Podcast 360 Episode 6: Dan Misener and Shira Atkins
Podcast 360 Episode 6: Dan Misener and Shira Atkins
Host: Dan Misener
Dan Misener (host): Hi, I'm Dan Misener, co-founder of Bumper. You might have heard me on last week's episode where I was interviewed by Fatima Zaidi of Quill. If you haven't given that a listen yet, please consider checking it out. And who's in the hot seat as today's guest?
Shira Atkins: Hi, I'm Shira Atkins. I'm co-founder of Wonder Media Network and Chief Revenue Officer. We started this company about five years ago. We create original content, we create content for other companies, and I'm psyched to be here.
Dan Misener: Here we go. Shira, thanks for being here today. Episodes of Podcast360 start off with a game called Two Truths and a Lie. So you, Shira, are going to provide us with three statements about yourself. My job is to guess which one of them is a lie. Are you ready?
Shira Atkins: I'm ready.
Dan Misener: Let's hear them.
Shira Atkins: Number one, I speak Russian. Number two, I never graduated from high school. And number three, we raised a ton of outside capital to start Wonder Media Network.
Dan Misener: I don't know you especially well. I do know a little bit about your business and I don't know what your definition of a ton of outside capital is, but my initial first guess is that the last one is a lie - that you raised a ton of outside capital. We will find out what the answer is at the end of the episode. But for now, I want to find out a little bit more about you and your business and your take on podcasting. I have three questions for you. You have 60 seconds to answer each question, and then after that we can pick one of the topics we discuss and go a little bit deeper. Sound like a plan?
Shira Atkins: I just love that we're starting this with lots of drinking games. So, yes, let's do it.
Dan Misener: Like you said, you co-founded Wonder Media Network about five years ago. That feels like a lifetime ago in podcast years.
What was the opportunity that you saw in the podcast ecosystem at the time? Because it was a very different time than the one we're living in right now.
Shira Atkins: Oh my God, it was radically different. First of all, five years ago you could launch a podcast with no preexisting network, no celebrity, no real hook, and get like 20 or 30,000 downloads per episode sold without really trying that hard. That is essentially impossible now.
So it was a ripe space for penetration and for audience building, which was amazing for any media outlet or brand. It was an open pasture. The reason that we started the company was that Jenny Kaplan, our co-founder, and I felt like there was simply not enough emphasis on diverse voices, which today, luckily and beautifully, has been sort of emphasis on that. But we still see who is at the top of the charts. And so there's lots of work to be done there. But amplifying underrepresented voices in the space was our charge.
Dan Misener: The mission and the editorial vision of the network is something I admire a lot about your company. Another thing that I admire is your approach to advertising and sponsorship.
And I know you've been really vocal about how programmatic ads or dynamically inserted audio or CPM based pricing. Not that they're bad, but they're not necessarily an appropriate solution for every show, for every kind of creator, for every network.
How does advertising and sponsorship work at Wonder Media Network and the shows that you produce and distribute?
Shira Atkins: I love when people say that I've been very vocal. It's like a coded way of saying that I’ve been explicit.
Largely speaking, we try to sell sponsorships that are flat fee to a wide variety of kinds of brands and organizational partners who want to get their content and mission in front of the audience that we're trying to reach and are less concerned with performance. Not to say that they don't care about impact, but to say that they're not the traditional DR advertisers that we have come to know and love and podcasting, we almost entirely forgo the CPM model.
I can't help it if brands want to back into a CPM, that's fine. It's a language. It's a way to understand a unit of advertising. But we are selling based on mission and vision and alignment as opposed to click through rates.
Dan Misener: In some ways inextricably tied to the advertising model are different kinds of shows, different kinds of release cadences. I mean, your team produces what I would characterize as some really high volume shows. I think about Womanica which has now released more than a thousand episodes? Which is impressive. Congrats! But then you also make shorter run season based shows, things like I Was Never There, which was eight episodes total.
So, as a business owner, as a as a Founder, how do you think about that mix of always on high volume stuff, the sort of stalwarts that you could depend on, and how those fit in alongside sort of the larger narrative, shorter run seasons, often with a higher cost per episode in terms of the production.
Shira Atkins:I think every media company needs diverse revenue streams, and these various kinds of shows simply represent different kinds of products that have different kinds of revenue models attached to them.
I just said that we almost entirely forgo the CPM model. That is true, but when we have tested it and when we have used it, it has been on Womanica, which is always on because with high volume you can do that and still make some real dollars, even if you're only getting 20-30,000 downloads per episode.
Narrative style shows are obviously much more expensive to produce, but they are really the shows that win awards, that move audiences, that are meaningful to our producers, and they're really fun to produce. It's also what we do for all of our clients. We've never made an “always on” for a client. So I think it's also just our area of expertise, but I believe there should always be a mix no matter where you are or what you're doing.
Dan Misener: So far we've talked a little bit about the mission, the mandate, the original vision for your company. We've talked about the advertising business and you've just raised this really important issue of companies needing a diverse set of audio products and perhaps different revenue models associated with those audio products. What do you want to dig into more?
Shira Atkins: You tell me - I don't know what's going to be most helpful for this audience, do you think?
Dan Misener: Well, I'm really intrigued by this idea of placing a number of different bets or not having all of your eggs in one basket, and continuing on with this idea of different audio products or different revenue models.
One of the other things that I know about your company is that you have an originals business and you also do branded work. You've worked with some really large, well-known brands. You can mention them and brag all you want. I've been really impressed with the kinds of clients that you get to work with.
How do you, again, as somebody who's running a business, leading a team, think about sort of that mix of originals. You talked about the team really getting fired up to work on certain kinds of projects. How do you think about the originals business and how it fits in alongside/supports the branded side and vice versa? How do you go about thinking about that?
Shira Atkins: First of all, thank you, Dan, so sweet.
We didn't get into this business to make branded content. Surprise, surprise. Like most podcasters don't start podcasting companies to work with brands. But I had a background in brand strategy consulting.
Our first summer when we launched the business, Jenny was like, I'm going to make this stuff- you figure out how to sell this thing, and how do we find an audience? And it became very clear to me that, like the traditional ad model, even then, when you could launch and build a real audience, it just didn't seem like we could build a company without raising outside capital based on that model alone.
Jenny had worked at Bloomberg, which is known for its diverse revenue streams. And it just occurred to us that like as many kinds of things we could sell, we should sell. And that is still very much true today. It's not so 1 to 1 as one for us, one for them kind of thing. I would say that even today it's about 50/50 split. From a revenue perspective of what we're doing on the originals and on the brand side. But we're just finding new ways of selling.
At a certain point, probably about a year ago, I wanted to properly brand our branded studio. I wanted to create our own in-house specific content, essentially. And what I've started to do, even when I'm selling sponsorship on originals, is I'm selling the work of our brand studio within our original content. So the ads are going to be better, the content integration is going to be better. There's going to be a stand alone marketing strategy and distribution strategy for the advertising placements. The advertising doesn't need to just live in the show. The content that's made there should be on socials and it should be in internal company newsletters. We find ways to make it feel sexy so that brands will get excited about it, and it's been fun for me, both as a salesperson and a strategist, for these brands to think about how many different ways we can package the content so it doesn't just live and die in 60 seconds.
So, anyway, I think the original content keeps us knowledgeable about form and storytelling, then when a brand like Pfizer comes to us and says, you know, I want to tell a story about AI, but how do I do it in a way that is truly compelling? We can say, here's a fictional approach and here's a historical documentary approach and here's an interview style approach, and that's what you want to do. But we have a leg to stand on because we can point to some of our other properties and show our track record and show our passion for this.
Dan Misener: Yeah, it's wonderful to have calling cards- shows that the kinds of people who might make a commissioning decision at a brand might have heard in their civilian listening.
I love the sentiment in what you just described. This idea that you can and should when working with brands, be making stuff that is really high quality, that stands on its own merit and that isn't good for a branded podcast but is good as a piece of audio storytelling, good as, as you say, an audio product.
I also like that you said it's not, you know, one for one- we do one for us and one for them. I'm reminded of something that my friend Katie Jensen, who runs Vocal Fry Studios, shared with me. She talked about her career as an audio freelancer and the kinds of work that she decides to take on. What is the type of project that she's keen to do? And I always love what she says. It's one for the reel, one for the meal, one for the feel. And so for her, it's yeah, it's nice to win awards from time to time. It's also nice to be able to pay your rent and buy your groceries and sometimes you want to work on stuff that keeps you sharp or hones your chops or is going to get you to the next thing creatively that you want to work on. I love that.
Lastly…
Dan Misener: Thank you so much for being part of Podcast 360. We have one final piece of business to take care of. I have to make my final guess for the two truths and a lie question.
I think I'm going to stick with my original answer that the lie is you did not raise a ton of outside capital. How did I do?
Shira Atkins: You did well. We've actually raised $0 in outside capital. You know, when I was thinking about the two truths and a lie game, I just came up with a bunch of truths. And then I was going to say that I didn't raise, and I was like, oh, I need a lie. So here we are. Good guess.
Dan Misener: A good old fashioned business. What a concept. Have more money coming in than going out. What a radical idea. If you have enjoyed listening to today's episode with Shira, you can find her sitting in the host's chair on next week's episode. She's going to have the opportunity to turn the mic on another founder. Shira, please let people know where they can find you online. How should people get in touch? Where should they find you?
Shira Atkins: You can email me Shira@wondermedianetwork.com. Go to our website. Find us on LinkedIn.
Dan Misener: Love it. Thanks to the Podcast360 team for having me. Thank you to Shira for being my guest. Don't forget to check me out on last week's episode with Fatima Zaidi of Quill and keep an eye out for Shira next week.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Podcast 360.
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