Adam McNeil: Adopter Media

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:12  
Adam McNeil never thought he would be running podcast ads for a living. He thought his life would be about bikes and biographies and coffee brews instead. He's a senior vice president at adopter media, a podcast ad buying agency. Now I do love talking to the people on the buying side of podcasting. What are they looking for? What sounds good? What makes the cash register ring? I met Adam at podcast YYC in September, and we had so much to talk about that I thought, yeah, we're going to save this for the show. Adopter media is growing quickly. What was once a company of about a half dozen is up to a staff of 15. And if you're wondering if the podcast advertising space is growing, it is today we will hear a number of success stories, what works, what doesn't work, and how it's all measured. And now, Adam McNeil joins me from Calgary. Last week on the show, I said that Alberta is the podcast capital of Canada. Am I right? 

Adam McNeil  1:18  
Oh, I don't know. There definitely is individuals that live in Calgary that live in Calgary that are very influential within the podcast world, but I didn't know about them until a year or two ago, and so for my seat as an ad person, Calgary was not on the map of podcasting to me, but there were creators that existed here, and there were creators that have come out of Calgary, but I always saw either Toronto or Vancouver as the capital of podcasting within Canada, because In Vancouver, there was at least podcast nation that was based out of there. Some of the quill team is out of there. And so there were these big entities that I knew from the advertising world of podcasting that existed there in Toronto, I knew, you know your Bob canes, and that's where you would find, typically, your a cast people, or your Libsyn people at the time, or anyone that was like a larger industry seller. So I only saw those two as like the hubs of Canadian podcasting, and that was until I met Tim Truex, and Tim, he found me. I can't remember who introduced us, but eventually we got introduced, and he said, Hey, can I take you out for lunch or dinner or whatever it was after work day, we sat down myself and one of my colleagues with him, and he's like, I think I want you to speak at pod Summit, because we don't have anyone to talk about the ad side of the industry, and I think a lot of creators would love to know how monetization on podcasting works. And so sure enough, I realized there was a bit of a community here. I met Jeff Humphreys, who runs a studio now in the city, and Meg Wilcox, who I think is the only PhD in podcasting that currently exists like a dedicated PhD in podcasting, and they're based here in Calgary. So there are some, like, very educated, incredibly talented people that are stupidly smart around podcasting that live here in Calgary. I just didn't know it existed until last pod Summit. Yeah, I always go to

Matt Cundill  2:53  
those podcast meetups. You never know who you're gonna meet, and you'll find out that the community is a little more vibrant than you think. And I think of Toronto Mike, who's been doing podcasting for many years, and Canadaland as well, who I can we can add to that list. Why should brands be excited about podcast

Adam McNeil  3:08  
advertising? Well, I'll tell you why I'm excited about it. I got my start in podcasting, both as a creator and then also while I was working at a company called theme. They're an E commerce startup out of Calgary. They make a no smoke, no vape, no nicotine replacement for the hand of mouth, habit of smoking and vaping to help people quit and vaping to help people quit and transition their habit off of nicotine, and we had a lot of trouble getting our ads on to meta or Google, etc. Come 2021 we were like, three months runway left in our business cash flow before we were gonna have to close our doors and say, this just isn't working, because we can't get the word out about what our product is and who it's for a podcast network reached out to us. They said, Hey, we had another smoking cessation product on our network that did well. They're no longer advertising with us. Would you guys be interested in advertising on our network? And gratefully and thankfully, I had a very optimistic manager, or my cmo was like, we'll do anything. We'll try anything, because we either die trying or we're dying not trying. So do something and just take a risk. So we spent five grand on podcast ads, and immediately we got, I think, 10 grand or 15 grand back. It was an immediate return on investment that came back quite quickly. And this was like early days of great podcast advertising, where you could almost, like, throw money at the wall, and most of it would stick. And that kick started my career in podcast ads. Simultaneously, I was also running my own podcast, and I think I've probably shared this publicly somewhere. I was working for a startup in Calgary. I wasn't making very much money, so I was always looking for a side hustle to help pay the bills, and so I had my podcast that I accidentally launched, and sure enough, I ended up stumbling into some revenue models. There I was selling my own merch. I had an event that I was running, and had an advertiser on there, and was making an additional 30 some $1,000 a year off of that, which made it so that I had a somewhat reasonable

Matt Cundill  4:49  
life in Calgary. So there was success early in 2021 you know, with this product and getting it into the ears of people. So think back to that period. What were some of the tech? Things that were used to really, you know, match the brand with the podcast, because I'm sure that's evolved and changed since then.

Adam McNeil  5:06  
I think I'm the luckiest person in podcast ads, because in hindsight, once I've done I, you know, I've booked 1000s and 1000s of shows now, and if I were to go back on my success rate on the shows that I've picked for my brands that have gone on to be profitable and long term good performers for the clients that I work with. If I'm hitting above 30 to 40% of the time, that's a really good ratio. And the reason that is is because you find 30% that work, you book those in for a year. They cover the cost of the ones that aren't working. And you keep rinsing and repeating, and you keep finding new opportunities and new shows to go with. I had no strategy when I launched, it was we had someone that came to us at the right time or the right opportunity. I said yes, and it candidly in hindsight, it was the right shows, it was the right audiences. It met all the metrics that I would look at now as a media buyer to qualify the shows as being good shows. I didn't have that. So like genuinely, I think I got very lucky with the first two shows that I booked, and along the way, I found shows that didn't perform. And that's when I started to have to build up my toolkit of Okay, so why didn't that work? And why did this one work? Oh, there's really good long term advertisers on this show, and this show can't seem to keep an advertiser happy for more than two months in a row, and they were falling off and dropping off. That was probably one of the first learnings that I ever had. Was follow brands where they're seeing long term, sustained success. We would do that by just looking at at that time before there were tools like pod scribe or like Magellan, et cetera that I had access to. But just like, look at the show, follow it a little bit and see that sheath underwear was advertising every three episodes on this show for a year straight. And I go, sheath underwear, male audience, mid 30s, tends to perform on the same shows that I've been performing on. Let me just find where else sheath or Ridge wallet or blue chew or some of these other brands that were targeting like a male 30 plus audience were consistently advertising, and then I went after those.

Matt Cundill  6:50  
So you asked me, before we started, what my favorite podcast was, and I'm sure a lot of people would answer that question and just say, well, it's the one with the most downloads, but I find that the shows with the most downloads are actually the most difficult to manage for whatever reason. Maybe it's it just sometimes feels that products get on there and the subject matter is too wide. So when we go back to that, how do we match this up? Is there a sweet spot that you look for that does involve the downloads metric inside a show? Yeah, totally. The

Adam McNeil  7:19  
way that I teach our media buying team at adopter media now is to follow a five step framework of vetting for a show, and it's always going to begin with, first take a look at the renewal history of that show. When we sign on a show to work with a brand and to advertise, I like to set the framework of we're hiring an employee to work for that brand, and so we want to look at their resume. We want to say, Okay, well, have they worked with other brands like our brand in past? It's not necessarily an indicator that it won't work, but it can be an indicator that they have some past experience selling products similar to ours. We sustain long term success. So vetting, number one, look at the renewal history. It's like their report card or their resume of job history. Number two, we would look at an indicator that would be more like demographically aligned, and we'd say, Okay, so is the show good at keeping brands around? Yep. Okay, now, does it fit the general demographics of what we'd be looking for that could be inferred. Sometimes you can just look at a podcast and get a pretty good idea of what the content and the audience is likely going to be. I encourage my team to lean into like, general stereotypes, because oftentimes you're going to be mostly right about what the audience is based on the content. If it's two girlfriends sitting on the couch talking about their dating history and their dating life, and they're in their early to mid 20s, the likelihood is their audience is also going to be in that category. You don't necessarily need to reach out to the show always and ask them for what's your demographics all these things. For example, there's a show called over 50 and flourishing. It's hosted on studio 71 do you think that most of that audience is going to be young men in their 20s to 30s? Unlikely. Maybe not. Maybe there's some really young men who are really trying to look after their aging mothers or grandmothers or who knows. So anyways, lean into the demographic data. Find a good alignment. Just check that box off. Is it generally aligned with you? Cool three, we'd look at something like an engagement ratio that's taking some of the data that we would pull from the iTunes reviews that the show has. There's a general multiplier that will apply, like a 20x multiplier on iTunes reviews versus what the show's reported downloads are. We'd look at those two things side by side and then say, okay, are we projecting a bigger audience than what the audience actually is. That's going to lead to a positive engagement ratio. If it's less than what they're telling us the audience is. It's a less than engaged audience. It's not a hard and fast this is the way, but it can be a helpful indicator to find a show that could be great to work with. And then lastly, we would look at stuff like the ad load and ad efficacy of the show. And so I would encourage my team to look at a how many ads do they do in an episode? How do they insert their ads into the episodes, and how do they actually sound when they do the ad? Read, when you do all four of those steps, it gives you a really good framework for getting to step five, which is negotiating every show will work for a brand at. Certain price point. Now that price point might not be a price point that the creator wants, but we can kind of, through that process, deduce what seems to be a reasonable price for that brand by checking off all those boxes. So I might encourage my team if I'm buying for fume, let's say their ideal demographic now is a 20 to 30 year old female show. We found a show great renewal history. That's a checkbox. That's a if you if you're familiar with the concept of card counting and blackjack, that's a plus one in the head right now. So I'm willing to tolerate a higher CPM, then I might go to the demographics. It's actually a male leaning show, so that's a minus one in my head. But it doesn't mean it's a hard No. It could still work, but I'm losing a little bit of my value on the show. I'd go down to the way that they do their ads and engagement ratio, and maybe those both look pretty good. So the only thing that's detracting is that it's not the right demographic. It's a male leaning show, but everything else looks great. I still might take a test on it. I just might push the rate down just a little bit to say, hey, it's not perfectly aligned for my brand. If you think this is a good fit for you, and you're willing to take the risk with me, I'm happy to do this, but this but this would be the rate that would make sense. And so that's how I teach my team to buy.

Matt Cundill  11:05  
So one of the things that sort of glazed past my ear was taking a look at ratings and reviews. We know it doesn't have anything to do with the discoverability necessarily, of your show, but I think for people, and I've seen this in the PR world, and you sort of touched on it a bit, that it does show activity for a show, you can still be a successful podcast and have zero activity on rate and review, but just seeing it, there is a small indication that there's activity Correct. Yeah.

Adam McNeil  11:31  
And more than that, it's a disqualifier for me, that's where I use it, probably more than as a qualifier. For example, I'll tell you a story of a show that got the better of me for a long time, and it got the better of a lot of our industry. I won't name the show. There's still a show that exists, and they still have found a way to take advantage of unsuspecting brands. But there's a show massive YouTube following. They get about 100,000 almost always, 100,000 views per episode that they get. They bill out at 100,000 they've been doing this for years, and when we measure the performance of the show by coupon codes. It looks amazing every time we would do a buy on the show, coupon codes through the roof. People are ordering product. We were so excited. It was like a 5x return on ad spend, anything a CMO would praise and be excited about. But eventually I started to go, I think this is too good to be true. I think something here isn't really adding up. And so I this is where I started to learn other ways of doing attribution. And so we installed post purchase surveys onto the brand's site, and I've been advertising on this show for months. Not a single mention ever came in for this show, and it had hundreds of 1000s of people listening in. We got hundreds and hundreds of orders via coupon codes. I would get shows that might only get one coupon code mention with like two survey mentions. This show had hundreds of coupon codes, no survey mentions. Then we went to the show. We looked at this YouTube audience, the 100,000 views per episode, and you go to any video, zero comments, one comment, nothing. And similar to how we look at the iTunes side of things, a show might tell us, Oh, we get 100,000 downloads an episode, but they only have two reviews on iTunes. Just seems unreasonable to me that 100,000 people tune in weekly, and only two of those 100,000 people ever came through and left a review. Something's a little fishy to me, and so I use that more as a disqualifier to say if these engagement ratios are so off, that's a telltale sign that either it's a likely purchased audience, likely very not engaged. But it could also be that the show is brand new, and the show might be brand new. They don't have a big following yet. They haven't earned that longevity where people start to review it. That's where I would say with my team, it's like, you can't use that formula for a new show. It just doesn't make

Matt Cundill  13:38  
sense. So let's stick with the 100,000 downloads for a second. It's very random number, and largely doesn't apply to most of us. But 100,000 downloads does not mean 100,000 people listen to the podcast. AD, there are moments when you know you just don't get over the hump, and over the hump means getting people to the mid roll. Is it a guessing game for you to figure out how engaged the audience is that they're actually getting through most of the show, or to the end of the show to make sure that those ads are listened to

Adam McNeil  14:09  
maybe a little bit? And this is where I think post roles in general are kind of like not a desirable commodity, at least from a performance attribution perspective.

Matt Cundill  14:16  
They are not. That is where the promo goes. We're going to put the promo there. We're going to do promo swaps there. Sell your

Adam McNeil  14:22  
own stuff in your post roles. But I think brands that are getting those spots are getting a severe disadvantage, and it's just not likely to ever work for them at any reasonable rate. So we don't have from our end, like from an advertiser perspective, when I sponsor your show, unless you show me your listen through data on your your show, I have no visibility tool to know if people got to my mid roll. You tell me. And I have tools if we pixel your show to see how many downloads your show got, or how many downloads of the episode that had our ad in it, or the episodes, if it's a run of network or a dai campaign, etc, has, but I don't know how many people truly listen to your ad in the episode. I. There are tools and technology that are coming, and certain platforms are now offering this. And theoretically, if you pass through to us or to pod, scribe, your apple, connect, I believe it's called, then they can see the Listen data, as opposed to the download data, and parse that out and say, Well, you got 100,000 downloads, but only 50,000 of them made it to your point in the episode with the mid roll. I don't think the industry wants to go that direction by passing everything through, because it will unveil a lot of secrets about a lot of shows that don't have very good, engaged audiences, and they get a 70% drop off in the first 15 minutes of their show every time. I don't think the industry wants that data out there yet. I don't think they're comfortable with it, but the one company love them or hate them that is starting to push and lead that charge is Spotify. They've been a champion of their streaming ad insertion technology. They've been pushing that forward, especially with their pull to get everybody to opt in to Spotify video and Spotify streaming, that has removed the ability to track on download, and it is now inserting the ads at the stream level, which is platform listening, and it is a live listening experience. So when they say you got 100,000 streams, they mean 100,000 people listen to your ad, which is a more technically accurate answer. And I think that that's something that the rest of the industry should be aware of, that they are setting a new precedent of they can tell you, this is how many people listen to your ad, whereas everybody in the RSS world is saying this is how many people downloaded your ad. I don't know how many listened. It's something to be aware of. I think that's going to hit our industry as a more real reality within like, two years.

Matt Cundill  16:22  
Yeah. So a fun example that I have, there's a 90 minute show. The first mid roll, we will probably get about 90% of, you know, that 100,000 downloads reaching it, but we only got about 600 you know, we only got about 60,000 on the second mid roll, which is about 50 minutes into the show, let's say, and so you can see it. You know, the ad people know. And they said, you know, this is just not ringing through as much as the ad that ran in the first mid roll.

Adam McNeil  16:49  
And there's hard data to support that too. So pod scribe, one of the leading companies in the attribution space, they do a quarterly report, and they measure the effectiveness of mid roll one, mid roll two, mid roll three, four, so on, and they'll show you the conversion rates and visit rates of each spot as it gets further in the episode. Now you can make the argument it's because it's more ads. It's not necessarily because it's more ads, it's also it's just further in the episode and less people are getting there, so it's inherently going to have less visitors and less conversions. But you could say ad load or ad episode length have a factor in that.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  17:18  
Sound design of the sound off podcast is inspired by mega tracks, the sound of entertainment, providing music and sound effects for radio, podcasts and media professionals. Mega tracks is your one stop shop for library and custom tracks. Start your music search now at Mega tracks.com the sound off podcast with Matt Cundill,

Matt Cundill  17:42  
so you have access to a lot of data. And so I get to ask this question, what is something that is distinctly Canadian that you see about Canadian podcasts that is just different from the American ones? And I'm asking this because I know that in the States, I get my pod news from there. I get all my press releases from there. So I know what the industry is like, but what's something that's distinctly Canadian about the Canadian podcast advertising industry

Adam McNeil  18:08  
so far less competitive, it's also far less optimized. Right now, there are lots of great Canadian podcasts and podcasters. A majority of those podcasts and podcasters still have a majority of their audience based in the US. And so if I'm a brand and I want to buy Canadian impressions, there's not actually a large, large influx of impressions coming from Canadian hosted shows to Canadian audiences where they're a majority. So the ad buying methodology that exists in the States, which is still predominantly host, read episodic ads, doesn't really exist in Canada. In Canada, it's mostly dai programmatic, because they don't have a substantial enough volume of Canadian listeners per episode to make it reasonable to do an episodic target on a show. So the buying methodologies are very different, similar to the UK. The UK is quite alike to Canada in that regard. Secondly, what that means is, for implications, is that some of the sins of early dai that were resolved in the states haven't necessarily been resolved effectively in the UK and Canada when it comes to like frequency capping issues, or even just like general standards around performance based advertising. Performance based advertising is super, super critical to the American economy of podcast advertising Canada in the UK, it's not. It's been mostly brand awareness, and it's mostly been uncapped impressions, mostly been un frequency capped as well. And so it's just buying boatloads of impressions to Canadians, hoping that it's doing something effective. I experienced this as a listener to podcasts, and you likely do as well. There's not as many brands that advertise in Canada, advertising to Canadians. Specifically, I used to listen to a show, and I still love this show. I listened to the whole first season of dungeons and daddies. I'm a D and D nerd. I love it. And for I want to say 14 episodes straight. I was getting in every episode the same ad for cozy, the modular furniture company based out of Montreal. I love cozy. Don't get me wrong, like they're a great brand. Great product. I've thought about buying their stuff. Maybe the podcast influenced me, but the amount that they spent on impressions, just for me, is crazy, because there was no frequency capping, nothing, and it's just not the way that Canada or the UK or most non US countries have been set up to do their ads, because they were not indicted into podcast advertising by performance based marketers that set the stage for how podcasting should be done, for brands to get an ROI on their ads. Does that suffice as a general, broad answer? Yes, it certainly

Matt Cundill  20:29  
does. I will accept that answer absolutely at the same time, when I mentioned, what's the difference between Canada and the US? And you know, we talked about that you're an ad buyer and you've got all of Canada to deal with, and that would include 8 million francophones in Quebec. Do you deal in the French language? And if you do, how is it different in Quebec?

Adam McNeil  20:49  
I don't, and this is more out of naivety. From my end, all my brands are generally. 90% of my brands are US based. I have one in the UK, or two in two in Europe, one specifically in the UK, I have a couple of Canadian companies that I've worked for, but they do 80 plus percent of their revenue in the state. So they care about the US side of advertising more so than they care about Canada. Canada for E commerce. And so to set the stage on my background, my background is E commerce. I work predominantly in direct to consumer e commerce type brands, and Canada's e commerce scene generally sucks. And this is where I'll slightly shit on Can I can I say, shit? No, fuck, that amazing. I'll shit on the Canadian postal system. It actually makes it really difficult for Canadian e commerce to thrive. We, when I worked at fume, to give you back end into how we used to do things. Shipping to an American was cheaper than shipping to a Canadian even though we were shipping from Canada. The way that we would do it is we would use a company called Montana mailbox that would come with a little truck. They'd come to our warehouse in Chester side of Calgary. They'd load up all of our supplies, they'd drive it across the border. It would be $1 per package that we'd pay for, and then they'd ship it using USPS in the States for $5 or $6 a package. So total cost for shipping $7 do you want to know how much it costs to ship something from Chester mirror to Calgary? A 20 minute drive using the Canadian postal service? It's like $20

Matt Cundill  22:11  
yeah, I was gonna say 21 bucks.

Adam McNeil  22:12  
Yeah, it's like 15 to 20, depending on where you're going, and so on, so on, that inherently, is such a barrier to doing e commerce, and it's slower, it's more expensive, and it's more prone to failures along the way. It is not a good postal system, and it means e commerce generally doesn't do well within Canada. So most Canadian e com brands find most of their success in the States. And as a by product, they advertise mostly in the States, and any kind of like halo effect of their US advertising, because as Canadians, we're so influenced by US based advertising, they'll buy proxy, end up purchasing products. So we, on average, we get like 10% of our efforts in the US, impacting Canada. Yeah.

Matt Cundill  22:49  
So every time you have to produce, I mean, you can run the same ad in the US as you will in Canada, but of course, if you have to go to Quebec to run it, you've got to go get new voice talent, you've got to go get new copy. You have to rewrite the entire marketing campaign for what is essentially a different country. I've seen it before, and, of course, it's very, very difficult to scale, so I completely understand

Adam McNeil  23:08  
that. In short, I don't have any experience doing French language. We've never done any like nationwide advertising within Canada or to Quebec specifically.

Matt Cundill  23:16  
So you mentioned this in Vegas. I believe it was a podcast movement where you were talking about the Dai bubble, and, you know, ads being inserted into RSS based podcasts, that bubble was going to burst. I went to London and heard Dan Meisner talk about, what are we going to do now with the download? And so where do we sit today?

Adam McNeil  23:36  
Right now is probably one of the healthier seasons of podcasting in general. I think we're building up a bubble again, and I think it goes back to that download versus listen conversation that's starting to well up a little bit more, where brands are going to get savvier and realize, oh, there is a gamification of podcasts where they could incentivize downloads and sell downloads through programmatic exchanges to fill their revenue buckets, but if they have to be accountable to The people actually listening to the ads in their episode. In their episode. They're going to lose a lot of money. I think one of the first dominoes that started to tip in our industry that is going to lead us to that direction was specifically Janine Wright's Inception point AI company, if listeners aren't familiar, this was x wondery EXECUTIVE that has gone on to launch a AI podcast studio, startup in which they're publishing, I believe it's 3000 podcast episodes a week. They're roughly producing at the cost of $1 an episode, and as long as they're able to get about 50 downloads per episode, it is a profitable engine for them where they can make money. Now, great. You think it's hard to get 50 downloads on an episode, relatively speaking, it is. But there's also ways in which people have been able to gamify getting downloads on podcasts, if it's either through SEO, search ability, web browser, you name it. There's lots of ways that people can get 50 to 100 downloads on an episode, maybe less than ethical at times, in my opinion, even they though they may be legal. I. However, maybe I'm a pessimist on this, and I don't think the content of this podcast venture is probably very good. I could be wrong. Maybe the content is amazing and I should give more of it a listen. Listen to one episode. And I was like, Okay, I wouldn't probably listen to a full episode. I get the point of it. It's like quick education on something in the current events around whatever it is. I made it like a minute or two in and say, there's a mid roll at minute five, I'm dropping off. And similar to your point where we were talking about earlier, they can get downloads, but can they get people to listen through the episode? And if they can prove that people are listening through their content at a reasonable rate, I actually have less of an issue with it. But right now, they are monetizing through Spreaker, which allows you to monetize through programmatic impressions at a really, really low volume. There's no threshold for downloads that you need to be able to monetize there. And if they can gamify that, their cost to get 50 downloads is less than what it will be for them to get a return, and they can fill it with 24 ad markers in an episode. Yeah, that's going to take advantage of our ecosystem. Ads are going to show up in this content, and brands are going to lose a lot of money on this type of content. This is where I think that pivot to focusing on the Listen will save us from ventures like this, because we'll then be able to prove, yeah, you're getting lots of downloads, but nobody's really listening.

Matt Cundill  26:07  
Are you able to see that when something has been gamified? Because I can catch it by just saying, Oh, that's a lot of browser traffic, and it's all coming from

Adam McNeil  26:16  
the same area, yeah, the web browser side of it, yes. So whenever we pixel a campaign, we get a lot of data on the back end via, say, pod scribe, or if you use clear toss, or whatever. I'm sure it's all quite the same about what you can see on the back end, but I can see, oh, this one show has a crazy amount of web browser impressions, 90% and then you you ask, Well, where are these coming from? Oh, we have this website that we drive paid traffic to. It was like, Okay, this is ridiculous. This This is dumb. I'm not paying for this. It's not real people. It's just web traffic coming through. So yes, we can see some of it. Sometimes it's just hard to catch. And I think the sad reality is, we are pumping out 1000s and 1000s of ads a month, and sometimes little things get missed. And in the grand ecosystem, brands are going through, oftentimes, big exchanges like the trade desk, etc, and their impressions are just showing up all over the place. And they don't necessarily get all the little incremental levels of visibility on everything. And it's easy to call it big, short, triple A tranche bad impressions with good impressions to make something feel good and inflated, which I think our industry has gotten away with for a long time, with packaging one really good show with a lot of really crappy impressions underneath,

Matt Cundill  27:23  
is there something we should be doing about the AI slop and the AI generated content that is just there to induce some clicks? Probably two things. One,

Adam McNeil  27:33  
labeling is probably the first step of just being transparent about what is AI and what isn't. That has to come from the onus of the creators, because creators because creators are going to be the ones that are going to have to check that box. It's going to get harder and harder for, say, Spotify or Apple to know what's AI and what's not AI when you're uploading it through their platforms. So we can't trust the platforms to do that. So transparency and honesty probably at some level, I would hope that other people, and then two, I think pivoting towards metrics that are more real, like a listen, will likely be a better compromise in the future to avoid shitty content from ruling our industry and ruling the ecosystem of

Matt Cundill  28:06  
podcast listening. You've had some great advice out there, including when you go to a conference, maybe avoiding the after hours you know events, that's very

Adam McNeil  28:16  
smart. I love that. I've partaken every now and then, and I'll give a clause around this, if you are the type of person that can stay very stoic or say sober lightly, not that you have to partake in anything for it to feel like a late night escapade. But look, when I first got into podcast advertising, I went to Podcast Movement in Vegas. That was my first ever event, and I had come out of like a very religious upbringing. I went to a religious school. I was a sober person. I did not really partake in much at that point in my life, and I realized very quickly how easy people talk at conferences about things that are going on in their businesses, et cetera, and the amount of secrets that are spilled and the amount of shenanigans people will get into, and some of that can be really unhealthy. I think both from a personal perspective. I think people can get caught up in a lot of the mess, and it will damage their career for the long term of what kind of things and what kind of people you hang out with and do. The other piece, though, is I'll caveat, some of the greatest learnings and conversations that I've ever had have been in those late night conversations. I was able to have a beautiful conversation with a handful of people at the lobby bar late into the evening after everything has passed off. I usually won't get in a car to go to the casino with people afterwards, but those late night evenings at the Podcast Movement Hotel, where you're in the lobby and people maybe aren't the most right of mind about how they're talking and thinking, you'll sometimes hear things that will dramatically change your perspective on stuff, and people talk a little bit more freely about their ideas. So I'll caveat and say I've learned some of the most things that have been important to my career there.

Matt Cundill  29:47  
Be careful. Yeah, lobby bar is generally my trap. Right after dinner, I have to make a decision. Do I want to stop at the lobby bar? Do I want to keep going and get a good night's sleep?

Adam McNeil  29:59  
That is really. Decision at Podcast Movement, isn't it? You

Matt Cundill  30:02  
can make the right turn or you can make the wrong turn. And I've made the right turn, and I've wound up with like, these great deals the next morning, and five new podcasts are joining the network, and it's fantastic. And then I've also done some things, like, what do we do? Again? I'll put

Adam McNeil  30:14  
it this way for anyone listening, it's like, you don't have to do the things to be a likable person in industry, just be you. Be transparent, be honest and show up. Don't judge people either. That's the other thing. Don't shame other people for doing their thing that they're going to do. Let them live their life. You're not their police. You're not their parents. Let them do whatever they want to do. Don't judge. Show up, listen and still be likable.

Matt Cundill  30:38  
By the way, this shirt, by the way, that I'm wearing right now, it's a Saturday and it's a t shirt, and it's Winnipeg in October, but it's from UNIQLO. I

Adam McNeil  30:45  
love their superma cotton. It's like, one of my favorite fitting T shirts that I have. It's like, I got a black one, and it's like, perfectly fits me. And there's very few shirts that I ever wear that I feel like fit me. Well, I'm a weirdly proportioned person. I got a long torso, short legs, and so I often need, like, a large shirt for my length, but I'm like, a narrower body, so I want a medium. And for whatever reason, the sapima Uniqlo shirt is perfect for me. It like, fits so

Matt Cundill  31:11  
good. So there are a lot of podcasters who are listening going, Well, how do I become a part of this? How do I make it so that Adam knows that my podcast exists? And maybe I would like some podcast ads in my show. Can they reach out to you? What do you recommend? What do you sort of look at as being baseline? Does it matter where they host? What can they offer you in order to get your attention?

Adam McNeil  31:32  
First off, I believe in just having a chat with anyone. I'm a pretty pro bono guy. If you want to have some conversation about your show and have some input from someone who's done some ad buying and host, buying and hosted a show that monetized? I'm usually quite happy to have those conversations. In terms of our business, like our brands are mostly focused on us audiences. We're mostly doing host, read, episodic stuff. We're not doing a lot of full catalog. We do a little bit, for sure, in terms of volume of impressions, that makes it an easier entry point into a conversation with our brands, which are like generally, quite national. Quite national companies. So usually about 10,000 downloads an episode. There's some exceptions to that. If you're a really niche show, especially in the health and wellness space, like if you're a health expert and a smaller show, that's like, yes, reach out to me. We would love to work with you. If you're less than that. Let me give you different advice, because I was much less than that. If you were a smaller show, don't go for magic spoon cereal. Don't go for a g1 don't go to manscape. Don't go to these big brands that you hear all the time on podcasts. You're You're just not big enough for them to put the time into your show to then onboard. The cost for them is greater than what the reward will be out of it. You want to find a brand that you can have a meaningful, sizable impact on where they see you as a valuable asset to their company. So find a brand that's maybe on their way up, something that you find that you really want to support. Maybe it's something not super local, like you're your next door neighbor and they're hand knitted crochet, thing that they really only sell to a handful of people, but maybe something that's in the small to medium sized business range, doing $500,000 a million dollars a year. My first brand that I worked with was an independent coffee company called Onyx coffee lab. They are now, like, quite big, but at the time that I was working with them, they were, like, still coming up in the ranks as a coffee brand, and I got to have a somewhat meaningful impact on their business. Early on, I knew my rep by name. I would get on calls with her, and she was lovely to talk to, and I think you want to know that you're meaningful to them. And if you want to know if you're meaningful to them, how willing are they to get on a phone call with you to talk about what you're doing with them, the less likely they're willing to get on a call or email back with you. You're probably not big enough for it to be that impactful to their business, and that might be a good gage to use to know if that's the right brand you should be working with. How do you take your coffee? Almost black, always. I'm a pour over guy, in the morning, I have been for a long time. If I'm camping, it's an Aeropress. Happy to divulge my recipes. You know, I got a decent pour over recipe I like. Sometimes I'll do a little pour over, over ice, make a little iced coffee in the morning. I gotta. I got a lot that I do. But I'm not a, I'm not a milk in my coffee. Guy, I will, on occasion, at a cafe, do a oat milk latte.

Matt Cundill  34:02  
One of the things I really like about speaking with you and meeting you for the first time in Calgary was your passion for ad buying and podcasting. My experience, and having dealt with many ad buyers, is that they've got so many other things on the go. They don't really pay attention to podcasting. They have wrong information. They don't really know the space that well you clearly do, and so I really thank you for taking the time to explain this to a lot of people, and it was great meeting you in Calgary, and we're gonna have you back on the show again soon. Thanks so much, Matt.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  34:31  
The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan cerminsky, edited by Taylor McLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.