Why Podcast Advertising Still Runs on Predictions, Not Certainty with Sean Howard

About this episode

Sean Howard discusses the challenges of forecasting ad delivery in podcast advertising and the evolving behavior of podcast audiences.

How do podcast publishers actually know what inventory they can sell? According to Sean Howard, most of the industry historically hasn’t. In this episode of PodBiz, Sean Howard, founder and CEO of Flightpath and co-founder of Fable and Folly, breaks down one of the biggest operational problems in podcast advertising: forecasting ad delivery in a medium built around unpredictable audience behavior. Before building Flightpath, Sean worked across fiction podcasting, branded content, and podcast audience growth. Through years of buying and selling podcast advertising, he realized that publishers, networks, and sales teams often didn’t actually know what they could reliably deliver to advertisers, creating cascading problems around campaign fulfillment, inventory management, and monetization. That insight became the foundation for Flightpath, a platform focused on predictive inventory forecasting, campaign management, and helping publishers better understand how audiences consume content across podcasting and video. The conversation also explores how creator behavior is changing as podcasting evolves into a multi-platform ecosystem spanning RSS, YouTube, Spotify video, newsletters…

People in this episode

Hosts: Norma Jean Belenky, John Kiernan

Guest: Sean Howard

Topics covered

• podcast advertising
• inventory forecasting
• audience behavior
• monetization
• multi-platform ecosystem

Keywords

• podcast advertising
• inventory management
• audience behavior
• monetization
• predictive forecasting

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Flightpath, Fable and Folly

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