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305 Heather Osgood - Podcast Representation & Advertising

Episode Summary

Heather Osgood is the founder of True Native Media, a boutique podcast representation agency specializing in podcast advertising. With an extensive background in radio advertising and a love for podcasting, Heather has become an influential voice in the podcast advertising space. Today, Harry and Heather discuss how entrepreneurship has profoundly changed her, trends she has observed in the podcast industry, and her latest project: a transactional platform that allows customers to buy and sell podcasts.

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Key Takeaways

06:26 – Heather Osgood joins the show to discuss her experience at Podcast Movement in Dallas and the challenges of managing and retaining a growing team as a small business owner

14:37 – Business models that Heather likes to follow

18:11 – How entrepreneurship has profoundly changed Heather

20:27 – Moving to Florida and experiencing Hurricane Ian

24:54 – Programmatic ads, consolidation and other trends Heather has observed in the podcasting industry

29:46 – Programmatic versus dynamic ads and what companies look for in podcast advertising

36:55 – Buying and selling podcasts? Enter: The Podcast Broker

47:11 – What’s next for The Podcast Broker

54:38 – Harry thanks Heather for joining the show and lets listeners know where they can go to connect with her and learn more about The Podcast Broker

Tweetable Quotes

“One of the biggest challenges that I face is that it is still a very competitive job market. So making sure that your team members are all taken care of isn’t always the easiest. I think one of the observations I’ve had recently is that we’re still a small company. And so when you hire really talented employees - if they’re ambitious and they’re looking to grow - they’re only going to be happy in that role for a year maybe. And then they’ve outgrown that role and there isn’t anywhere else for me to put them.” (10:56) (Heather)

“I love content creation. I love speaking. I really want, personally, to grow my thought leadership within the industry. And I can’t do all of those things when I’m managing every single team member.” (15:05) (Heather)

“In terms of the trends, I think that we’ve seen so much consolidation. Podcasting was created to be this very open source environment and we’ve had so many large companies coming in and doing so much consolidation. There’s a lot of conversations right now about how these bigger companies - Spotify in particular - is really influencing the industry. I think that has been fairly significant. I do think it will be interesting to see how this recession/slowdown period in our economy is gonna impact that, if we see less acquisitions happen.” (25:19) (Heather)

“Every medium is gonna have an audience that they reach strongly that is going to bring a certain type of customer. And, what advertisers tend to see with podcast advertising, in particular in podcast audiences, is the audiences tend to be early adopters, people who want to buy the newest thing out there. They tend to be higher income earners. They tend to be more educated. So those buyers are gonna be different." (33:42) (Heather)

“We’re really doing things in a very high-touch way right now. I want to make sure that the podcasts that we’re selling are in a good place. I want to make sure that I understand the buyers. Right now it is in a very high-touch place, so I would say that on the roadmap certainly is growing to a place where it is a much more transactional platform.” (47:26) (Heather)

“I would say that if there was one thing that I’ve learned in my career is that it really all does boil down to relationships.” (51:14) (Heather)