Record-Breaking Podcast Marketing — The Donnie Brasco Story
Julian Espinosa · December 2020
$0.08
Cost per new listen
$0.02
Cost per click
Overview
Deep Cover tells the true story of Joe Pistone — the FBI agent who spent years undercover inside the mob as “Donnie Brasco.” Jam Street Media brought us a remarkable show and a simple goal: get it in front of the people who would love it, fast and cost-effectively.
Podcast advertising the traditional way is expensive and hard to track. So we did what we always do — we treated it as a paid-social growth problem and built a system around it.
How we did it
Market Research
We started in Facebook Audience Insights, mapping the overlap between true-crime listeners and mob-movie fans — the people most likely to fall for a real undercover story. That research defined exactly who we'd put the show in front of.
Choosing Assets
We pulled the most gripping moments from the show and built creative around them — audiograms and clips engineered to stop the scroll and sell the premise in seconds.
Three-Stage Testing
Creative and audiences went through a structured three-stage testing framework. We killed what didn't work fast and scaled what did — driving clicks at a remarkable $0.02 CPC.
Measuring KPIs
Every dollar was tracked to a download. We optimized relentlessly against cost per listen, so the budget always flowed to the audiences and creative producing real listeners.
The results
The system worked. Clicks came in at roughly $0.02 apiece, and we drove new listens for as little as $0.08 each — a fraction of what podcast advertising normally costs. The result was record-breaking growth for the show, and proof that the right paid-social system beats expensive, untrackable ad buys every time.