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“The hardest thing to do is to be true to yourself, especially when everybody is watching.” — Dave Chappelle

Where were you when you started your first company? What about when you first had the idea? The “spark,” faint glimmer that you might found a business someday?

Mine was when I was 11 years old. I tried (and failed) to start a baseball camp on the LBI part of the NJ shore. My mom was my inspiration as a small business owner for my whole life, and I drew up a full business plan with costs and projections that I ultimately submitted as part of a math project. Surprisingly, not many people were looking to have a tween as their boss. However, I think this was my first “spark”, and it drove an inherent curiosity as to how businesses are run that has stayed with me ever since.

Fast forward to Claremont, where Peter Fankuchen (CMC ’13) and I won the Kravis Innovative Start-Up Award (ISA) — Social Track. It didn’t work out the way we expected it to, however, this was much more than a preadolescent dream. We developed a scalable, vertical wall planter for Aquaponics — a hybrid of aquaculture and hydroponics. That “spark” turned into a “seed”. Our business, Second Nature Aquaponics (SNA), not only aimed at creating a profit but also teaching sustainable farming techniques in food deserts, areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food.

I learned many things from the ISA, but I’d like to highlight the most important lesson as a quick side-point: know your customer. While pitching this business idea, I surged with a mix of idealism and altruism. Genuinely, I thought that everyone was or could become our customer. Obviously, that is not the case and most folks reading this know the classic question of “Who is your customer?” However, businesses and strategies change, quite frequently at that. So, it bears repeating not only at inception but also repetitively throughout a venture. “Knowing my customer” especially started paying dividends as I moved towards the corporate world and eventually podcast advertising.

I landed my first “corporate” job in advertising at the digital publisher, CBS Interactive (CBSi). I went from an entry-level client services role in San Francisco to a junior sales role in New York City. While at CBSi, I saw the slate of streaming apps built out from CBS All Access to the CBS News app, but I chose to stick to web-based digital advertising when I jumped to Vox Media as a lead account salesperson. Like when I saw an entire department built out at CBSi for streaming apps, there was a direct parallel with the podcasting slate at Vox Media. So, I left what the CEO described as a “turbulent” digital publisher for a global podcast technology platform.

I started another lead sales role and doubled down into podcast advertising. I had a streak of success over my 2.5-year run which included personal highs like completing my second Ironman and lows like a global pandemic which turned NYC into something unrecognizable. There was soul searching, a surge in podcast advertising, and perhaps a few too many IPAs. However, my success was a true mixture of hard work, identifying a rapidly growing industry, and being in the right place at the right time.

At Acast, I built a million-dollar keyword contextual targeting product by working with one of our engineering managers, as well as onboarded different technology partners for things like speech to text (STT) and natural language processing (NLP). I learned what it meant to be part of a hyper-growth startup and how to manage time zones from PST to CET. Perhaps most importantly, I felt the “spark” again. I felt the need to have hard conversations with my management and be true to myself.

This past July, I followed the spark yet again, remained true to myself, and founded my own freelance consultancy to primarily work with D2C e-commerce companies moving into a multichannel marketing approach — specifically as an agency of record (AOR) to help them plan, buy, and optimize their podcast advertising.

The Information can give far better insight as to why e-commerce companies have to move away from social tactics due to the ongoing privacy debate, but for a long time, early D2C brands made an entire business model off of funneling a large part of their funding into acquiring new customers through social and search advertising. Alongside the ever-growing creator economy, podcasting has now become a surging industry with over $2B in expected revenue by 2023, and so much M&A that it’s hard to keep up. Check out the Podscape and that top right legend.

For the past few years now, I’ve become entrenched in this podcast AdTech ecosystem, and I’d like to share some of my learnings.

First, you can track and measure podcast advertising attribution via tags and pixel-based technology. It’s still a misconception that you have to do this via promo codes or specific handshake URLs. Personally, I’ve overseen campaigns from upper-funnel awareness to down-funnel cost per acquisition KPIs. Again, this is as simple as driving traffic to a website or actually getting users to download or purchase a product.

Second, there are still limitations for how you can target listeners, especially with behavioral or psychographic segments. Instead, you should focus on contextual and basic audience demographic data like gender and age. So, stick to the targeting basics, and think about the audio creativity. Remember, know your customer.

Third, lead with creativity. Most people know the host read endorsement tactic of podcasting, but rotational up to 30-second audio ads — like radio — are incredibly valuable. Audio advertising performs better than other channels like display, and with podcasting, a majority of the listening is done through headphones. So, spend some time producing compelling rotational audio creatives for your podcast campaign, and don’t put all your eggs in one basket by selecting a handful of expensive host read endorsements.

Fourth, if you’re spending large budgets on search and social advertising, get into podcasting now. While understandably this can be seen as self-serving, learning the channel while it’s still evolving outweighs the barrier to entry, and the technology is only getting better. Moreover, the parallel between hosts as influencers is perpetuated by the fact that they’re creators. So, alongside podcasting as a lucrative advertising channel, it is also part of the long tail creator economy which has gained more and more notoriety over the last couple of years.

Fifth, as with any rapidly growing vertical, there is opportunity. As a CMCer, I believe in leadership not as a buzzword or lip service, but as a value and necessity. Growth is determined by leadership, and there are tangible opportunities for good leaders, especially in the podcasting industry.

As a person who values leadership, the hardest part of my career was to be true to myself when I saw everyone watching but not acting. Lean into that “spark” or that “seed”, believe in yourself, and don’t worry if you fail or take a longer path. As an international relations and economics dual major, it’s still surprising to me to be writing about my entrepreneurial journey from aquaponics to podcast adtech. I can’t wait to see what comes next!

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