Meet The Leaders: John Goforth, Gamut Podcast Network, Hubbard Radio

Meet The Leaders is a special 8-week series created in partnership with Point to Point Marketing. Our first feature is on the VP/GM of Gamut Podcast Network & Podcasts at Hubbard Radio, John Goforth. Follow along with the series and revisit former conversations by checking out the entire category.

John Goforth joined Hubbard Radio in August of 2024 after spending six years as the chief revenue officer at Magellan AI. A seasoned leader with expertise in all facets of podcast, digital, and broadcast advertising. Goforth new serves a growing portfolio of podcasts as Gamut Podcast Network continues to build upon an already stellar lineup utilizing Hubbard radio talent across their eight markets in the United States. After over ten years of local sales experience in traditional sports radio, Goforth returns to the format leading Hubbard’s podcast wing into the next generation. 

In this edition of ‘Meet The Leaders’, we explore how John’s extensive career led him to Hubbard, the recent launch of Gamut’s newest product 312 Sports, and artificial intelligence’s role in the future of podcasting.  

John Goforth spoke with Barrett Media from the Hubbard offices in Chicago, Illinois. 

*Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.* 

John Mamola: You’ve had an extensive career working in St. Louis, Chicago. Traditional radio and non-traditional. What skill set from your previous experience with traditional radio stations helped you prepare for your role currently as the VP and GM of Gamut Podcast Network with Hubbard Radio?

John Goforth: The street fighter sales mentality that I learned in local radio sales and local radio sales management absolutely applies to podcast revenue growth. They go hand in hand. You’re talking about connecting audiences with advertisers. There’s no difference.

Whether you’re selling a large national campaign for a huge podcast that gets millions of downloads, or if you’re selling a local or regional campaign for a local show that listeners absolutely love. You’re taking that audience who thinks of that host as being as big as Oprah or Joe Rogan. They are that big to them and inviting them into their ears.

Learning how to do that at the local level, and certainly on the national side has served me well.

I think a big thing that the podcast industry is missing on right now are local and regional advertisers and audiences are criminally underserved. From a sport perspective. From a sports perspective. Name the genre. That’s something that we’re going to look to change a Gamut [Podcast Network]. Having that visibility and understanding the mechanics of that. Understanding why radio is still a $14 billion industry depending on who you ask.

The podcast industry, no matter what revenue you believe, is still much lower than radio. The difference is super serving those audiences and those advertisers that are local and regional.

John Mamola: Bouncing off what you just said about local advertisers being not represented. Is that more on the sellers themselves? In your experience, did you find local clients were clamoring for a play in podcasting, but weren’t a focus because of the ability to sell to larger more national clients with podcasts?

John Goforth: It’s twofold. I think it’s the nascent nature of the podcast industry. I’ve been knocking around for almost a decade in the podcast world. That makes me an old guy in this space. It’s still a very nascent industry; it’s still growing up and finding the opportunities.

I wouldn’t put anything on the sales teams. They are going to sell whatever advertisers are interested in ultimately. If we had to play the blame game, it would be in the development of content for those audiences.

We recently launched a sports brand in Chicago. Before we launched that brand, we would have had a harder time selling to advertisers that were looking for that target demographic in Chicago. We had to create the content. If you build it, they will come.

We built it and now we’re able to super serve both national and local advertisers on the content that we built. More of that content needs to be built in all markets. Whether it’s by Gamut or by some of our brothers and sisters out in the podcast world.

John Mamola: You’ve been with Hubbard now for a little bit over a year. Just out of curiosity, why a return to the traditional radio company when you were playing in the non-traditional space for as long as you have? 

John Goforth: I think those lines are getting blurrier. If you were to ask our awesome CEO Ginny [Hubbard], she would say that podcasts are the third pillar of excellence of our company.

We’ve got the broadcast arm which is an amazing business. We’ve got 2060 digital which is an amazing digital agency that super serves advertisers and agencies across the country. Then we’ve got Gamut. These are all individual pillars under the greater Hubbard umbrella.

So, I don’t know that I returned to traditional media in that I just joined an amazing company that was interested in expanding their footprint into this amazing medium that I’ve been a fan of and been a part of for almost a decade.

John Mamola: Entering the second year with the company, what’s been the biggest positive from your experience so far joining Hubbard. Also, a challenge that you’re still attempting to conquer since you began.

John Goforth: The biggest positive has certainly been the support that we’ve received from internal stakeholders. Our CEO Ginny [Hubbard} and our EVP and CFO, Dave Bestler are just so bullish on the space and want us to succeed. They are as supportive as you could hope for. We’re encouraged to go out and find bets to take and find places to win. To help grow Gamut into what we know it can be. That’s what me and my partner in crime, Jeremy Sinon, do every day.

The biggest challenge is also the biggest opportunity. That is finding the areas of growth from a revenue, content, and a download perspective. It turns out when you’re building things, you can take a lot of different paths up the same hill. Choosing which path is the correct one and where we should place our bets is the biggest challenge, but it’s also the most fun.

If we rewind back to when I decided to join Hubbard. One of the things that I said to my wife often was I want to go and help be a part of something and build something. I don’t want to just take a job to show up and make sure the trains depart and arrive on time. I want to be part of building the tracks. That’s the most challenging part, but also the most fun and rewarding part.

John Mamola: With 312 Sports, you said there were a lot of advertisers that were asking for what can you do for us with that particular audience in that market? Hubbard has music brands in that market. Was there not a notion of those brands or those talent could reach that audience? Was it a sports direct focus that advertisers wanted that led to creating 312 Sports?

John Goforth: An important thing to do is when you’re a business that’s looking to expand is to lean into your strengths. A huge strength of this company that was built out in Minneapolis is SKOR North. Which is a regional sports podcast network that’s part of Gamut. It’s exactly what we want to build in 312 Sports.

It covers all the sports in the Twin Cities area, led by amazing hosts like Phil Mackey and Judd [Zulgad] that do really great content. It reaches millions of people.

We saw the success of that and the success of the advertising sales that go along with it. Both with local and national advertisers. We’ve got a real strength here. Then with the help of Phil [Mackey] being a thought leader in the space as well, we decided that we did want to try to build replicas of that in some of our other markets.

At the same time, you can’t just decide to do that. You must have the right pieces to win. It’s a matter of also being opportunistic. We had the amazing luck and fortune to have a conversation with Dan Bernstein and Matt Abbatacola to potentially bring them on board to launch this venture. That was the missing piece. I wouldn’t want to launch a new venture and not have a top performing team to do so. That’s what these guys are.

They are the creme de la creme when it comes to sports talk programming in Chicago. We were lucky enough to launch 312 Sports on the backs of their success. It’s proven out to be wildly successful so far. I’d be remiss not to mention our market president, Keith Lawless, and his integral role in bringing 312 Sports to life. It’s as much his baby as ours.

John Mamola: Is the plan to replicate the SKOR North model in the other Hubbard Radio markets like Washington D.C., Seattle, Phoenix, and others?

John Goforth: They say the definition of luck is when planning meets opportunity. We like to be lucky. Planning is one thing and understanding the opportunities out there, but the opportunities have to present themselves. We’re not going to force ourselves into a market just because we think we’re good at something. We’re going to find the right opportunities.

There’s no arguing that it helps to launch in markets where we already have a presence because you have an infrastructure there. You have the sales team, finance, studios, just basic stuff. We certainly like to lean into that first, but again I don’t want to take anything off the board or say that we’re definitively launching a brand in market X just because we happen to have a presence there.

We’re going to be intelligent about it. We’re going to pick places that we think we can win. We don’t want to put out a subpar product and nor do we want to pursue advertisers with something that’s half baked.

The one thing I think you can say about 312 Sports is it was very intentional. You knew exactly what we were launching. Everywhere from the paid marketing that we launched to some of the previews and the interviews that Dan [Bernstein] did. We’ve been very upfront about the type of content we wanted to create and the brand that we wanted to launch.

I think if we were to do that again, and maybe we will, maybe we won’t. If we were to do that again, we’d want to be just as intentional.

John Mamola: Was there any pushback internally based on the way Dan Bernstein’s situation with Audacy played out leading to his dismissal from 670 The Score? We’re there internal discussions about should we go down this road with him?

John Goforth: No, and if there had been, it was mitigated from the moment we sat down with Dan [Bernstein]. As you heard in his first episode in Dan Bernstein Unfiltered, he couldn’t have been more contrite and really took full blame.

Whether it’s deserved or not. he will tell you that it’s 100% on him. Not my words.

After having that conversation, but then also looking at the scope of his work. When you can look at the breadth of work over 30 years and just how amazing the content has been over those 30 years. Interviews, work in the community, charity work and everything.

When you look at the breadth of work and then you talk to the man to put that all together. There was no hesitation on our part. We were just glad and lucky to be partnered with him.

John Mamola: Is the plan for 312 Sports to continue to expand on content with other personalities from Chicago? Or is the plan right now to wait and see what you have with Dan [Bernstein] and Matt [Abbatacola] to adjust off of those results?

John Goforth: We’re full steam ahead. We absolutely have intention of releasing new podcasts as new sports seasons commence. We’re bringing Dan’s Chicago Bulls podcast back; Organizations Win Championships that Dan does with his son, Jason.

Other seasons will be coming around, and whether we’re looking internally or externally. Finding the best content creators to help super serve those fandoms as well. Don’t have anything to announce yet but stay tuned.

John Mamola: Chicago is a big market for sports content. You have five pro teams and a division one school in Northwestern. You can also say the University of Illinois has a big footprint in the market as well. With that, the on-demand content market is very full. You have CHGO from ALLCITY, and two massive traditional sports radio stations that put out a lot of on demand and time-shifted content. Both on audio and video.

In other markets, there are similar stories to that tale. Does the amount of competition in any market from a sports perspective weigh into decisions to enter a crowded sports podcast landscape?

John Goforth: I truly believe that we haven’t even scratched the surface.

Looking at it from a macro perspective, depending on who you ask anywhere from 30 to 36 million different YouTube channels. Those are channels on one platform. Even the most aggressive estimates for the number of active RSS feeds is in the 2-3 million range.

No one is sitting around and saying there are too many YouTube channels.

It’s about putting out the right content and being able to reach the right people with that content. Whether you’re talking about YouTube using its algorithm to find me and identify that I really enjoy content about my favorite band. That is the same thing as us identifying a need in the city of Chicago for an independent sports voice. That’s why we hired Dan [Bernstein] and Matt [Abbatacola].

We needed someone to set the sports talk agenda on a daily basis because we didn’t believe anyone was doing that fully. To me, that’s the same thing as an algorithm identifying that I want to go listen to My Chemical Romance concerts.

Going back to your earlier question, that’s what we’re trying to do in the markets when we look at them. We’re trying to identify holes in the market. We’re not just going to blindly run into a market just because we think we need a seat at the table. We’re going to look for where we believe there to be additional opportunity.

Broadly going back to your original question, do I think that it’s oversaturated? Absolutely not.

John Mamola: In the short time you’ve been with the company, how have you seen the talent from the Hubbard music stations adapting to the goals of the podcast network?

John Goforth: I’m very lucky in that I joined a company that has always been interested in having the topflight talent that’s live and local in every market it owns.

It doesn’t matter what market you look at, generally speaking, one of our stations has the top morning show. We have amazing talent that does amazing content. It’s a real testament to Hubbard’s EVP of Programming, Greg Strassell.

These morning shows are content incubators even if they’re on a music station. Many of them don’t run any music, or if they do run music it’s very minimal, and they produce amazing segments.

If you look at The Rizzuto Show in St. Louis, it’s routinely in the top 200 podcasts. Its time shifted audio. It’s audio that went out across the radio and it’s repurposed for podcasts, and it’s a great podcast.

That’s the message that I try to impart to all our creators. It doesn’t matter what the content is, whether the podcast is exactly what you put out over the radio airwaves or a benchmark that’s typically two minutes on the radio. Maybe you stay in those seats after your shift ends and do a half hour version of that benchmark.

Every market, talent, and creator that I’ve gone and talked to, I’ve said the same thing. You don’t have to have the same strategy as everyone else; you just need to have a strategy.

John Mamola: How brands are utilizing AI continues to evolve on a daily basis. For Hubbard, is AI utilized in the content creation itself on any level? Especially with growing fears of AI potentially replacing actual people for content itself in the podcasting wing?

John Goforth: It’s hard for me to play guess the future. I’m certainly no prognosticator. I’ve learned a long time ago to never say never. However, I can talk about the present, because AI is here and it’s real.

On our narrative series, where we go out and we do a lot of work and we have amazing hosts that put out amazing content. We will make sure and put a disclaimer in stating no generative AI was used in the creation of this podcast.

I believe AI, whether it’s on the sales, content creation side, or anything in between. It’s meant to be another tool at our disposal to make us that much more efficient and better at our job. It is no different than the disruption that email caused as email became more prevalent in the corporate world. That was a huge disruption.

People at that time were saying this is the end of business as we know it. No one’s ever going to see each other in person anymore. You’re not going to shake someone’s hand and look them in the eye and be able to sell them. It turns out it made us all that much more efficient, and you can get a lot more business done.

Even going back to the invention of the printing press. These are just tools at our disposal.

If you think that you can just build a business on the back of one tool. Until we’re proven otherwise, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. I love the use of AI in the sense of it makes us better at our jobs.

If I’m producing some sort of content, can I use AI to help fact check? Can I use AI to do some research for me? Sure, but then it’s incumbent upon me to fact check to make sure the AI is not hallucinating.

If I’m in sales, can it help me identify who the best targets for a podcast are? Who the decision makers at a given business might be?

Strategy and planning, can it help me put together the right spreadsheets and templates to really think about my business in a more comprehensive way?

Can AI help me think through that rather than just sitting in front of a blank canvas and going, where do I start? That’s how I think AI is and should be used. Not this doomsday scenario where the robots replace all of us who think of ourselves as talent. That narrative leads to a lot of clicks, but I don’t think that’s the right way to approach it.

The consumer’s not there either. One of the things that you can see online pretty quickly, even with this new introduction of Sora is that we have not crossed the uncanny valley yet. People know when something has been produced by AI, and they don’t like it.

It’s going to get better. Don’t get me wrong. There will come a day where you won’t be able to tell the difference, but we’re not there yet.

I still think independent, real voices. Giving independent, real thoughts on great podcasts are the way to go. That’s what we’re going to continue to pursue and use AI to help support that dream.

John Mamola: You’re having a conversation with someone who has no idea about anything to do with podcasts. How would you define a podcast?

John Goforth: Audio first, platform agnostic content and probably just stop there. I don’t get into whether it has an RSS feed or doesn’t. Whether it has a video component or doesn’t.

I don’t even think if it was YouTube first, that you couldn’t call it a podcast. There are plenty of amazing shows on YouTube. They’re actually podcasts; they just don’t realize it. Nobody’s ever ascribed that word to what they do.

It’s an evolving definition. If you talk to the old guard in the podcast world. By definition, it can’t be a podcast if it doesn’t have an RSS feed. That’s an antiquated way of thinking.

If it’s a lean forward audio first content and it’s platform agnostic, that’s what a podcast is.

To learn more about Point-To-Point Marketing’s Podcast and Broadcast Audience Development Marketing strategies, contact Tim Bronsil at tim@ptpmarketing.com or 513-702-5072.