Presenting Sponsorship of a Podcast Series, Negotiated

A presenting sponsorship is production risk wearing a media buy's clothes. We do not commit a client to a narrative series with fewer than three episodes finished and mixed, and we stage the fee so the second half releases when episode four publishes. That rule has cost clients access to good series. It has also kept them out of the ones that never shipped. What the money actually buys: It buys the credit and the reads. It does not buy editorial, and a producer who offers you editorial input has just told you what their audience is worth to them. We ask for one thing in its place: 48 hours of notice before an episode publishes that touches your category, so nobody learns about it from a journalist. In return we sign an editorial firewall letter saying we will not ask to see scripts. A sponsor who cannot live inside that arrangement should buy spot inventory instead, and we will say that in the first call. The terms we will not sign without: Category exclusivity written in our words rather than the seller's, because modest womenswear is a category and retail is a category the seller will happily sell around you. A 30-day download guarantee measured to IAB v2.1, with make-good taken in inventory on a named future series rather than a credit note nobody ever redeems. A host departure and hiatus clause, so that if the voice on the ad leaves mid-season the flight pauses and the remaining fee is repriced. Explicit pricing for the back catalogue, because an evergreen read sitting in episode two for three years is worth more than the flight and is given away free in most contracts we are handed. Separate, time-boxed rights if you want the host's read cut into paid social, usually 25 to 40 percent of the flight fee and never assumed. And a termination event written narrowly enough to mean something. Underwriting, for foundations: Underwriting copy and advertising copy are different registers and Turkish listeners hear the difference immediately. A foundation crediting a documentary series wants restraint: the name, one sentence of purpose, one destination. We will argue you out of a call to action in the credit read and into a separate honest ad in the midroll, where it belongs. We also price the giving calendar into the deal rather than around it. A series landing across Ramazan and the weeks before Kurban Bayrami is worth a different number than the same series in October, and sellers rarely price that themselves. What we refuse: Series that exist only as a deck. Fees settled partly in product, which apparel brands propose constantly and which turns a media commitment into a gifting arrangement with no measurement attached. Blind slates, where a network sells one of its upcoming series and names it later. And any series whose downloads have never been verified by a third party, because a season is a concentrated bet and the wrong place to trust a seller's spreadsheet. Not for: Brands that need to approve the content their name sits beside. Buyers who want a series because a competitor sponsored one. And teams with no measurement in place, since a season is one large flight against one audience, and without a code, a survey field and a pre-period you will finish it with a warm feeling and no read on whether it worked. Get instrumented first, then sponsor.