Titans of Advertising Ep 5 | Grant Durando: Why Lower CPMs Don’t Mean Better Results

In this episode, Cam Pritchard sits down with Grant Durando of Right Side Up. Grant has spent 12 years in podcast advertising and has managed about $1 billion in media spend across 250 to 300 brands. He started as a media coordinator at Oxford Road with no idea what a CPM was. They talk about: -How Grant went from an English and philosophy degree at UCLA to podcast advertising -Why he built a data grid that disproved the belief that lower CPMs mean better performance -What successful brands do differently: knowing their unit economics and using pixel-based attribution -The 60/40 split of broad shows to niche shows, and why you shouldn’t only buy shows in your exact niche -What makes a good media plan, and why 75K to 125K over three months is a good starting test budget -How AI, GEO and the “dead internet” are changing marketing, and what personalized AI audio could mean for podcasts -The shift of podcasts into video and mainstream media -Right Side Up’s machine learning model that predicts podcast performance, and the weekly attribution tool for terrestrial radio built with Podscribe -The one-word advice from his early boss (“awareness”) that shaped his career Find Grant on LinkedIn (Grant Durando) or at rightsideup.com