Pitching the test to your CFO

What evidence actually holds up

The channel-level facts you can defend: podcast advertising is a multi-billion-dollar annual market tracked by IAB’s revenue reporting, which is revealed preference by thousands of advertisers, and independent audience research (Edison’s Infinite Dial series) documents large, sustained listening. Note what this site does not do: quote a specific market-size or ROI figure here, because we have not verified one to our citation standard. What does not hold up: vendor effectiveness studies. Acast’s study says podcast ads work; Acast sells podcast ads. Put the skepticism on the slide; it buys credibility for the rest.

The assumptions section is the pitch

Your CFO will not challenge the CPM (it is published and dated, from the rates hub); they will challenge visit rate and CVR. So source both from your own funnel: use your paid-social view-to-visit and site CVR as the starting values, disclosed as such. The Test Modeler’s DeckExport formats this automatically, ranges intact. Never collapse ranges into point estimates for a finance audience; they know what false precision smells like.

Objections you should pre-answer

Incrementality (“would these buyers have come anyway”): concede it is partially unresolved at test scale, point to the code-plus-survey design in Stage 5. Brand vs response: commit to judging on response only for the test. Attribution leakage: state that code-measured CAC overstates true CAC, so the reported number is conservative. Each honest concession costs a little polish and buys a lot of trust.