and the content that we're doing.But wait a second, we're not really creating the right thing for that.We're at a really interesting intersection of all those things, Jeff.I think that we're at this funny point where podcasting is having a little bit of an identity crisis.And my answer to that is that like a lot of different things can exist simultaneously.
14:43You can have the YouTube bros moving into the podcast space.You can have the serialized NPR folks that are making these big, vast investigative series.And you can have everything in between.It's just the thing that is missing from a lot of these considerations is what's the business model there?And it exists.And there are a lot of people who are paying close attention to this.There's still quite a few people who are just high in the sky.I want to do this.
15:07But they haven't really put in the legwork to figure out how.Where can our audience find a way to you, Jeff, and what you're doing?Glamarate.com.You can shoot us a note at www.com slash connect.I'm on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbrough.And really appreciate the time.Thanks for having me.really enjoyed it, brother, and look forward to continuing to collaborate.
15:30Go check out podcast perspectives.Jeff's got a great show.And I look forward to being on and to continuing our relationship.And thank you, brother, for coming on.Yeah, thank you.This was great.I really appreciate it.Hey, guys, you're going to find us.
15:43Ryan is right.com.Find all the highlight clips, the full download, all the details on Podgarent and where to keep up with Jeffand other things happening in this ever-evolving podcast.industry. It's going to be right here, right now. We'll see you next time on Right About Now.This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. VisitRyanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorshipopportunities. Thanks for listening.
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