My son Nick, a podcast aficionado, suggested recently that I’d enjoy a podcast called “StartUp,” which tells stories of companies that are just starting out. In its first season, the show’s host, Alex Blumberg, and his new business partner, Matt Lieber, train their microphones on their own company, Gimlet Media, which Blumberg, who is also the chief executive, hopes to turn into a podcast juggernaut. The second season, in which Blumberg is joined by a co-host, Lisa Chow, chronicles the highs and lows of a new dating app.
Nick was right. Blumberg, a co-creator of NPR’s “Planet Money,” and Chow, formerly of NPR and WNYC, prove to be first-rate storytellers, hardly a surprise given their backgrounds. What was a surprise were the commercials spliced into each episode. “StartUp’s” second season was sponsored by Ford Motor Company, the email marketer MailChimp, and Personal Capital, a financial firm. But instead of running a traditional ad, the co-hosts crafted little stories, often conducting on-air interviews with a company official.
In one fairly typical ad, Blumberg interviews Ford’s “general manager of the factory tour,” who tells him about the living plants that cover much of a big factory roof. She explains how all the plants help warm the factory in the winter and cool it during the summer. After some banter, Blumberg finishes the ad with a gentle spoof of a traditional advertising tag line. “Ford,” he intones. “Making pickup trucks under a living roof.”
My first reaction was one of amusement and even admiration. The ads were clever, and their cleverness caused me to remember them, which is what advertisers want.
My second reaction was something akin to horror. The ads reminded me that the great CBS journalist Mike Wallace used to do commercials in the late 1950s for several cigarette brands that sponsored his interview show. Wallace would take satisfying drags from a cigarette while touting its taste, its recessed filter, even the crushproof box. There is a reason journalists have stopped serving as commercial pitchmen: It raises all kinds of potential, and real, conflicts of interest. Could a journalist beholden to a sponsor ever report honestly about that sponsor if the need arose? Would he or she go easy on other companies that might become sponsors — or shy away from controversies that might drive away advertisers?
My third reaction was confusion. As the Internet has eviscerated journalism’s traditional business model, news organizations have had to find new ways to generate revenue. The long sacrosanct barrier between the business side and the news side is falling. Many companies with the highest journalistic standards are adopting so-called native advertising techniques, which are meant to mimic the feel of the publication itself. (The New York Times’s native ads, called Paid Posts, do not mimic the paper.)
Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, gave a speech a few months ago in which he said that journalists needed to “abandon the idea that the newsroom can labor in isolation from the business operations.” He added that “advertisers are looking for innovative, measurable and successful ways to connect with potential customers.” He’s right, of course.
And isn’t that exactly what Blumberg and Chow are trying to do?
When I spoke to Blumberg about the ads, he acknowledged, with no hesitation, that “we’re still trying to figure it out.” In a recent Gimlet podcast devoted to Gimlet’s advertising, he and his staff focused on an ad for Microsoft Outlook, in which Lieber, his partner, explicitly endorsed the product, saying that he had converted five colleagues to it. But the hosts of that podcast, called “Reply All,” ultimately felt uneasy about having participated in the ad, and Gimlet decided to stop doing ads that were too “endorse-y” (their word). Blumberg also told me that part of the reason he and Chow are so involved in creating the ads is that Gimlet is still a small company, and everybody has to do everything. He envisioned a day when there would be a greater divide between business and editorial, though a host would likely still be reading the ads.
By the end of our conversation I found myself giving Blumberg and his company the benefit of the doubt. But maybe that’s because I know his work from “Planet Money,” and he’s built up capital in the trust bank. And I like how transparent he and Gimlet are about the inherent problems that come with their kind of advertising. (A recent Times story about podcast advertising also featured Gimlet.)
But I can’t help it: It does have the feel of a slippery slope. “The logical next step,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, “will be to set up an in-house studio that will produce ads for advertisers. And maybe ask the journalists to write the copy. I think the line is sliding.”
Gimlet’s honorable intentions notwithstanding, I think he’s right.
