At the tone, please record your message.

Hi, Adam.

Sorry, Mr.

Call.

I know you are looking for an answer to one of the biggest questions in podcasting of all, which is how do we define success for a B2B podcast? There's a lot of ways that we can define success for a B2B podcast.

And here at HubSpot, when we think about sort of the results that we want to see from our shows, And we kind of think about it in three buckets.

The first is just that like having a show and having all the derivative content from your show is a great vehicle for thought leadership.

Where is the best place to spend your money right now to get reach with paid media?

Ooh, this is a great question.

I actually would say that paid is one of the weaker links in terms of things that I feel like I personally excel at and have a strong strategy for.

And I would say that because I work across so many different platforms and every platform is different.

i'm actually curious i might throw this question back at you working in the partnership space and having done a lot of the work that i've done in the creator space as well it's definitely a buyer's marketplace i mean you can buy a youtube view you can buy a subscriber you can buy a download like you can buy everything and so i'm wondering because it's such a buyer's marketplace like is will paid even matter in the future like what will these like publicly available numbers views subscribers etc like will those even matter to audiences or to brands in the future because it's such a pay to play marketplace that's just something i find myself thinking about a lot um we try as much as possible to not invest in low quality paid.

So low quality paid would be buying a download because a download is not a person that's actually listening to your podcast or buying a YouTube view because we want our content to be in front of real people.

But there's definitely um ways to have more like campaign based media buying that works well for us so for our newsletters we run meta ads uh and we you know run meta ads for offers that are branded as our newsletters for the newsletter in general like meta ads has definitely been um a big thing for us but the return on ad spend there is not great but it's the best option out of all of them and so meta ads work well for us we also do a lot more like direct media buying so on our monetization side we buy ads directly from creators and that's giving us the the best return on ad spend there um just because we're getting in front of an audience that's new to us we're seeing higher level of conversions we know that like editorially it makes sense to get in front of that audience.

I'm curious, what is the future? Is it creators are the future or media companies are the future?