In 2009, Anthony Casalena was listening to a lot of
podcasts, especially one called “This Week in Tech,” a round table where tech
reporters gathered to talk about things like
Farmville,
Foursquare, and the
iFart app.
اضافة اعلان
Though the website building business he started in his dorm
room six years before had yet to make a profit, he decided to make a big bet.
He spent around $20,000 for an ad on the show to tell listeners about
Squarespace.
“It was so expensive compared to anything else I had done,”
he said over Zoom from his vacation house in Montauk,
New York, in September.
By this fall, he was working on an ad campaign on a somewhat larger scale —
including a Super Bowl ad starring Zendaya.
How Squarespace went from podcast spots to Super Bowl ads
shows that his 2009 bet was right. Podcasts could sell.
To find out if that gamble on his first podcast ad on “
This Week in Tech” worked, Squarespace built one of the earliest post-purchase
surveys, the ones companies now pepper customers with. When he looked at the
results, Casalena was shocked. A third of the company’s new subscribers had
heard of its product from the ad on “This Week in Tech.”
“So we became pioneers in trying to find every emerging show
host we could before they’re super popular,” Casalena said. Everyone at
Squarespace started hunting for podcasts to advertise on.
When a podcast host ad-libbed their promotional copy — and
particularly if they stressed that using the Squarespace promo code supported
their show — the return on the ad spending was enormous. And, according to a
former Squarespace employee, when that host was Joe Rogan, the return was
almost unbelievable.
Other people later discovered the same about Rogan, who
started podcasting the same year Squarespace started advertising. In 2020
Spotify offered him a reported $100 million for his show.
The success with podcast ads made Casalena such a believer
in advertising that in 2015, he decided to buy a 30-second Super Bowl ad that
he figured cost him $10 million. “It’s a good deal,” he said. “What other ad do
we do that gets picked up in the media over like a hundred different sources
and played for free?”
Casalena’s commitment to podcast advertising was so singular
even in 2015 that when President
Barack Obama went on Marc Maron’s show,
Squarespace was the only company approached about ads.
The podcast ad budget grew so large that the team of four
young people couldn’t spend it all. According to the former employee, at one
point, Squarespace discussed taking out ads that didn’t even talk about
Squarespace and just promoted Podcast Awareness month, something they were
going to make up. Squarespace employees were the only group of people in the
world who have ever thought there weren’t enough podcasts.
Squarespace ad buyers were agnostic about audience size. If
they spent $500 on a podcast with a tiny audience and scored 20 subscribers, it
was worth it — because people who pay an annual fee to host their website
aren’t likely to leave and redesign their site somewhere else.
Squarespace gets mocked for being the podcast-ad company,
but Casalena revels in the attention, rattling off mentions on “Saturday Night
Live,” the Netflix show “Only Murders in the Building” and J. Cole’s song “My
Life.” (“I think he just really needed something that rhymes with ‘airspace,”
Casalena said.)
Since he founded the company, Casalena had spent over $1
billion promoting his brand across all platforms. The revenue from those ads, plus
all that attention, helped the company go public in May, landing Casalena $2.4
billion in stock in the $6.6 billion company.
Long before anyone came up with the idea of Web3 (the name
for a decentralized internet run on crypto tokens), Casalena understood that
people were looking to monetize every interaction in their lives.
He saw that Squarespace’s small business owners were selling
services along with goods. Online classes. Tattoo appointments. Tutoring. Tarot
card reading. The internet rule “information wants to be free” was starting to
deteriorate.
“People were able to get audiences in ways they couldn’t get
them before via the social networks,” Casalena said. “But they don’t want to be
beholden to the social networks.”
The decentralized economy, Squarespace predicts, will be all
side hustle, all the time. “The part of the economy that will be less
commoditized is our individual experiences,” said Nick Kokonas, the derivatives
trader turned
Chicago restaurateur who founded Tock.
If 10 different merchants on
Amazon are selling the same
product, he can buy the cheapest one. “But food isn’t like that,” he said. “And
personal training isn’t like that. Those people whose marketplace used to be
hyperlocal, this gives them global reach.”
Kokonas believes that most businesses selling goods will add
a service component, a trend called multimodal spending that the pandemic sped
up.
In this year’s
Super Bowl ad, Zendaya plays a woman selling
seashells who uses Squarespace to offer seashell meditation sessions and a
seashell travel, becoming a “seashell celebrity.” Which is a not a completely
improbable job description in 2022. No doubt, she’ll also have a podcast.
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