Pod-cession or recession? What matters when everything else feels unstable.

Hello friends, coffee fiends, and competitors alike—

We’re days away from the annual pilgrimage to yet another Podcast Movement. You know the drill: brand safety panels, open bars, hallway whispers, and the recurring existential question...

Do we really need two of these every year?

Maybe we do. Maybe we don’t. But after a chaotic Q1, I’m just glad to be back with my people. I’ve got some bruises (literally), some reflections, and three core values I want to share to future proof any “bubbles popping” before we all clink glasses in Chicago.

🗣️ Before I Become the Wet Blanket I Often Am…

Here are four places I’m proud to be sharing my love for podcasting this quarter (three of which are at PME!):

🎥 Why Ecom Brands Should Explore Podcast Ads

I sat down on Jordan Hayes’ YouTube channel to dive deep into why podcast advertising is still a massive blue ocean for DTC brands—and how to actually do it right. It even got me excited about creating more content for brands that haven’t tried podcasting yet.

🧼 Ad Infinitum / A-asap TEAM Reunion – Live Ad Creative Roast

Wednesday, April 2 · 10:00 AM – 11:15 AM CT

A live panel hosted by Stew Redwine of Oxford Road reviewing podcast ad creative with your favorite masochistic marketers.
I’ll bring takes, audio trauma, and some helpful tips for creators to win the brand’s heart.

🎤 Uncensored – Podcast Advertising Questions You’re Too Afraid to Ask Buyers

Tuesday, April 1 · 1:45 PM – 2:15 PM CT
Profit Stage (inside Expo Hall)

This one’s spicy. Libsyn Ads’ Anthony Savelli and Stephen Pickens are grilling buyers like me, Bart Roselli, and Taylor Bradbury.
No question is off-limits. Bring yours.

📹 Monetization Strategies for Multi-Platform Distribution

Wednesday, April 2 · 1:45 PM – 2:15 PM CT
Profit Stage (inside Expo Hall)

We’re talking all things video: inventory pricing, premium packaging, sponsor expectations, cross-platform metrics, and how to make it all scale without breaking your soul. If you’re playing the YouTube/podcast hybrid game—this one’s for you.

🪦 Q1 Was… Something.

• Spent 7 days with the ADOPTER crew at Disney/Universal. Very fun. Very sick.

• Skied three times at Lake Louise. Bruised a rib. Still hurts.

• Canceled over $500K in media spend. (Optimism is a hell of a drug).

• Read four biographies. McConaughey & Bourdain? Stellar. Smith? Meh. Perry? Sad.

• I renewed my fun uncle status by taking my nephews/nieces to a waterslide park and indoor go-karting. “funcle.”

• Went on a blind date. She wasn’t blind. She was lovely.

• Inbound leads from other agencies’ clients hit an all-time high. Called it.

• I’ve had a dry cough for five weeks. Send help (or witchcraft).

📊 Industry Insights & Q1 Performance Signals

A few patterns we’re watching closely as we head into Q2:

🟥 Conservative Media > Liberal Media (for Conversion Rates)
We’re seeing conservative-leaning shows consistently outperform liberal-leaning shows on Visit Rate and Conversion Rate. That said, liberal shows are spiking in virality (e.g., MeidasTouch outranking Rogan and others in reach).

Possible theory: Are more liberal listeners projecting a recession, feeling economically squeezed—and therefore clicking but not converting?

Looking back at prior elections and major political moments, I’ve always bet heavily on the opposition, as people love to hate—and that’s where we can find high influence and high engagement (my two favorite commodities). During Biden’s presidency, I made bets pretty strongly on Conservative media that panned out well.

Come 2025, I was so confident that much of America would tune into Liberal media and thus would make for a great space to buy. I was half right.

In Q1 the MeidasTouch Podcast dominated the charts, blew up in growth, and has had an an incredible cult following. At the time of writing this, on their main channel, they’ve released 15 videos of breaking news. Several approaching 1M views.

Engagement is incredibly strong, too, with 1,000s of comments on videos and 10k+ live stream viewers regularly.

They’re not alone in this growth—liberal media is on fire right now and people are tuning in.

Across clients, we’ve spent several $MM this quarter on liberal media and a fair amount on conservative as well.

Here is a brief client case study:

Looking strictly at impression vs. impression data (not cost associated), here’s the visit % (percent of people who downloaded an episode with an ad in Q1 and went to the website) and visit conversion % (the % of visitors who bought this clients product).

Looking at the funnel, there are three things to observe:

1. Liberal/progressive media is driving more on-site engagement (higher visit %)

2. Conservative listeners are more likely to buy the product (higher visit conversion %)

3. Full funnel performance shows conservative listeners for this client as 2x more efficient.

Jeremiah Prummer pointed me to some data that further backs this shared by Steve R, Director of Data at Common Thread. 

On the economic sentiment, there is clear split between red states (FL, TX) and blue ones (CA, NY) around November. pic.twitter.com/xBeGAFyDmb

— Steve R (@RSteveData) January 4, 2025

Yes, there’s a lot of nuance:

1. Ad placement/frequency/diminishing returns.

2. Duration of campaigns (the shows in this Q1 portfolio were all active in 2024 and performed quite well).

3. The product you’re advertising

4. And a myriad of other things…

I still think this data is relevant and makes me consider the initial theory that liberal listeners are extremely nervous about a recession and are withholding purchasing much more than conservatives.

I’m pretty confident in my hypothesis and the data I keep stumbling into is reaffirming it, but please reply to this email if you disagree and are seeing things differently.

📉 February Was Brutal (Even By February Standards)

An affirmation:
Q1 is always challenging, but February 2025 was particularly rough.
If your tests failed last month, you’re not alone. Don’t let it dictate how you plan Q2.

If you’re a podcaster getting beat up by brand cancels, you’re also not alone—and your content/audience doesn’t necessarily suck.

🕵️‍♂️ Run of Network (RON) Buys Are Quietly Winning

I’ll eat some humble pie when it’s served to me.

I am still a general naysayer about DAI capabilities (I’ve been burned more than once), but we’ve been dabbling into programmatic and more RON/Full-catalog buys for clients recently with some decent success.

To give me some credit, I am more of a skeptic optimist. I pioneered (to my knowledge) the use of RONs for finding new shows to test as episodic endorsed reads back in 2022/23 when Podscribe was launching their pixel—also during the era of the DAI bubble pre-pop with iOS 17.

The breakdown:

Specifically, we’re seeing strong, repeatable performance from carefully selected RON campaigns—especially in True Crime via trusted networks like Wondery.

When you set up a RON, it’s imperative you pixel it to get the show-level data, or there’s no point. You need a way to optimize and learn.

Here’s an example of the show-by-show breakdown in a Wondery True Crime RON bundle we’ve run on a client recently:

It’s clear here that some of these shows are unlike the others. 48 Hours, Small Town Murder, and Morbid show strong visit rates relative to the rest with average (~2-3%) on-site conversion rates.

Something Was Wrong has lower visit rates but a strong purchasing audience (could be that the broader audience isn’t the right fit, but the ones that are coming are buying at a good rate.

With this data, we can now approach these shows through Wondery for host-reads and ramp up the partnership.

And, in this same instance, we may also want to just further optimize the RON by removing “REDACTED” as the audience is visiting but buying at a low rate, eating up our impressions.

Podscribe actually affirmed this with the Q4 PPB results stating the narrowing gap on performance:

RON has become a backbone strategy for several clients due to the speed of data we get back, the de-risking of big bets (test RON then launch big on the show) when:

• CPMs are kept under ~$15

• Data is used to identify breakout shows for host-read upgrades

• You can optimize show selection within RONs i.e. excluding shows

Not all RONs are equal. Some publishers/podcasts allow large numbers of ads per episode, do not allow show-level tracking, and ask for rates that don’t actually make sense for you to bite at.

Ray Harkins at Wondery has been a huge help in getting this moving for us, among other networks.

This is one of the most scalable and efficient pathways we’re using right now. Don’t sleep on it.

The Industry Vibe Feels... Familiar

I’m expecting this PME to feel a lot like Vegas 2023—a “Big Short” energy kind of year. Because back then? It was.

I’m nervous this year for the same reason: false optimism is back on the menu.

I genuinely believe 2024 was one of the best years in recent memory to buy podcast ads. But 2025? It's off to a rough start—and no one seems to be talking about it.

Spotify’s video changes, YouTube’s pending DAI, IPv6 concerns, publisher overconfidence (deserves an article), a pending recession, and the trend of squeezing more ads out of a single listening experience—it’s a cocktail that’s tough to drink (even for the lobby bar-goers are PM).

Or maybe I just need to level up.

But I don’t think I’m alone. This quarter has been brutal (as I noted earlier). And when clients from each of the Big Three start knocking, asking what else is out there—that’s not a coincidence.

A reckoning (perhaps mild) is coming. I’m not predicting a single iOS-style disruption, but there’s a pile-up of small compounding problems that could hit hard and fast.

So before we get swept up in panels and parties—I want to share what I’m focusing our team’s attention on to withstand whatever does hit. Three core values.

The Three Rules That Still Work

🧠 Know Your Shit

Whenever we onboard a new rep to an account, I challenge them:
Ask me about any campaign, past or present, and I’ll have an answer.

One of our clients had over $5M in spend across 300+ shows. They once asked about a placement from two years ago. I could still tell them why it was canceled and the performance nuance around it.

I’m a freak. I obsess over details. Because I hate being caught off guard.

Clients hire us to lead, not react. And leadership comes from mastery, not guesswork.

When everyone else was throwing dumb money at DAI and programmatic pre-iOS 17, we avoided it. Maybe we missed some easy upside. But when the floor fell out, we grew—while others drowned.

Know your shit. Then act on it.
The second part is often harder than the first. But if you obsess over performance, study patterns, and ask tough questions—you’ll outpace everyone trying to fake it.

Two ways I’m taking action on this to keep our team on top of this value:

1. Building our team to being the most Podscribe competent team in the industry (1-on-1’s, team trainings, and even conversations with Podscribe to formalize training paths).

2. Our team huddles where we put a buyer on the spot for a “peer review” of one of their accounts. One buyer will secretly review another buyers account and then try to find errors, optimizations, and praises to keep us on our toes and test if we really know our shit.

🤥 Don’t Lie

Not to clients.
Not to publishers.
Not to yourself.

Every time I’ve seen campaigns collapse and relationships rot, it started with someone pretending things were better than they were.

If a test flops, say so—with brutal candor. If a show performs, shout it out—and maybe offer a bonus or rate increase.

I’m tired of hearing that I’m the only buyer who opens Podscribe with a network and walks through performance in real time.

Gatekeeping performance out of fear they’ll raise rates? That’s backwards.

Yes, some sellers will take advantage. Cut them. But withholding data from good partners is the dumbest thing you can do as a buyer.

And please—don’t lie to me.

If you under-delivered, tell me. I’ll work with you. But if I find the issue before you bring it up? That’s a red flag for future business.

🚀 Be Ready to Scale

You won’t always have budget. But you should always have a plan.

Every client call, we show up with scale-ready candidates.

Because when a brand says:

“Hey—we’ve got an extra $50K next month. Can you place it?”

...you don’t want to be standing there with your pants down.

Don’t wait for clients to tell you a show’s not working.
Tell them first. Protect their investment.

That’s how trust is built—and budgets grow (even if the rest of the industry is falling apart).

Final Sip

This industry is shifting. Quietly.
The cracks are forming under the surface.
If you’re not paying attention, they’ll catch you off guard.

But if you:

✅ Know your shit
✅ Don’t lie
✅ Are ready to scale

...you’ll survive the next cycle. And probably win.

See you in Chicago.