Meet The Leaders is a special 8-week series created in partnership with Point to Point Marketing. Today’s feature is on the Chief Operating Officer of the Locked On Podcast Network, Carl Weinstein. Follow along with the series and revisit former conversations by checking out the entire category.
Carl Weinstein serves as COO of the Locked On Podcast Network, where he has played a pivotal role in building the company into one of the leading sports podcast networks in the country. Joining the organization in 2018, approximately two years after its launch, Weinstein brought a unique combination of sports media, business development and entrepreneurial experience to the growing network.
He has overseen key areas of the business, including operations, sales, marketing, finance and product strategy, while helping guide its expansion and long-term growth. His leadership also played an important role in Locked On’s venture capital financing process and the company’s acquisition by TEGNA in 2021. Under his tenure, Locked On has continued to expand its reach, develop new programming opportunities and strengthen its position in the evolving sports media landscape. At Locked On, Weinstein has helped champion a talent-focused business model that combines local sports expertise with national scale, while emphasizing audience-driven programming, video expansion and emerging technologies.
In this edition of “Meet The Leaders,” we dive into his impressions of Barrett Media’s Top 20 in advertising series, the launch and early success of Locked On Hit, the power of unaided brand awareness, and why Locked On has sights on further growth in the women’s sports space while remaining focused on a sports-first-and-foremost product.
Weinstein spoke with Barrett Media from his offices in Los Angeles, CA.
Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
John Mamola: We just wrapped up our first ever Barrett Media Top 20 series for advertising. Everything from local, national, podcast, advertisers, agencies and account executives. As the COO of one of the top sports podcast networks, what elements stuck out to you about the series overall?
Carl Weinstein: I think it showed just how robust the category is. Obviously, I focused a lot on the podcast space and the advertisers listed. We’ve just seen tremendous growth in terms of advertisers coming into the space. Not just the ones that have been in podcasts for quite a while, but brands that maybe not have been traditionally in the podcast space. Maybe sticking to more traditional audio formats.
So, it’s just robust. The growth is great. The breadth of advertisers, brands, types of advertisers continues to grow. That’s been a great parallel to the growth of podcasts overall for the last decade plus.
John Mamola: We had over 140 people vote in the series with the voting sample representing 61 media groups in total. When you look at these types of lists, what do you look for? What do you take away or act on when you see rankers like this?
Carl Weinstein: The first thing I look for is who’s advertising with us and who’s not. Then we follow up on that. That’s probably one of the most valuable things for us specifically that comes out of the list.
That was a ranking that was done by voting, not necessarily by volume of advertising or dollar amounts. There’s different ways to look at that, but certainly getting a sense of who’s leading different categories and making sure we’re connecting with them. We should be working with them if we’re not and that we’re strengthening our relationship if we are.
John Mamola: I know we spoke earlier this year around the tenth anniversary of Locked On. It’s been another year of growth for Locked On. I see the brand all the time on my LinkedIn feed. It does an amazing job of telling its own story. Looking at 2026 overall, what has been the biggest difference compared to prior years for the brand?
Carl Weinstein: Year eleven looks a lot like the previous ten. We have continued to have robust growth across audio, video, and our social platforms. Not that audio ever stopped growing, but we’ve seen a nice resurgence in audio again. The growth of our flagship podcast has been really robust. Everything’s trending well ahead of 2025. That’s before even accounting for Locked On Hit, which is the brand-new product that we launched early this year.
We’re on track to do what we set out to do and what we said we would do, which was hit a billion listens and views on audio, video and social platforms this year.
John Mamola: What’s been the early results so far for Locked On Hit? Not just the results with viewership and consumption, but also how advertisers have responded to the new venture?
Carl Weinstein: Out of the gate, it’s everything we’d hoped it would be. We launched the NFL in August, college football in September, and we’re still filling in college. Now we’re in the middle of launching the NBA here in October. In just the first two months of the NFL, based on those early results Locked On Hit looks to be our fastest growing product that we’ve ever launched.
What’s been very encouraging about it is it’s reaching both new audiences that are more socially native audiences and driving additional sessions with our established audience. Exactly what we hoped the strategy would do, it’s playing out that way.
So it fills out the portfolio for us that includes our daily flagship podcasts that we built the network on. Those are still growing. We added squad shows in the last few years to team coverage. Those are roundtable shows with local experts, including former players. We’ve added postcasts, which are post-game podcasts. They go live first, and then they’re on demand for our MLB coverage. And now our Locked On Hit product, which is a creator-driven short-form coverage with each host delivering multiple hits a day.
We’re super encouraged by what we’ve seen so far.
John Mamola: In regard to MLB, this winter is going to be very interesting. How are you planning for content in the MLB offseason if there is any sort of work stoppage or lockout? With as many teams and creators that Locked On covers, is there a particular strategy that you are working on if there’s no baseball?
Carl Weinstein: Well, we survived COVID. So, I think we can weather a potential lockout. Our strategy does shift a bit. In fact, we’ve started working on this plan already. We’ve spent a lot of time working with our hosts on what I would call offseason topics. That can be anything from lookbacks, top ten lists, deeper analysis of the team, and reliving previous seasons.
Hopefully there won’t be a delay to the season. But if there is, digging into what that looks like when baseball returns. What maybe a shortened season looks like. What the impact is to each individual team. There’s a lot of angles that we can take. For better or worse, we had experience doing this during COVID and came through with flying colors.
John Mamola: As you know, when it’s a labor negotiation, it’s not necessarily team-specific like much of Locked On’s content model.
Carl Weinstein: The strategy may not be team-specific, but the content is going to be team-specific no matter how you slice it. That’s really what matters to the local fan anyways. That’s how we can look broadly at how we’re going to get through it. Then locally at how we’re going to tackle it.
John Mamola: Take me into the planning stages of what led up to creating Locked On Hit. What was the opportunity that you saw, and how did you strategize the approach moving into the NFL season?
Carl Weinstein: We saw changing habits in how younger audiences were following sports. There’s another trend behind it that’s going on as well. It’s harder and harder to follow games and follow your teams because you need multiple streaming apps.
There’s less RSNs. Now there’s a variety of over-the-air coverage. We think that has an impact too on how people are able to follow their team. They look for the one place they know they can get coverage every day. Podcasts, and now podcasts on social are particularly attractive in that regard.
We saw two opportunities there.
One was that consumption was different for different types of audiences. At the end of the day, our goal is to be the local sports leader. How we reach people can change and vary in a number of ways. We need to be flexible, innovative, adaptive, and that’s really what Locked On Hit is in large part.
Then we saw this other trend that it’s harder to follow your team with games being on so many different platforms. It’s hard to remember where games are sometimes. It’s also more costly. Those things together really lent themselves to exploring the opportunity.
John Mamola: The Locked On Network stated last week that it was approaching 60% unaided brand awareness among sports fans. That’s a massive win, especially with the size of the sports content ecosystem that Locked On plays into. What’s the key to growing that brand awareness as that ecosystem continues to grow a little bit more each year?
Carl Weinstein: First of all, the best marketing you’re ever going to have is a great product. We focus on product a lot. The better the product is, the better the marketing is just inherently.
We’ve always been very fortunate to have organic growth. That’s been a huge driver for us. It’s sort of a misnomer. Organic growth doesn’t mean effortless. Optimizing discovery is both art and science. How people find podcasts is changing dramatically. In the earlier days of Locked On, in-app discovery and word of mouth were huge drivers of audience. Then YouTube became the discovery engine. Now social media in a variety of forms is number two behind YouTube.
At least that’s what we see. We spend a lot of time in optimizing and looking at how we use social media. It’s product as well as maximizing discovery through organic growth.
John Mamola: YouTube is surely becoming the place for discovery for podcasts. But with social media specifically, are there different platforms that work better than others for Locked On?
Carl Weinstein: They work different. They appeal to different audiences. The strategy does need to be somewhat bespoke to that platform.
First of all, there’s a certain way people consume TikTok content and that tends to skew younger. Instagram fits the middle of the age spectrum in terms of how demos and people use Instagram. Facebook is still powerful as well, particularly for men and particularly for some of the older end of the demo. Every one of them is valuable and it’s really for us understanding how content, social media is best used in that format.
There’s something behind Locked On Hit as well. We also know that just taking our original flagship podcast and cutting it out and putting it into social isn’t necessarily the way people on TikTok or Instagram want to consume their content. A big part of Locked On Hit was taking a very different approach to creating content that is specific for those formats.
John Mamola: Artificial intelligence continues to be the biggest buzzword across the media industry. How have you seen AI influence how sports fans have discovered Locked On over the past six months to a year? Because of AI, have you had to switch strategies?
Carl Weinstein: AI is such a big topic overall. We’ve embraced AI wholeheartedly, but to be very clear. AI will not replace our hosts. Our hosts do things that only humans can do. They deliver nuanced insights and analysis and can entertain. Above all, they connect with audiences in ways that AI can’t.
That said, we use AI across the entire organization. It’s part of the show prep. We use AI to optimize distribution, create compelling social media, and in other ways to support other marketing functions. It’s great with analytics, obviously. Using all that helps us drive discovery. Then just generally supporting our business operations as well. We fully embrace AI as long as it doesn’t cross into the realm of content creation.
John Mamola: Switching back to advertising. You spoke at the NAB in April of last year and shared how sports content tends to do better with holding onto advertising clients than other categories. We’re now in 2026 and Podscribe’s latest September data agrees with you. The top ten podcast advertisers combined to spend $41 million last month with seven of those advertisers spending the most in sports. What’s the messaging to advertisers that Locked On provides that makes the brand stand out to advertisers looking for sports to spend their dollar?
Carl Weinstein: There’s a passion and an urgency to sports that really doesn’t exist in many, if any, other genres. That’s why you see the stats that you just discussed. That’s why sports is going to be more resilient and always will be more resilient if there were to be a downturn. But for Locked On, our message is pretty simple. It’s local passion at national scale.
Sports fans are fans of their teams first. We are the number one way you can reach every fan in their most passionate moment, which is around their team. Discussion before games, after games, in season, in the off season, during the draft, during trade windows. That’s something you uniquely get and can tap into with Locked On is this local passion. We deliver at national scale. One stop and you’re reaching the entire audience that we deliver on any given day. We sell Locked On as a network. So, on any given day, our NFL network is one of, if not the biggest sports podcasts in the country. Same with the NBA and down the line.
One stop, you tap into this massive passion at this national scale. It’s delivered through one network and with hosts that have this very deep connection to their audience.
John Mamola: Podcast consumers continue to shift to using video more often when it comes to consumption. There’s a good balance on use between video and audio, where the consumer is using both pretty equally. When it comes to ensuring advertising works to the highest level, is there a difference in how you coach your talent in regards to presenting sponsor reads for audio and video? Or is it one and the same?
Carl Weinstein: It’s basically one in the same. But you’re really hitting on something else that’s a trend in the business and very important.
There’s been this turn back towards the host read advertisements. That’s the way the business was when I first got involved with podcasts. It evolved somewhat to more digitally inserted ads many years back and has shifted now back to much more heavily skewed towards host read ads. The reason for that is because advertisers can tap into the entire audience, both audio and video with a host read ad. There’s nothing more effective than a host read ad for delivering that connection they have with their audience. We are believers in the power of the host read ad.
It runs the same on audio and video. There’s some things we do on video like graphic overlays, QR codes, and a number of things that are important to advertisers. That certainly adds some more value. But it’s the same connection that the host has with their audience on both platforms.
John Mamola: It’s no secret that some broadcast companies are crafting what the Locked On model for podcasts has been for the last decade. Even companies without a sports broadcast station in the markets they operate in. How do you battle against that approach by broadcast companies that engage in that approach where the megaphone of radio is their marketing weapon?
Carl Weinstein: This may surprise you, but we don’t respond. We focus only on what we can control, which is our own business, our own strategy, executing our own plans. We stick to our model and mission. Generally, we’re not compelled to do something one way or another because of competition. We just simply execute our strategy regardless.
By focusing on the things we can control and produce the most compelling daily team coverage. We are expanding into all the different ways and platforms we can do that, while delivering outstanding results for our advertisers. But also building a powerful company culture. At the end of the day, people are what make everything go. If you have a staff that’s skilled, passionate and inspired, the results will follow.
That comes along with our strategy to being the most talent-friendly organization in the media business. If we do all that consistently day in and day out, the rest takes care of itself.
John Mamola: You’re not foreign to this, but the rise in women’s sports, especially with the WNBA, has been very impressive. However, looking at Locked On, there’s not team-specific podcasts for women’s sports as of yet. I’m assuming Locked On has some plans to cater to those audiences as well.
Carl Weinstein: Yes. We do cover women’s basketball, but as you noted, we haven’t delved into team-specific. Women’s sports is the hottest growing area in sports right now. We are absolutely following it and keeping our eye on it. When we find the right point of entry, then we’ll get into the space in a more expansive way.
You are right. That one is definitely on our radar. While we’re looking at expanding Locked On in terms of the ways we reach our existing audience and our existing teams in terms of both platform and the types of content we deliver, women’s sports, in particular basketball would be most likely our next point of entry.
I can’t make the commitment as to when we’re going to do that exactly, but that would be the most logical point for us.
John Mamola: I know when we talked last, I asked you about the merger with TEGNA and Nexstar. That was about four months ago. You stated you’re optimistic about being part of a larger media company with a bigger footprint but still operating as normal. It’s been four months. Have you had any additional conversations about what the assets would be at your disposal when and if this merger finally goes through?
Carl Weinstein: No. We are business as usual. In fact, even since that last conversation, I’d say just completely running this business like we always have. It’s been a non-factor, non-issue, and we’re left out of whatever is going on behind the scenes. It’s not anything we’re part of.
John Mamola: Is it hard to plan for the future when you really don’t know what will eventually happen?
Carl Weinstein: We have not found it that way. I’d say it’s probably similar to how we look at the question about competition. We just keep our head down, and execute our plan. If we’re growing, we’re successful, and we’re delivering, we just think the rest falls into place.
John Mamola: A lot of sports podcast networks continue to diversify their portfolio of content with stepping outside of sports and into culture products. Has there ever been a thought of doing something similar with Locked On?
Carl Weinstein: Sports are what we are all about and what we will be all about in the future. There are so many ways we can grow from this base. Especially with this audience and with the unique position we hold as the leader in local sports coverage. I think we’ve got plenty to do in the sports vertical.
John Mamola: Moving into 2027, what’s the biggest opportunity piece that’s on your radar for growing Locked On moving into 2027 and beyond?
Carl Weinstein: Locked On Hit is the growth engine for 2027.
It’s super exciting and a really compelling product. The early results have been great. That’s where we’re dedicating a lot of growth energy and focus right now. Beyond that, I can’t really predict the future, but we’ve always been flexible and innovative and tried to be very opportunistic. As long as we’re guided by the things that are core to our business and our principles, being the local sports leader, which for us means continuing to explore the ways we can deliver coverage for local sports fans. In particular leaning into free coverage. That’s really one of our strengths.
To show up where the fans are next. We started in audio, went to video, and social. We have our own OTT app now. We’re on the Station OTT apps. We have distribution on FASTTV. We are always looking at distribution growth and how we can continue to connect to local sports fans in all the ways and places they consume throughout the day.
On whatever platforms and form the content takes, which differs throughout the day. They may want to read an article about their team in the morning. They may want to listen to a podcast on their run. Maybe a break in the middle of the day where they’re hitting social media, so you want to be in all those places. Later in the day, FASTTV and YouTube can be a lean back sofa experience.
We just want to be and will be in all those places.
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.
