This Week’s Influencer: Building Creator Partnerships That Last; Bloomberg’s Pod MVP; YouTube Inflates Numbers; Japan is Ready to Pod; and More…

Few relationships can change a company’s fortunes like finding the right creator to partner with. So what’s the secret to making the most of creator partnerships that deliver results? Find out in this week’s installment of The Media Roundtable.

At this year’s CAO Summit,  Conor Doyle (President, Oxford Road) moderated a superstar panel that focused on how to make the most of creator partnerships, even when you don’t have all the data. Taking the stage with him was an all-star team of industry veterans:

• Caitlin Bricker (Sr. Manager, Influencer Marketing, DraftKings)

• Gavin Carr (Head of Podcast & Emerging Media, Morgan & Morgan)

• Mandy McDonald (VP, Partnerships & Affiliates, AG1)

• Morgan Melvan (Sr. Manager, Offline Marketing, Ro)

Together, the panel talked about how buyers need to be great sellers; the best ways to help creators crawl, walk, and run; and why briefs can still be valuable. Let’s dig in.

“The audience is so loyal to those creators that they will write in [the reviews]: ‘Oh, I  saw this on this YouTube channel, [and] had to give it a shot. He’s been talking about it for months.’” – Mandy McDonald (VP, Partnerships & Affiliates, AG1)

Great Buyers are Sellers – To make the case for creator investment, you need to be able to sell the channel’s results internally. So where can you find the attribution data? Anywhere that works. Our experts piece it together from vanity links, post-purchase surveys, and yes, even customer reviews, paying attention to when users give shout-outs to their favorite hosts or shows.

Crawl, Walk, Run – Successful partnerships aren’t static. When the performance is there, you can progress from a crawl (test their main channel) to a walk (negotiate usage) to a run (try new channels and amplify the partner). Partnerships like these are the ones that help both sides, and can serve as cornerstones of any marketing campaign.

Brief the Niche – Trusted creators (like Dr. Andrew Huberman, who works with AG1) don’t need a brief when they’re talking to their audience. But when you’re trying to connect to a new niche, briefs are lifesavers, because you know more about the audience you’re trying to attract. Give hosts the context they need to tell a story that will resonate, and watch the result roll in.

For more insights from industry vets who make creator marketing look easy, check out the full episode below.

The Classifieds

She’s Doing it for the Culture

Network: The Paragon Collective / Episodic Downloads: 10k

Though many people love learning the latest online gossip, there’s very little reverence for the “culture” part of “pop culture.” Shay Omi wants to make sure people understand culture isn’t just about what happens to people–it’s a shared understanding among many. In her new podcast, Critical Condition, Omi takes a detailed look at the what’s and whys of what makes pop culture special.

Genuine academic rigor is applied to the stories everyone is already talking about, including Justin Bieber’s Coachella comeback; the racial dynamics at play on Love Island USA; and the reemergence of purity culture. Each episode is researched, argued, and delivered with the kind of precision and empathy that’s genuinely rare in entertainment commentary. If your target demographic leans more female and is interested in the society & culture and mental health categories, this is a highly recommended new opportunity. Click below for your own cultural diagnosis.

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Joy Reid is Bringing Primetime to the Masses

Network: Crooked Media / Episodic Downloads: 50k

After more than a decade behind an anchor desk, Emmy-nominated, NAACP Award-winning political journalist Joy Reid took her show independent, and she hasn’t missed a beat.The Joy Reid Show drops three times a week, with each episode featuring Reid’s signature brand of sharp, unflinching political analysis. Topics include the Trump administration’s impact on public health and the Democratic establishment’s war with its own base.

Reid’s guest list has included the likes of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens. The Joy Reid Show already has nearly 200 episodes and a loyal audience that’s followed Reid from cable news to new media. For those looking for left-leaning political news options ahead of the November midterms, this is a good bet. For more newsworthy details, click the link below.

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In Case You Missed It

YouTube Inflates Numbers, Bumper Has the Receipts

Last month, YouTube announced it would start counting one second of video play as a view. With that change now in place, Bumper reports that public view counts for long-form podcast videos have nearly doubled relative to engaged views. Based on early data from hundreds of thousands of podcast videos, recently published episodes are averaging 1.96 public views for every engaged view. Nothing changed about how people watch videos, only how YouTube counts them. Marketers shouldn’t expect campaign performance or conversions to suddenly improve; instead, expect view-based metrics like view-through rate to decline and view-based CPMs to appear lower, simply because YouTube is counting many more views than before. Make any comparisons to historical benchmarks with that context in mind.

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Japan Is Late to Podcasting – Investors Bet It’s Worth the Wait

Japanese Adtech company Robot Start has raised new funding to expand its podcast advertising business, reflecting growing investor confidence that Japan’s podcast market is approaching an inflection point. While podcast adoption in Japan has historically lagged compared to similar developed markets, monthly listening continues to grow, particularly among younger audiences. For years, Japan has been a head-scratcher for global podcast advertisers: It’s a tech-forward market that never embraced podcasting at the same pace as other developed countries. While it will likely take years for listenership to approach markets like the U.S., the investment in podcast advertising infrastructure suggests Japan may finally be turning the corner from a niche medium to a scalable advertising channel.

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Radio Gets a 21st-Century Measurement Upgrade

Triton Digital has partnered with broadcast software provider RCS to enable advertisers to buy over-the-air inventory through their DSP. By connecting RCS’ playout system to Triton’s advertising platform, broadcasters can make traditional radio inventory available through the same automated buying workflows used for podcasts and streaming audio. Broadcast radio is well-suited to programmatic buying. Most terrestrial inventory consists of standard 30 and 60-second spots that can be bought and trafficked with relatively little complexity. The bigger challenge has been the industry’s reliance on traditional buying workflows. As advertisers increasingly expect automated buying, making broadcast radio easier to transact is an important step toward competing for budgets that have steadily shifted to digital media.

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#SaveTheLiveReads

King Crimson, Talking Heads, and the Earbuds That Let You Hear the World

Duncan Shields, Alex Ellenberg, and Jacob Winneche of Hot Take Point Made bring this week’s #STLR home with a practical endorsement for Raycon’s Essential Open Earbuds. Their read highlights how the product’s open-ear design allows listeners to enjoy music without completely tuning out the world around them. The hosts specifically call out how useful that feature is when walking through an urban area, where hearing street crossings, cars, and nearby pedestrians adds an extra layer of awareness and safety.

The read gets personal when the hosts share their recent music obsessions, whether it’s a deep dive into King Crimson or a refresher on the Talking Heads. They also highlight the earbuds’ eight hours of playtime and long battery life, letting users connect the product to their own habits. The read feels less like a traditional tech pitch and more like a passionate recommendation from a dedicated audiophile, which makes the listener want to click add to cart immediately.

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OXFORd In The News

We Agree: BetterHelp’s Brittany Clevenger Is the Most Powerful Person in Podcasting

Bloomberg’s Soundbite featured a profile of BetterHelp‘s Brittany Clevenger, whom writer Ashley Carman named “the most powerful person in podcasting.” Clevenger was the inaugural patron award recipient at Oxford Road’s Independent Podcast and Creator Awards at SXSW, an event built to celebrate the independent industry. In the story, Dan praises Clevenger’s importance to podcasting: “Without advertisers who take a chance on independent shows, none of us would be here right now.”

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Oxford Road to YouTube: Thanks for Making Our Point for Us

Podnews and Sounds Profitable both picked up Dan’s LinkedIn response to YouTube’s recent changes to its play metric. Dan’s read on it was characteristically direct: He acknowledged the frustration caused by YouTube’s announcement, while noting that, by adding more confusion to an already fragmented measurement landscape, the platform was inadvertently making the case for the kind of cross-platform standardization the AMP Accords are trying to solve.

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