Hays and Abruscato said that the podcast stands to benefit from the project’s ripple effects. In particular, they expect the ad to travel far beyond the broadcast, spreading across the social platforms that TBPN knows intimately—and has long relied on for growth. “This ad is optimized for shareability,” Hays said. “I would expect it to get millions of views across X and other platforms.”
The concept came together quickly, prompting TBPN to produce the spot in-house rather than enlist an agency. It gave its three-person production team—out of just 10 full-time employees—the chance to show what they could do.
The spot represents TBPN’s second big marketing push, following an out-of-home buy last summer that brought Hays’ and Coogan’s face to a billboard in New York.
The TBPN billboard in NYC is the newest high-profile destination for tourists and city residents alike https://t.co/ZvxbnrUToW
— Tyler Gold (@tylergold) July 2, 2025
“There’s a running joke on the show about our love for advertising,” Hays said, nodding to early episodes in which Hays and Coogan inserted ad reads into their scripts even though they had no advertisers. While some podcasts view advertising as a “necessary evil,’” he added, TBPN has “really leaned into it.” The podcast’s sponsors now tally over 25, and include big names like Google Gemini, Figma, Plaid, Ramp, and Shopify.
“Through advertising and being an ad-supported media company, all the content that we’ve ever put out has been free for the entire world. We’ve never paywalled anything. We don’t have plans to paywall anything.”
The appearance is also a sign that TBPN’s ambitions are only growing. “We constantly are pushing ourselves to go bigger—that’s the challenge,” Hays said. In 2025, some of the show’s biggest moments included covering Figma’s IPO in July and interviewing Mark Zuckerberg at Meta Connect, the tech titan’s annual developer conference. Now, the show’s Super Bowl ad is the next escalation.
“Then the bar gets set,” said Hays, “and then we have to figure out how to do it again.”
