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American Public Media was one of the launch partners for the recent announcement of podcasting coming natively to Samsung devices through the Samsung Free App and we had a chance to speak with Tom DeNapoli from APM about the long view of what this deal means to them.
Tom DeNapoli is the Managing Director of Multi-platform Sales Strategy & Business Development at the podcast division that sits within American Public Media. Tom says that APM came together to organize and create a business unit around podcasts and largely falls within three main domains: business news and investigative journalism, lifestyle series like Terrible, Thanks For Asking, and Don’t Ask Tig with comedian Tig Notaro, and a kids and family portfolio as well.
He joined APM from Viacom CBS in early July of last year and says one of his first tasks was to figure out their ad sales strategy, especially around sponsorships.
“We’re looking to build upon the existing podcast IP that we have right now,” he says, “and to extend it to new experiences and new platforms.” And of course, they’re always looking for new partners for new ventures and that’s where the partnership with Samsung for their Free App to put native podcasting on Samsung mobile devices comes into play.
In looking at the 10,000-foot view behind the Samsung deal he remarks how the fast-changing marketplace of podcasts has forced smaller public media organizations like his to be nimble and either collaborate with the larger organizations or figure out a way to work around them. “We need to have the discipline to know what the opportunities are and what are the strategies we want to follow through on,” he says, “because it’s super easy to get distracted right now by the newest buzzy thing that’s happening and lose sight of your core principles.”
His 10,000 foot-view is trying to be always aware of those principles to make sure they’re diving into the right places.
Traditional advertising has a problem in trying to reach a typically more affluent college-educated audience who are often harder to reach with traditional marketing. That type of consumer overlaps with the podcast audience which is why he says podcasts have become the last bastion for advertisers to reach this type of audience. He points out that growing the podcast audience will require expanding to new platforms where the general audience can discover podcasts as a medium and until this new deal happened, listening to podcasts on Android devices was a hurdle.
He says his father is a devoted Samsung Galaxy user who can talk about NFT’s but can’t figure out how to listen to podcasts on his phone. That’s a really big problem to the extent that last year their kids and family division released a video with Julie Andrews (of the Julie’s Library podcast) called “How to Listen to Podcasts”.
“The significance of the Samsung deal,” he says, “is that Samsung is the flagship device with which we see the most opportunity for growth among Android devices.”
One of the reasons he’s hopeful about the deal is that Samsung didn’t just approach them and say “hey let’s connect pipes because you’ll build a bigger audience.” Instead, they had conversations with their marketing team where Samsung asked them what APM shows and genres they should be promoting that would best fit the Samsung audience.
Podcast discoverability is still an industry buzzword for a reason, and the best way to discover a podcast, Tom says, “is to be right there in front of their eyes. So if we can be one of the first few tiles in this new Samsung app at launch that’s a win for everybody.”