TBPN, the hourslong daily tech podcast hosted by the young, brash entrepreneur-investors Jordi Hays and John Coogan, spun up significant cultural cachet—and big sponsorship dollars—in the year-and-change since its debut. Now, the show has bought a regional Super Bowl ad, set to air on broadcast across the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.
The 15-second spot, produced in-house, showcases previous TBPN guests, opening with interview clips of Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, investors Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and others—before panning out to show a colorful collage of business logos that come together to form an all-caps ‘TBPN’ logo. Each small icon in the image represents an organization that has appeared on the show.
The investment is a bold and unusual bet for a podcast business. “It’s completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising,” Hays told ADWEEK. “The nature of media is that you’re constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally, just through the content.”
So why do it?
Well, for one, the show’s president, Dylan Abruscato, a former entrepreneur and marketer, secured a kind of sweetheart deal on the spot through his connections at NBCUniversal, where he worked for three years in the mid-2010s. While national Super Bowl LX spots have sold for up to $10 million, regional spots can sell for anywhere between $50,000 and $1 million-plus. Abruscato told ADWEEK he paid less than $50,000, thanks in part to his ties to NBC Sports, the game’s official broadcaster this year.
“I started my career in the ad sales team at NBC, so I knew the right questions to ask, and the right spots in the game to request,” he said.
Even so, the investment was mostly for the hell of it. TBPN doesn’t need a Super Bowl ad to generate awareness, grow its audience, or drive downloads, Hays and Abruscato suggested.
“We believe in doing things purely for fun,” Hays said.
Most of all, TBPN wants to deliver a show of thanks to its many guests in an unexpected way. Hays called the push “Operation Surprise and Delight.”
“We wanted to give back in a small way to and create a fun moment for everybody that’s been a part of creating the show,” Hays said. “It’s really just this big collection of people that have made the show possible and are what make it great. So surprising everyone with this fun moment just made a lot of sense.”
