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Always Be Testing explores the experiments, insights, and growth stories shaping the future of affiliate and partner marketing in B2B SaaS. Hosted by industry veterans, the show dives deep into real-world lessons from the people driving measurable impact at companies like Google, HubSpot, Ramp, Webflow, G2, and beyond.
Each episode uncovers what happens when today's most innovative marketers challenge assumptions, run smarter experiments, and build programs that scale revenue through meaningful partnerships. If you’re in affiliate, partnerships, or SaaS growth — this is your front-row seat to how the best do it (and what they’ve learned along the way
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing Podcast. I'm your host, Ty DeGrange, and I'm really excited to talk to Jordan Bentley. Jordan, how are you?
Jordan Bentley (00:29.03)
Doing good. Thanks for having me on.
Tye DeGrange (00:31.904)
Absolutely. I feel like this has been a long time in the making. We've been working we've been cooking it this up, working on it for what seems like months of the summer and we finally come to f kind of finally made it happen.
Jordan Bentley (00:44.562)
Agreed, agreed. Excited to excited to make this happen.
Tye DeGrange (00:48.842)
Absolutely. I am this is one of the more more exciting ones for those of you that don't know. Jordan Bentley is the founder of Audio Hook, an amazing paper performance opportunity to get brands on the podcast space and all that it entails. And I talk a lot about how partners are the currency of the ecosystem and how we need to have more.
publishers and partners on the podcast and talking about like experimentation and figuring things out and sharing the learnings that they've they've gone through so so you guys can benefit them from them. So just just really happy to have you on and it's amazing what you've built. What it give us like the how the heck did you start thinking about this wild thing that is, you know, podcasts on a performance basis for brands.
Jordan Bentley (01:44.087)
Yeah, it's it's been a bit of a journey. so about about 10 to 15 years ago, I got involved in just advertising technology, the programmatic ecosystem, and spent a lot of time working on on you know campaigns, primarily display campaigns, video campaigns, initially nothing audio at all.
But you know, naturally I I love music. I play a few instruments and always kind of had my eye on like, hey, I wonder when when audio and podcasting gets big. and then, you know, of course you had the advent of Pandora and Spotify in kind of the twenty fifteen range. I'm sure maybe a little bit earlier.
and of course, podcasting started to get bigger as well. And so around 2019, I was like, you know, audio and podcasting is so powerful, but the ecosystem in terms of digital advertising technology, you know, wasn't really embracing it. and so that's when I started thinking a bit more about like,
Hey, how do we build some tools really around podcasting and audio? and so as I'm sure lots of us did a lot of deep thinking during COVID, I was doing some of that. And yeah, the good, bad, and ugly. And so one of the things kind of coming out of COVID was hey, let's start this company called Audio Hook. initially it was like, let's make a platform.
Tye DeGrange (03:11.093)
Yeah. Right. Good, bad and ugly.
Jordan Bentley (03:28.012)
Specific for audio and podcasting. specific for audio and podcasting. And we got to work with a lot of brands in the early days, but one of the challenges that we saw, Ty, was audio is a bit of a different animal. Podcasting is a bit of a different animal in terms of creative, in terms of how you measure it, in terms of how you optimize it.
Tye DeGrange (03:30.689)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan Bentley (03:55.727)
And so we saw brands that that were using, you know, the tools we were making as well as other tools out there. And it was still just really hard for them to scale this medium. And as the old saying goes, like the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. And so we're like, you know, man, we're really kind of missing the mark here because our goal, you know, the goal I had when I when I founded Audio Hook was like, let's help brands be successful.
And it was clear that we were still requiring them to do too much work because the spend just wasn't flowing and the spend wasn't really flowing for anybody in the space. And so that's when we took it to kind of the next level to said, okay, well, let's make this just fully performance-oriented, where brands can give us an outcome that they want, whether that's a sell or a lead, what have you.
Tye DeGrange (04:30.306)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (04:50.167)
Yep. Yeah.
Jordan Bentley (04:52.146)
They can tell us how much that's worth to them. And then we can build all of this technology to help them be successful, including the planning, executing the campaigns, buying the media, measuring it. We take all of that on, we take all of the risk on ourselves. They don't have to pay for anything, except for the outcomes that we drive, if and when we drive them.
And and we've seen that that as one might expect has significantly made it much easier for brands to get involved. And so we're now fortunate to work with a lot of brands and help them embrace audio and podcasting to be successful and and drive more sales and and conversions for the company they're working for.
Tye DeGrange (05:16.279)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (05:30.935)
Yeah. Yep.
Tye DeGrange (05:35.958)
love it. Yeah, it's a such a no brainer and like obviously you know, seeing the the space change and it's it's the core nature of what affiliate is and a lot of the best of partner marketing and obviously, you know, T V Scientific has been instrumental in kind of, you know, doing some some flavor of that. You know, you guys are in a in a and when I when I saw this come out, I was just like, I'm such an idiot. Why didn't I think of this? And to tip my cap to you 'cause it's that easy, right?
Jordan Bentley (06:02.434)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (06:06.401)
I'm kidding, of course, but how on earth did you were you able to pull that off to say we're going to offer this something that is very challenging to measure historically in the past, top of funnel historically, there's misperceptions about all the channels, podcast included. and as it's grown in popularity and demand, how how are you able to do that and fit the bill and you know, find it and make it work?
Jordan Bentley (06:34.616)
Yeah, I think, you know, a first some credit to to TV Scientific and a number of other kind of innovative companies out there. you know, there were a number of companies, us all kind of innovating at the same time, not necessarily aware of one another in the beginning phases of being like, How do we make media more performant? One of the one of the challenges, I'm a big fan of like alignment of interests.
Tye DeGrange (06:49.826)
Yeah.
Jordan Bentley (07:01.956)
And so one of the challenges is like, okay, traditionally how you pay for marketing, right, is based on a percent of spend. Hey, I go spend a thousand dollars, I get paid whatever that you know percentage is. I spend ten thousand dollars, I get paid more. there hasn't really been this incentive in general to be like, how do I make it work better?
and so spending a lot of time in the ad tech ecosystem, it was like everybody makes money regardless of how well it works, except for the brand, right? They were the ones kind of getting the short stick. and so it was great to be again companies like TV Scientific and others out there being like, okay, how do we how do we make us a bit more accountable? How do we change the model a little bit so that if it's not working, we're not getting paid. and that helps incentive.
Tye DeGrange (07:24.087)
Yeah.
Jordan Bentley (07:53.349)
us to make sure, not that ad tech companies and you know aren't trying to drive performance either. but it's always a little bit more challenging of like, well, you know, this inventory is maybe not the greatest, or we know that this stuff doesn't perform that well, but there's sure a lot of it. And if we buy it more, we all make more money. And so that was one of kind of the the nexus of this. I think the other certainly AI, right?
Tye DeGrange (08:19.254)
Yeah.
Jordan Bentley (08:21.72)
Around this same time, you see a lot of innovation with AI and a lot of businesses changing their pricing model, right? Going from a per seat model, hey, I'm using a CRM or I'm using some of these other tools to saying, no, we're not going to charge on a seat. we're going to charge on how much we're helping you.
Tye DeGrange (08:21.986)
Yeah.
Jordan Bentley (08:41.33)
And so I think those two things really coming together was like it created a nice environment to be innovative. The last thing I'd say is from a first principle standpoint, you kind of ask you, you kind of have to ask yourself like this stuff either works or it doesn't, right? And if if podcast advertising, let's say it doesn't work, right? Let's just say it's it doesn't work, well then.
How successful of a business can you build? And how much can you help advertisers, regardless of the pricing model? Right? Whether you're charging on a CPM or a CPA or some other metric, if it doesn't help, well, ultimately brands won't use it, ultimately the business will fail and it just doesn't matter. And on the flip side, if it does help,
Well, then is there really that big of a difference between CPM versus CPA, other than the alignment of interests? And so that's really what kind of helped drive us to this of like, look, we know this works. Radio's been around for almost a hundred years at this point. Like, if radio wasn't if radio ads weren't working, this the gig would have been over a long time ago.
Tye DeGrange (09:36.705)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jordan Bentley (09:55.227)
We know this works. We know like anything, you have to optimize it. You need to make sure you have good creative. You need to do best practices. Of course, you can run inefficient ad campaigns. but as we follow best practices, as we add technology to optimize it and run it better, we know that we can get it to generate a return for clients. And we know that this can be a viable business model that brings more people into the ecosystem.
Tye DeGrange (09:55.405)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (10:20.521)
how much was AI kind of critical to, you know, from what you can share, being able to kind of crack this code for you all? And is it more yeah, I was just curious at like how much of that is part of the mix from your perspective?
Jordan Bentley (10:36.142)
Yeah, I think AI helps in a number of ways, right?
it it didn't inherently just like solve it or make it easier for us. I think, like we probably all experience in our jobs, it just gives us more leverage to maybe do things easier, better, faster. so you know, let's take something like script writing. you know, the process of writing a script, obviously you don't need AI to do it. but you can get writers blocked, right? After you write so many scripts, they can all start to sound a little bit like the same. And so that's where AI.
Tye DeGrange (11:10.157)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan Bentley (11:11.224)
Comes in and it's like, hey, here's the brand, right? Here's the product they're promoting. Help me write a catchy script. Is it perfect? Maybe, maybe not, but it helps get at least an initial version. Maybe there's some tweaking and some policying. The other thing is like with AI, obviously, you can start to record ads, and you may or may not use them for production, but just to like hear it and send a client, like, here's five different ads with different copies, you know, to help visualize that.
A lot of these things that just made a lot easier. just made a lot easier in terms of the operations. Cause again, that's one of the places historically most brands aren't running audio ads. And so it's unlike a display ad where they probably are running ads on, you know, Meta or Google or with a local publisher or with an affiliate platform. It's easy for them to be like, here's our ads that we're running right now.
Getting audio ads or podcast ads, it's like, I don't have those. How do I go about those? How do we get those? And so again, that just kind of contributes to like a lot of work is the juice worth the squeeze here. and so AI's been super helpful to be like, all right, let's make lift much, much easier for everybody involved.
Tye DeGrange (12:20.695)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (12:27.521)
Add efficiency, add scale, add ease of use, add data. one of the things we're very keen on here is is the the test and learn. And obviously that that gets related to the topic of like tracking attribution incrementality. We've had a lot of guests come on that are, you know, measurement experts and in-house measurement experts, or they offer and really hone in on the importance of measurement. you know, I serve on the measurement council of the PMA.
something that's been really grateful to do and and collaborate on. When you think about attribution, when you think about what brands are asking for, or you think about how this can be varying degrees of the funnel, right? Sometimes you've got a promo code, sometimes you got a landing page, sometimes you've got maybe some halo effect that's benefiting other areas or entry points like search or social. How does audio hook help
brands or th at least think through that. Obviously it's a very advantageous, you know, commercial model. How do you think about attribution when it when it comes to audio and simplifying it for the audience so they can understand what what they need to be thinking about?
Jordan Bentley (13:43.663)
Yeah, it's it's a great question. and I think this is where sometimes us as marketers we have preconceived ideas or maybe even things we're already doing that maybe contribute to the problem. And so there when we talk to brands, there's two common answers we get on if they have done any podcast advertising today.
You know, half of them basically say no. And the other half inevitably say yes, we tested it, we tried it, it didn't work. which I'm always like, you know, face palm a little bit like, well, okay, let let's talk about that experience a little bit. And it and it comes back to measurement and attribution. And oftentimes what we hear is, hey, we used a promo code, yeah, we set up a landing page.
promo codes and I certainly understand the the desire and and wanting to use them.
In my experience, promo codes usually end up in one of two categories. Either A, you use them and or you include a promo code, nobody uses it. And so then the brand says, hey, you know, we had three people use the promo code. We don't think this worked. Or you get a lot of people using the promo code, in which case the brand's like, it ended up on Honey or some coupon site, in which case we still we still don't use it. I've never really seen like a use case from a brand where like
Like, we use promo codes and like we think it worked perfect. It's it's usually like, hey, it didn't work for bad, or it didn't work like either cases are bad. and then you see a little bit of this with post-purchase as well, where a lot of brands have post-purchased, you know, surveys. I think to be, I'm a big fan of post-purchase surveys. I think they can be very helpful. but sometimes I think we conflate signals at times.
Tye DeGrange (15:24.855)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (15:32.557)
Surveys.
Jordan Bentley (15:43.763)
and could because the reality is consumers, right? We are being exposed to lots of different marketing, right? We may hear a podcast, we may see an ad on meta, right? We may do a Google search, we may get retargeted. And so there are all these touch points that it's as a consumer, like, okay, which one do I use? Right. When I went and signed up for whatever Netflix, like
What was it because of the ban rad? Was it because of the plug? Like it's you're like, I I don't know. Like I of course I know of Netflix. Like how do how would I not know of Netflix? and so I think that can be a challenge with with some of these tools. This is why in general, we're big fans of geo-based incrementality. and doing you know, running a test, always be testing, running a test.
Tye DeGrange (16:38.605)
There you go.
Jordan Bentley (16:39.628)
like, okay, let's include these four or five states. Let's exclude these other kind of similar states. Let's run it. Then let's see the lift. because the post-purchase survey, not that consumers lie, but sometimes they forget or they don't remember. What doesn't lie is the data, right? And if you go run a campaign, whether it's podcasting or whatever, again in five states with you have then five comparable states that you know you didn't include that medium.
Tye DeGrange (17:08.609)
Yes. Yes.
Jordan Bentley (17:09.492)
That is your apples to apples test to be like, hey, we got a 13% lift. It clearly worked, right? It clearly worked regardless of what the post-purchase says, regardless of what the promo code says. And so I think promo codes and post-purchase are directionally very helpful. Certainly not statistically rigorous.
and and so that's what we're big fans of is hey, let's run geo-based incrementality test. There's a lot of great tools out there, a lot of free tools out there. there's also a lot of vendors specializing in this stuff that can help that can help you run these things. but then that helps give you a baseline as you then scale, right? So it's like, hey, let's run a test. Okay, great. It drove 12% lift, it's working. Okay, let's continue to invest in it. and I think like most
Most measurement experts recommend like this type of test is a point in time, right? continue to then test, right? People should be testing meta right once a quarter or twice a year or something, right? Test your Google stuff. What's really interesting too, as I've learned more about incrementality, is for things like branded paid search, for one brand it can be incremental and for another brand it may not be incremental.
So the answer isn't always like it it didn't work for any brand or it did work and so that means it works for every brand. It's hey, let's test it. And again, because it worked one month, if you're never changing your creative and now you've been running the same creative for eight years, guess what? It may then not be incremental anymore because creative is is stale and saturated. So yeah, big fans of the of the always be testing. Let's just
Tye DeGrange (18:31.597)
Totally. One hundred percent.
Tye DeGrange (18:51.564)
Literally.
Jordan Bentley (18:59.814)
Make sure we're testing in a statistically rigorous method and not using some proxy where we can put conflate accuracy for where we're conflating accuracy.
Tye DeGrange (19:12.439)
Yeah, no, you're speaking our language on so many levels. Like we've some great measurement people we've had on the podcast talking about like using MM as a a great kickoff point. Excuse me. You know, using MMM is a great kickoff point to then look at, okay, what can we do? Some additional holdout tests on that that media mix modeling or that marketing mix modeling to then inform.
you know, where do we do holdout tests or geotests or or or PSA lift tests, all all possible, right? and and you can do you can do the flip side too. You could do some of those experimentations and then jump into MMM. But I I appreciate where you're going with that. we we've we've talked about this, right? We've we've we've been fortunate to have some really interesting, you know, deep wins and and and learnings in SAS world, right? With Google, Atlassian superhuman.
to name a few, like quite a few. And it's something that I feel like that world is kind of catching up to the consumer world. And it's sort of this interesting mechanism. I think there needs to be a a higher level of customization and how do you find the right audiences with B2B versus consumer. Consumer has, you know, you gotta be ICP based with consumer. You got to be thoughtful with consumer. It's not just easy, but with SaaS and B2B, I feel like you really have to be thoughtful about those ICPs. You have to be very customized.
Is this something where you see an opportunity with audio? It feels like absolutely is as a as a business owner making software decisions. I am obsessed with podcasts, just like a lot of people are. How do you think about that type of thing when you get types of requests that are outside the box, unique, maybe have specific ICPs and personas that they're trying to target?
Jordan Bentley (21:00.124)
Well, I think this is where podcasting really shines, obviously. one of the things when I talk about TV is like at any given time there's what, a hundred TV shows, whatever, maybe twenty popular TV shows that the the vast majority of Americans are consuming. And so you don't get as much signal there.
in podcasting, there are millions and millions of podcasts. there are now around a billion episodes that have been published on quite a range. And unlike TV, where it's largely, you know, the vast majority of that consumption happens on a few shows, podcasting, you really see
A pretty distributed spread on the content that's being consumed. And one of the things I love about podcasting as a result of this, with a lot of the privacy changes that have been happening over the last number of years, that Apple has, you know, certainly spearheaded. the content that a consumer is listening to, you don't need to to do
you know, tracking, you don't have to do any type of privacy things, right? It's like, hey, this person's listening to a fintech podcast, right? They're listening to a fintech podcast about new fintech new fintech APIs. I bet if I work at Stripe or something, I, you know, that would be a good contact, right? Maybe we want to throw in a Stripe ad there. versus like, hey, we're listening to a podcast about how to be more productive or how executives can get more time back. Okay.
Okay, great, I'm superhuman, right? How do I land a better ad? and so it really is this perfect intersection of kind of privacy.
Jordan Bentley (22:53.59)
as well as content and personalization that you can really take advantage of to deliver very relevant ads and because you know you have hundreds of millions of Americans listening to podcasts you also get the scale there right this isn't some niche thing of like okay great I delivered seven ads
you know, you can drive meaningful growth for your B2B business and do very in a very efficient manner.
Tye DeGrange (23:21.025)
Yeah.
I love it. All right, man. We we've gotten some good ones down in terms of like the business. I'm gonna shift gears here and get some fun questions going, Jordan. So you you know, you know the game, right? You're you're building this amazing future, interesting platform for digital audio. When you're working away, what what are you what are you listening to to
get in the zone to get work going or to zone out. What's what are some of the options that you've you've listened to recently or you want to share?
Jordan Bentley (23:52.593)
Yeah. Yeah, my wife my wife gives me a hard time 'cause she says I just listen to the music that I listened to in high school, which is a fair I I'm listening to a lot of things like, you know, Taking Back Sunday, All American Rejects, Lincoln Park, you know, I all mix in some eighties stuff, big Bon Jovi fan, like first concert I went to.
so so we'll go eighties, a lot of the classic eighties, but a lot of the you know punk pop stuff, a a little bit of emo, as well as you know, mixing it up with with some rap and MMs and 50 Cent. so a fairly eclectic mix. most notably absent is is country. I'll do some country.
Tye DeGrange (24:37.719)
Nice.
Nice.
Jordan Bentley (24:44.996)
Not not a huge country person. so that's probably the one that's largely missing in there.
Tye DeGrange (24:47.403)
Yeah. Yep.
Yep. I won't hold that against you as a as a Texan and a country fan, but my my my tastes are all over the place in on terms of like music and different things and definitely see on the eighties I can I can get down with that. I think our our pod intro music might have just of just a touch of eighties flair added into it. So I think you're speaking my language. okay, what's the most annoying, catchy, funny jingle?
Jordan Bentley (24:56.626)
Think more.
Tye DeGrange (25:19.529)
in ads that you've ever heard or or can reference.
Jordan Bentley (25:22.726)
Yeah, so I'll I'll lead with kind of annoying and it's more a generic, but annoying is always the we call car dealer ads, right? It's like the screaming like, you know, there's a sale, bye, bye, bye, come here, you know, this Saturday only. So everybody hates those ads in the in the podcasting world. so those yeah, those would certainly be
Tye DeGrange (25:45.549)
Gorilla suit, balloons, whatever.
Jordan Bentley (25:51.407)
Look down upon, and I don't know that anybody knows my favorite ad ever, and I had I actually spent a second thinking about this because there's a lot of good candidates. But do you remember the campaign that Budweiser ran? I want to say in the 90s, it could have been in the early 2000s, called Real Men of Genius.
Tye DeGrange (25:52.769)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (26:13.986)
Yes.
Jordan Bentley (26:15.266)
That has to get the top prize. But you know, I I will listen to the
Tye DeGrange (26:19.937)
Yeah, jingle jingle funny, like s kind of quirky.
Jordan Bentley (26:24.944)
Yep. I I will go on YouTube and just listen to those ads back to back to back because they are so funny, right? And you know, you know, for those not familiar, you should go Google it, but you know, it'd start off again kind of with this 80s voice a little bit, but this real man of genius and and
Tye DeGrange (26:37.099)
They're good.
Tye DeGrange (26:43.861)
Yeah. Yeah. Almost has like a survivor you know, journey type voice. The power ballad. We salute you.
Jordan Bentley (26:51.436)
Yes, exactly. And then the salute Yeah, they'd be like, We sell you, Mr. Hughes Car Salesman. And and I remember this one, they're like, You stand behind every car you sell because if you stood in front of it and the brakes went out, you'd be crushed. there anyways, there's so many that are like greaters. so and then it ends like, you know, it's brought to you by, you know.
Tye DeGrange (27:10.861)
So cheesy and so good. Yep.
Jordan Bentley (27:20.775)
Isa Bush or whatever.
Tye DeGrange (27:22.935)
Well done. Well done. I I speaking speaking of 80s, my my vote in this is like super obscure reference, which is not shocking for people that know me and probably dates me because for how old I am. Think he might be a bit younger. But I Jason Alexander, pre-Seinfeld, did a McDonald's commercial with the Mc the McDLT sandwich. And it was they were trying to really go for like the hot side stays hot and the cold stays cold.
Jordan Bentley (27:24.24)
Yeah, the the people that take
Tye DeGrange (27:52.558)
If you watch the video on YouTube, it's about as eighties as it gets. It's Jason Alexander in very non-George persona, like effervescent and jumping up and down and dancing and having like an eighties tie on. It's it's so bad, it's funny. but I I the the jingle associated with that is stayed with me for far too long.
Jordan Bentley (28:15.864)
Love it. Love it. I'll I'll do it after this.
Tye DeGrange (28:17.153)
Very humorous. What what's your all right, three pods that you gotta keep and you you can't listen to anything else. You're just gonna keep those podcasts for a while. You gotta listen to those only.
Jordan Bentley (28:27.474)
yeah, so so acquired. I I've several that I love, but Acquired's up there. Big fan of Acquired, so that's one of the three. there's a podcast called the 20 Minute VC. and that's a good one. they in particular have this episode that drops every Thursday, which is like
Tye DeGrange (28:36.971)
Ooh, yeah.
Jordan Bentley (28:56.516)
Jason, a guy named I think Rory or Driscoll, and then Harry Stebbings, who's the host. and so I I that that Thursday drop. and then third place. Let's see, who do I give third place to? There's there's a lot of third place ones.
Tye DeGrange (29:04.288)
he's fantastic fantastic.
Jordan Bentley (29:20.77)
you know, I'll probably get some hay metal for this. but probably go all in, the all in podcast for to round out number three. so sometimes a bit but you know they have they have s they have some good banter particularly when they kind of like make fun of Jason on that.
Tye DeGrange (29:31.853)
It's hard to beat
Tye DeGrange (29:41.463)
They they need that yeah, the the comedy is important part of that mix, I think. I would agree with you.
Jordan Bentley (29:44.912)
Yeah. So it's so that would that would that would probably be my top three. Subject to change, of course.
Tye DeGrange (29:53.272)
I love it. I love it. coming down the home stretch here, it's it's just been awesome to have you on and get to know you more. Is there something that you you think is a deeply held belief in marketing or advertising that maybe a lot of peers disagree with that you're kinda like, Yeah, I I I believe in that, or something maybe you disagree with that is very accepted in the industry?
Jordan Bentley (30:22.158)
Yeah, I would say two. one is that audio's top of funnel are only for brand awareness.
That it certainly does that. One of the but one of the unique things about audio is unlike a display ad that somebody's gonna see for half a second, and you can really kind of only have one message where you have to kind of make this lower funnel versus upper funnel choice. Audio and and podcasting certainly it can be upper funnel and lower funnel at the same time, right? You can highlight the
Tye DeGrange (31:00.577)
Love that.
Jordan Bentley (31:01.298)
You can talk about the space, bring awareness to it, but then you can make it very lower lower funnel by your call to action, right? Your your promos, what you're doing today. Hey, here's why you need this now and drive urgency. And so yeah, it's certainly not just top of funnel. and and it can be very, very lower funnel, which I don't think is is fully appreciated.
The the other thing that I would kind of highlight is in audio and podcasting, one of the main ways of doing attribution is called pixel-based attribution. where you see if the person that that heard the ad then went to the website, etc.
I think it's very helpful. It's very helpful information. Directionally, it's very helpful. But like all of these tools, just like we talked about post-purchase surveys, certainly helpful. by themselves are not sufficient, right? I think all of these tools, when calibrated against incrementality, and particularly geo-based incrementality.
get much better, right? Because then you can see, hey, I ran this incrementality test. 82% of people that that responded in my post-purchase survey about, you know, whatever medium is incremental. Or may or maybe it's even more, right? Maybe you're under reporting because not everybody fills out the post-purchase surveys. And so it's like, hey, it's actually 2x that say, you know, whatever. I don't want to focus on podcasting per se. But whatever medium.
Tye DeGrange (32:43.447)
Yeah.
Jordan Bentley (32:44.176)
They say it's actually more incremental. I think the same thing is true. They call us an incrementality factor. Certainly the same thing is true for like in-platform reporting. So you can get the incrementality factor for Facebook or for Google.
Or for TikTok. And the same thing is true for podcasting. You can use a tool like pixel-based attribution, but then you just need to calibrate it. because uncalibrated, it could be wildly off. It could be too high, it could be too low, it's hard to know. and so I think that's something that that the audio and podcasting space is really missing. there's a lot of people that use pixel-based attribution, but they're not doing a lot of calibration with it. And so
You see brands say, well, I know that this particular vendor told me, you know, we had this many conversions. I don't believe it. I think it's wrong. and it causes some distrust in the space between brands and and us that really care about it and practitioners. So those would be the two things I would call out.
Tye DeGrange (33:37.185)
Yep. Yep.
Tye DeGrange (33:44.971)
I love that, Jordan. it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on. What just kind of finishing up with the final question. What's something that maybe folks in the audience don't know about you that you want to share?
Jordan Bentley (33:57.832)
man, there's a there's a long list there. but I would say in terms of random facts, I've broken 13 bones. so I
Tye DeGrange (34:13.099)
Whoa.
Jordan Bentley (34:15.79)
I love skiing, I love riding motorcycles, and I'm quite adventurous. And that adventure, that spirit of adventure has resulted in more than a few broken bones. So that's a little bit of insight that you otherwise know.
Tye DeGrange (34:20.843)
Love.
Tye DeGrange (34:32.023)
Dang. That's amazing. I love it, man. You you've been awesome. It's always I always enjoy our conversations. more adventures to come from it for an adventurous guy and someone that started something that is, I think, a great growing, exciting partner in the ecosystem. And as we kicked off with, the the partners in affiliate and partner marketing are literally the the RD and the
The spirit and the currency of the ecosystem. You know, our my role a lot of times of this is to guide and find and source them for the brands and take care of them. And I think you you're providing that. So thanks for coming on. I just always enjoy our chats and have a good one, everybody. Thanks, Jordan.
Jordan Bentley (35:12.497)
I think so. See ya.