Podcasting’s Next Era: Chat Shows, Video Expansion & The New Advertising Landscape | Jeff Umbro

0:00On 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.

0:32And there's different data that you're going to read in order to try and manage the expectations on both of those things. 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. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month.

1:05Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. Hello and welcome to Right About Now. We're always getting right. We're always talking about what's now. What's more now than podcasts, baby? Hey, I told you eight years ago, you better pay attention. I don't pretend to 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's been doing it all.

1:37He is the founder and CEO of Podglomerate. He is Jeff Umbro. What's up, buddy? How you doing? It's great to be here and you know plenty. Don't count yourself out.

1:51Jeff and I have taken different paths and I've been fortunate enough to benefit probably from his leadership and passion for the industry indirectly. He's done a lot for the space. He'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, Jeff, but I'm going to say, you know, real recognizes real. I don't do everything perfect. I'm a trailblazer. I try to look behind me to see whatever it is, but I'm trying hard to do it the right way and to just do it my way. You've obviously done the same and respect a lot of what you've done.

2:20Thank you very much. It's great to hear that from you. And 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 on because 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. And I love what Podglomerate has done. They just seem to be sort of like one of the beacons, like doing it right. You do production, audience growth, marketing.

2:48There'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. I give him credit because people need the good work their team does. It's just tough work. Production's funny because anybody who is listening who has a production background is probably 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, it's 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 then crunches your deadlines for everything else that you're doing.

3:20It's very much one of those things 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 record on a Saturday. Or can we do this at 10 o 'clock at night or whatever? No big deal. They don't care. This is fun for most people, whereas for us, it's a job. And hopefully also fun, but not always. 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.

3:54Just because you produce something great doesn't mean that you're going to find an audience for it. The 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. 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 and unlimited seemingly time and resource to do 30 second commercial or a brand campaign, the good enough or standard was different.

4:33But 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. This 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 got to nail this. I've done that. Look, I've done 700 episodes. There's some turds in my first hundred.

5:07I 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. I was that same guy eight years ago. And I was like, hey, Chris, we're here today hanging out. Number 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 and oh God, it sucked. Funny to your point. The first question I always ask, what are your goals for producing this show?

5:36And the second question I ask is, what are the listeners going to get from this show? I stole that from Dan Meisner from Bumper. He's incredible. You guys should all read his stuff. It's always a really interesting conversation to have because maybe you are making a show because you just love talking to people and you want to learn more and this is the vehicle to do it. Maybe you're the big Fortune 500 organization that's trying to sell a product. Maybe you want to get 10 ,000 people watching or listening each month. You can make some money on it. But whatever your answer to those questions are, it should determine like what kind of show you make and how you make it.

6:08And to your point about an MVP or a minimum viable product versus like a really polished thing, what you make should be informed by what you're hoping to gain from the thing. And that could be using this thing as a vehicle for lead generation. You only want it to be good enough that you can get those people in a room that may buy your product or something. Or if you want to just have something that's entertaining, that a million 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 existing audience.

6:40There are 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 expectations on both of those things. You just mentioned like spending all your time on the intro and outro. That might be really important for your show, depending on your existing listener base and how 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.

7:09And it's all about like A-B testing and talking to your audience and also trusting your own intuition, 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. If I was hiring someone to do mine, I'd hire Jeff. They do great work. That wasn't preplanned or this isn't a sales show. We have a really good team that does this stuff.

7:40We 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 it a long time. How you got into it, where we are today and exactly what the hell podcasting is, isn't trying to be. You've got these intersections of opportunity and growth and sustainability. And it's what I'm looking at. All of those are here. There's positives and negatives, but I'd love that lens through your journey. Take all this with a grain of salt. I started listening to podcasts in high school. This was about 20 years ago.

8:13A friend of mine burned a CD with five episodes of This American Life and gave it to me. I don't even think they were called podcasts back then. That is the story that got me into the medium. And then it was another 10 years before I actually turned to this professionally. I 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. And 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 next month.

8:45I'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. I'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 of this, left that job and started the Poglomerate. In 2017, we started as an ad agency where we're trying to bring together a group of shows and then sell ads as a package to advertisers across that group of shows. Very quickly, I realized I have to pay my rent. We started producing podcasts and then because everybody kept asking us for it, we started doing audience development work for podcasts.

9:25It quickly became this three legged stool that has been a godsend in hindsight. It was all unintentional when we built the business. Now, like if we have an OK year in marketing and a great year in monetization and a bad year in production, everything can kind of help sustain one another. And the goal is always to have an amazing year for all three of these business units. But that doesn't always happen. We have been able 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 orgs. It's really what every show needs.

9:55It'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 SiriusXM or an iHeart 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 a thing.

10:27Little magical bubble of people who are just making shows that they wanted to make because they were really interesting to them and they wanted to listen to them. You had a few thousand producers all over the country who were putting out stuff, the Memory Palace from Radiotopia or This American Life, or on the other side of that scale, you had like the Joe Rogans of the world who were doing chat shows. There is this whole ecosystem that developed over time where they created these things that suddenly somehow we're getting hundreds of thousands. And even in some cases, millions of listeners or viewers, this entire ecosystem sprouted around those shows in order to try and monetize them and bring some revenue to those creators.

11:04I do feel like it's frequently the other way around where somebody sees a business and then builds all the content around the business. And from my vantage point, the opposite happened here. That was really cool to see. Podcasting today looks really different from where it was 10, 20 years ago. There's a ton of consolidation in the space. Whenever an organization does get to a certain scale where there's real money there, they get snapped up by Amazon or SiriusXM or iHeart or Spotify. video has become this massive part of podcasting, which is great. It's like a really cool way to bring in new audiences.

11:37But what it also inevitably means is that you have a tech stack that was designed for one thing and then being used for another thing. And it breaks all the time. You have this big move and shift towards like true programmatic advertising on audio and in the future video properties, which inevitably means that podcasting becomes a scale play where these programmatic marketplaces are looking to pump as much advertising into 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 years, where a lot of people have been paying a premium for this ad space because of the quality of what they were buying.

12:18And then one of the other things, I'm sure I'm not going to touch on all of them, that I'm really paying attention to right now is just the death of the narrative podcast. And I'm making that sound much worse than it actually is. In essence, a lot of people came into podcasting because of these narrative serialized shows, Bone Valley or Serial or Town or you name 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 10 years ago.

12:51A lot of people who were previously investing in these big, crazy narrative stories that the listener loves are not able to do that 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 nothing wrong with that. That's a lot of what I listen to, but it's not the same thing. And or people are coming up with clever ways to do a close to narrative series, maybe a monologue or something if they're like subject matter experts. It's a lot easier to sell ads on shows that are less serialized because a lot of advertisers don't want that for any number of reasons.

13:26All of that to say, the podcast industry just looks really different than it did historically because 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 listening to 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 four companies? I have my opinion on what that answer is, but 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.

14:00It'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, but 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'd love more people. We'd 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.

14:33I 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 a lot of different things can exist simultaneously. You 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.

15:06I want to do this, but they haven't really put in the legwork to figure out how.

15:14where can our audience find a way to you jeff and what you're doing glomerate.com you can shoot us a note at glomerate.com connect i'm on linkedin at jeff umbro and and really appreciate the time thanks for having me jeff really enjoyed it brother and look forward to continuing to collaborate go 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 both for coming on. Yeah, thank you. This was great. I really appreciate it. Hey guys, you're going to find us. Ryan is right.com. Find all the highlight clips, the full download, all the details on PodCorrent and where to keep up with Jeff and other things happening in this ever evolving podcast industry.

15:57It'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. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.