Audio Ad Power with Jordan Fox

Justin Levinson (00:00.61)‍

Hey everybody, welcome to the Agency Side Podcast. I am your host, Justin Leventhin, and I am here today with Jordan Fox. He is the CEO of AdResults Media. They are one of the leading agencies helping brands scale through audio and podcast advertising. His team has worked with some of the biggest names in the world to connect them with top-tier audio content, turning listeners into loyal customers. Thank you so much for being here, Jordan.

‍

Jordan Fox (00:25.362)‍

Thanks for having me.

‍

Justin Levinson (00:26.968)‍

Cool man, well outside of the brief intro I gave here, maybe you can just enhance that a little bit and explain to the listeners what you guys are doing.

‍

Jordan Fox (00:37.576)‍

Sure. So Ad Results Media is a specialist media agency. We help brands show up in the world of audio and audio first creators. We've been around really since the beginning of the kind of podcast boom. Although we don't just buy on podcasts, right? We're full spectrum across audio and creators, means that we're showing up in the realm of streaming music and in radio, which is still $14 billion.

that is relevant for a lot of our clients.

‍

Justin Levinson (01:11.054)‍

Wow, yeah, that's really fascinating. does it, I guess maybe you can walk me through the pipeline a little bit of how it starts. Is the brand coming to you first? Is that sort of like the beginning of the pipeline where they're saying, hey, we wanna do some paid media here, who can you connect us with?

‍

Jordan Fox (01:30.952)‍

So, mean, we meet new clients in a bunch of different ways. Inbound, which you're describing, is a big piece of it because we have a reputation in market as being best in class in this kind of world. So that is a big piece inbound. Client referrals is another, right? So happy clients talking to other marketers, which is something that I always love to see. We also have an agency partnerships strategy that drives new business for us.

Which basically means like audio was kind of in a no man's land for a while when radio kind of manifest itself as a melting ice cube, albeit a slowly melting ice cube, right? So big media agencies gutted their radio teams, gutted, because it was not viewed as a growth area and there was an enormous pressure and still is at the whole co-level on margins, right? So they're like, this is not a priority, we're cutting the entirety or the majority of this team. Then...

Over the past couple of years, and I think in an intensified way over the past like 18 months, podcasts have become a huge driver of culture, both in the United States and globally. And all of sudden brands are knocking on their agency's doors saying, how do I show up in this world? And they're not getting great answers. And I guess like the more self-aware.

AOR folks are like, we need a partner to help us show up rapidly in this space because it is faster and more cost efficient for us rather than trying to now hurriedly piece together an audio specialist team, right? So in light of that, we've been basically arranging partnerships with media AORs that wanna serve their clients at like a top tier level in audio and don't wanna build a team from scratch to do it. So.

‍

Justin Levinson (03:06.67)‍

Yeah.

‍

Jordan Fox (03:20.719)‍

The kind of first big announcement we made on that front was earlier this year with Stagwell. so we're across all of Stagwell's media agencies, of which there are several, we are their strategic and execution partner, which means that now we go together to a Stagwell client, the assembly team and my team next to each other, or the Gale team and the arm team next to each other, and co-pitch really cool audio first ideas to their clients.

So that's another way that we meet new clients.

‍

Justin Levinson (03:52.472)‍

Did you have like a crystal ball? How did you know this was gonna come back around in this way?

‍

Jordan Fox (03:58.823)‍

I got lucky because I had the opportunity to join this agency at an inflection point right when I was beginning to see all of the signs of acceleration. I ran laundry service. I was at laundry service for eight and a half years, which is a social and digital focused creative agency. I was there for eight and a half years. had an amazing time running and building up that agency.

In late 2023, I entered into talks to join ad results as CEO. And that was really, if you think back to that time and kind of like Q3, Q4 of 2023, when podcasts were building enormous cultural heat and a very observable shift had happened where like when the smart list guys changed networks, had that happened, call it in 2021 or 2022.

it would have appeared in like a specialist newsletter. Like if you subscribe to pod news, then you would have heard about that. Those guys shifting from one network to another in the back half of 2023, that was showing up on the front page of the wall street journal, right? Everybody was talking about this. I mean, it's, it's obviously just because like people are consuming enormous quantities of digital audio and enormous quantities of, of podcasts and talking about it and relating to it in a super, super deep and often kind of parasocial way.

And that gets marketers attention. So the outreach to me about possibly joining Arm was right at the time that I was seeing all of these signs. So the stars really aligned and I got super excited and I ultimately joined the company in the first quarter of 2024.

‍

Justin Levinson (05:42.562)‍

It was cosmic, I love it. I know part of the business is not only making the connection here, but it's also keeping track of the stats and how the partnerships are working. How does that work on the backend to know how well this is all working for a better...

‍

Jordan Fox (06:08.558)‍

Yeah, no. Well, it takes a lot of work and there are many different methodologies now to kind of triangulate performance in this world. And I think we have to be really good at it because a majority, although not all of our clients are focused, are really performance marketers. Right? So like we have, we have great brand marketing clients as well, and they have their own kind of brand KPIs. And that's much more about reach consumer sentiment and stuff like that.

But on the performance side, performance marketers are hardcore and they want to see ROAS or CAC or CPI or CPA, right? Like real performance metrics. So in the olden times in audio, there were no real mechanisms to do that other than very blunt instruments like vanity URLs or discount codes where the code was linked to a particular show and then you could check the performance. And that stuff works by the way.

The problem with it is that it understates performance because it's leaky. So depending on the research, if somebody says, you know, like go to www.brand slash the ringer. The research suggests that between one and six and one and seven people will remember to type slash the ringer and everybody else.

it'll just show up as a site visit, right? And so if you're just looking at the data, you would attribute that to Google, right? You'd attribute it to search or something, or you would just think it was a blind site visit. So anyway, there were existing methodologies, but they were leaky and then you had to apply a multiplier and it was a little bit tricky. But you could still prove it out. The other thing is that even in that era, you could do dark tests where you run media and then you go dark for a month and then you see what happens to overall.

KPIs and if they fall, which in a healthy campaign environment they will, then you can prove out performance that way. But anyway, I would say over the past few years, there has been a rapid evolution in more sophisticated ways of tracking performance in audio buys. And that's mainly through a proliferation of third party audio attribution and pixel vendors. So.

‍

Jordan Fox (08:18.425)‍

There are many of them ranging from Claritas, which then bought Arts AI to Podscribe to Magellan AI to Veratronics. there's all of, there's this whole third party technology ecosystem now. And the methodologies and underlying data sets are all slightly different, but the basic idea is that you can drop a pixel into an audio stream that is either streamed or downloaded onto the user's device. And then the pixel can give you a lot of information about user behavior following exposure to a show or to an ad, right?

those tools are not perfect either. It's not like the crystal clean gleaming black box data that you get from buying with a Google or a meta, but it's much more rich of a data environment now than it was 24 months ago for those reasons. So I think our job as an agency and as a partner to our clients is to help them navigate this increasingly complex data and attribution environment and synthesize all of these different signals, because some of our clients are still doing.

the old school stuff, the how do you hear about us surveys, the vanity URLs, et cetera, and also running pixels and ingesting all of that disparate information. And then also ingesting sales data or whatever site visit data, first party data that is provided to us on an anonymized basis by our clients and then harmonizing it to extract insights. That's, that's a big part of our value add and of our job.

‍

Justin Levinson (09:40.546)‍

Yeah, sounds like a big differentiator that you guys are kind of doing it the more modern way. What is the, I mean, I'm sure it's a broad brush, what sort of like the amounts brands will spend? what's, know, what does that sort of look like in terms of, mean, obviously, don't need disclosing on what this particular clients, but is there sort of a range that you see that, you know, how does that look?

‍

Jordan Fox (10:06.252)‍

Yeah. So it ranges widely, obviously, as it does at most media agencies. We have over 50 clients and some of them are just getting started. And some of them are extremely established spenders in this space that spending millions of dollars a month. I would say in terms of an introductory client, that's just getting started in the space. We would look for no less than a hundred K a month in budget. And then in an ideal situation, we'd look for that to kind of scale to mid six figures and up to call it a million a month. That's a really

That's a really strong kind of kickoff and scale that could happen over the first couple of months in a successful client relationship. But honestly, it varies. It varies widely from our big clients who are in multiple millions of dollars a month to smaller ones who are still ramping up.

‍

Justin Levinson (10:33.422)‍

Yeah, that's fascinating. I guess, you're the matchmaker in a way too, right? Because you were also connecting the podcasters on that side at least and the radio. You're sort of making that match on that side of the coin too, right? do you have like a, how does that sort of work?

‍

Jordan Fox (10:55.843)‍

Sorry, help me understand that question.

‍

Justin Levinson (10:57.924)‍

so you, I mean, you're putting the ads into the podcast that the brand is passing along. How do you select what, yeah, like which podcasters are gonna, you know, be the right fit and all that?

‍

Jordan Fox (11:09.219)‍

I gotcha.

‍

Jordan Fox (11:14.478)‍

First of all, it's very collaborative between us and the clients. And second of all, it is a classic media agency answer, which is there's art and science. So like the science part is that because we've been doing this for a long time, we have a huge proprietary database of anonymized campaign data. So we can look back and see different categories and how they perform on different audio channels or even on individual shows and have signal.

‍

Justin Levinson (11:21.965)‍

Yeah.

‍

Jordan Fox (11:41.185)‍

that can then have predictive value when we're constructing a new media plan. So that's one science piece. And we're developing some really cool AI tools that help us better leverage that historical data to make higher quality predictions based upon it, right? But then there's also a huge subjective piece, which is like, does a brand want to be affiliated with this person? There's like a lot of hot takes in the, whatever, there's a lot of hot takes on the internet, right? And podcasts are no exception. So.

‍

Justin Levinson (12:03.244)‍

Yeah.

‍

Jordan Fox (12:10.81)‍

You know, brand safety and brand suitability are also very important to certain clients. Certain clients are like whatever works, man. And that's cool. But anyway, so we will use all of our tools and are also like our subjective experience buying in this space for so long. We'll put together a proposed media plan and a kind of a list of targets with explanations. And then the client will react to it. And they might say, we don't want to.

‍

Justin Levinson (12:21.409)‍

you

‍

Jordan Fox (12:38.082)‍

that's a little bit dicey for us, that's a little bit off-brand for us. And so it's an iterative process, particularly with a new client, to kind of zero in on the way that they want to show up in this space.

‍

Justin Levinson (12:50.156)‍

And they're coming to you with not, I if they're paying a million dollars a month or more, they're not coming to you with just one connection. You're connecting the brand with many different opportunities, correct?

‍

Jordan Fox (13:05.77)‍

Yeah. So that's, that's why, like, if, you want to like buy an ad on a podcast one time, pretty much anybody can help you figure out how to do that. Although you'll probably overpay for it because in audio, there's still a very significant scale discount, meaning that like, you know, somebody's spending 20 or $30 million a year with a vendor and audio, their rate card is going to be more attractive. like,

Small buys, you'll overpay, but anybody can do it for you. Your media agency can do it for you. But yes, our clients are looking to show up at scale. There's two flavors really. One is they haven't done anything meaningful in the space and they have realized that it's a strategic imperative for them too. And then we're kind of starting from scratch and we're building up our strategy alongside them. And in concert with their broader brand strategy and campaign strategy, obviously.

The other way is that a lot of clients start buying in-house with their in-house teams and they kind of like get to a ceiling beyond which it becomes logistically impossible for them to continue doing it themselves and they realize they need professional support. And in those cases, we're inheriting a media plan that's usually working, right? Like, cause they wouldn't have built out the internal competency if it weren't at least showing initial signs of working.

And then we build upon that plan and we, we like conduct a strategic analysis of what they've been doing to understand why that's been working and then figure out how to scale it into two or three or five X that.

‍

Justin Levinson (14:37.874)‍

Are some agencies still or some company or brands, I'm sorry, still not hip to this niche, do you think? I know I talked to lot of people in influencer marketing. There's still some legacy brands that are not hip to it yet. They don't quite see it. Do think there are some brands that are missing the boat and not taking advantage of what you're offering?

‍

Jordan Fox (14:56.875)‍

Well, I think there are definitely some, like, there's a couple parts to this question. One is, yeah, there are probably some people who don't see the value in podcasts or digital audio and are not themselves consumers of those channels. I think that's probably the smaller group of the people not showing up in, a meaningful way on these channels, but like that, that group exists, right?

I think the broader group of people who aren't spending on this channel are aware of the channel and are themselves consumers of the channel, but find it daunting to navigate and they don't really have support because their media agency almost certainly does not have a meaningful audio team that can help them show up in this space. And if they ask for an audio plan, they get like a generic, like all with one vendor. Like here's how you can spend a couple million bucks with Spotify.

The best media plans are never just like shoveling all the money to one counterparty, right? so, and on the influencer marketing side, because I guess like, you could view host read endorsements as influencer marketing, right? Like I used to run a digital and social agency. We paid people who were famous on Tik TOK to say nice things about our clients. Paying somebody who's famous on a podcast to say nice things about your clients to me, he still is kind of in the, in the vein of influencer marketing.

But influencer agencies are also not equipped to buy on audio or with audio first creators at scale. So the larger category of folks who aren't really buying in this world see the value, but neither their influencer agency nor their media agency is fully equipped to help them.

‍

Justin Levinson (16:35.35)‍

Yeah, that's pretty interesting. Outside of just doing this kind of stuff, you have any, like what's the, I guess curious about your personal life. Do you have a hobby, things you enjoy outside of audio? You must be into music and stuff like that too, because if you're, mean, audio adjacent.

‍

Jordan Fox (16:55.584)‍

Yes, I think there is a requirement that you have to have been in a band if you are in the audio business and I am no exception. But no, my hobby list got much shorter once I had kids. That's a boring but truthful answer. You know what mean? It's easy to be into photography and playing bar gigs with your band and doing all this stuff pre-kids and then I think your world narrows a little bit.

a five-year-old and an eight-year-old at home. So I think I have like legacy hobbies that might kind of have a resurgence in a couple of years is what I'm told by my friends with older kids, but right now it's a little bit life.

‍

Justin Levinson (17:37.538)‍

Yeah, man, you're preaching to the choir. I got two little ones, but in my mind, mine is three and six. And I'm thinking when you just said your children's age, was like thinking when they're that age is when I'm gonna see the light. But apparently I'm still not gonna get to the light yet until it's even older than that.

‍

Jordan Fox (17:59.082)‍

I mean, look, my daughter's learning how to play piano now, my main instruments are like stringed instruments, but I can play piano okay. And so I do, it's fun to sit with her and play the little songs that she's practicing and so, so you find ways to weave it in.

‍

Justin Levinson (18:12.664)‍

Yeah, well I just started coaching T-ball, so that's sort of my, that's my new thing. I didn't realize what an endeavor it was. I first signed up thinking I was an assistant coach. I didn't know I was the actual coach coach. And my wife is, you know, I was very late to answering a lot of the emails in the feed and my wife was like, you better take this seriously. I'm like.

‍

Jordan Fox (18:33.887)‍

Do you have an outfit? Do they call you coach? Do they address you as coach?

‍

Justin Levinson (18:38.606)‍

They haven't yet. We only had our first practice in the rain and everyone was tired. We had a parade and then we did that. Oh man, it was a mess. And the little boys were just the worst. This one kid's just like, I need a pitcher, I need a pitcher, I need a pitcher. I'm like, dude, mean, he must have said it like, was like the family guy, like, mom, mommy, mom, mom, mom. He said it like a hundred times to me. He's like, not my kid. If he was my kid, I would have been like, you gotta leave this coach alone.

The kid just keeps saying it over and over again. I'm like, dude, I'm like, this is T-ball. We're not, nobody's pitching. You're hitting off a tee. This is it. This kid was driving me bonkers. But yeah, I guess that's for another podcast. But I will definitely say that children have changed my, like,

I have less and less hobbies and the day just goes by so much faster. I'm like, I would have loved to play piano or should have gone on the elliptical for an extra hour. And I'm just like, holy smokes, it's eight o'clock at night. How did that happen?

‍

Jordan Fox (19:46.397)‍

Yeah, I get it.

‍

Justin Levinson (19:47.904)‍

Yeah, but it's a great thing. What kind of music did your band play when you playing any original music?

‍

Jordan Fox (19:57.577)‍

We played a mixture of originals and covers. It was like a classic, like people doing it kind of as a hobby, but also gigging sometimes. You know what I mean?

‍

Justin Levinson (20:05.525)‍

Yeah, totally. I used to tour and I made an effort at the music thing up until I was about 30. And then in my late 30s, I said, well, maybe I should try to gig again. And I started doing it like just a couple of weekends and during a month and it was too exhausting. Like I was just like, I come home at like midnight. I was like, I can't do this anymore. And kids get up early and I made my full retirement from.

performing last year.

‍

Jordan Fox (20:37.362)‍

Yeah. You never know. It may come back. You never know.

‍

Justin Levinson (20:41.278)‍

Yeah, it may come back, you we'll see. Do you guys have any big plans in the future? Are there any sort of long-term goals that ARM has?

‍

Jordan Fox (20:54.685)‍

Yeah. mean, I think what I see in the market is a big need that is ill served right, right now. I see a lot of brands who like the parents are listening to podcasts on their way to work. The kids are consuming podcasts on YouTube. There's an enormous focus on the channel set, but even if the parent is the CMO of a fortune 100 company, there's a decent chance that they're not really showing up in this space. So.

I view that as like both an opportunity obviously for our business and a problem to be solved. So we're working really hard to make this world more accessible to a broader swath of marketers to help them get involved.

‍

Justin Levinson (21:31.224)‍

Are you able to use some of your music interests in your job? I mean, I know that having music in ads is a thing. Are you connecting the music into that world at all as well?

‍

Jordan Fox (21:46.494)‍

Occasionally. Occasionally. But like, let me think about that.

‍

Justin Levinson (21:56.056)‍

What do you?

‍

Jordan Fox (21:56.229)‍

A lot of times, a lot of times the production budgets for, so again, there's like host read stuff where there's no music per se, and it's more like influencer marketing. You're working with the host, you're giving the host talking points, you're helping them show up and talk about this brand in an authentic way. So music isn't directly relevant there. And then on the produce side, if you're talking about like us making 32nd or 62nd audio spots and deploying them programmatically across the audio ecosystem, which we also do.

Music is a question there, but production budgets are typically really tight on those assets. And there's a couple of reasons why. One is that just like, obviously the people who are allocating budgets on the brand side are allocating the vast majority of budgets to video assets, which is understandable. And only small budgets remain for audio. The second reason is that the assets change a lot because particularly in like a DTC or performance world, which again is a big chunk of my clients.

different offers change, different campaigns. There's like high campaign velocity where you're focusing on different RTBs or different offerings, right? So if you're constantly making new stuff, then it gets really hard if you're trying to like license killer tunes for every one of those. So I think we, you know, we do music with stock music houses. We're experimenting with client consent with AI generated music from time to time. So there's a bunch of different ways to kind of have interesting sonic experiences at lower price points, but like,

We're not putting together these like amazing tier one playlists just for pure cost reasons.

‍

Justin Levinson (23:30.914)‍

Yeah, no, I was sort of more curious about the libraries and if you guys were sort of looking into that world and curious if it makes any difference in performance if you go to a stock library for those things or if the AI music seemed like it's doing the trick in a lot of these things.

‍

Jordan Fox (23:50.35)‍

What I would say is that we've been experimenting with AI creative in general, and the synthesized voices are better and more prone to contribute strongly to performance than the music. That's going to change. Everything in AI is evolving very, very rapidly. But right now, voice synthesis technology is ahead of music composition technology.

‍

Justin Levinson (24:21.19)‍

What's your tech stack that you have going on right now within your team?

‍

Jordan Fox (24:27.386)‍

Yeah, well, like some of it is proprietary, but I guess like on the data side, we have a bunch of third party, like sources of input, as I said, and then that's harmonized with our proprietary database. And then we have some software that belongs to us that we use to glean insights from that data. on the AI production side, we've, we've played with a lot of different tools.

And again, I keep saying this, but because it is such a rapidly evolving marketplace, like right now we have a tool set that we're doing most of our AI work with, but that might change in two weeks. Our team is constantly experimenting with all of these tools as they roll out new offerings. And some of them are fully bespoke pieces of software, like people who have gone and actually created their trained their own voice models, which is very hard and time and compute intensive. and some of these tools are basically.

Chat GPT and 11 Labs wrappers, right? Where they're ingesting the APIs of kind of best in class commercial tools. And then they're creating either custom weighted versions of them or just really sophisticated UIs around them that make them more suitable for audio production.

‍

Justin Levinson (25:43.094)‍

That's pretty cool. What is your team structure like? mean, you're talking about your team, you know, how many people work at ARM altogether and what are sort of the people's, you know, different roles over there?

‍

Jordan Fox (25:45.368)‍

Yeah.

‍

Jordan Fox (25:55.663)‍

We're a little bit under a hundred. We're structured, you know, like a normal media agency. Like there are kind of strategy and client service folks. There's media planners and buyers. There's data and analytics. There's media operations. There's creative. There's a new business, the normal, the normal functions.

‍

Justin Levinson (26:16.098)‍

Yeah, and are you guys fully remote or do you guys come into an office?

‍

Jordan Fox (26:20.485)‍

So it varies by office is what I would say. So in the New York office where I and a bunch of kind of more senior leadership sit, we're in the office three plus days a week. That's where I am now. In Houston, which is our largest office by head count, it's less frequently in the office, but at least weekly for most teams.

And then we do have a handful of more than a handful, should say, honestly, there's a decent chunk of the team that is fully remote because kind of during COVID the team, like a lot of agencies, including my old agency, you were definitely working fully remote during COVID. And then when you're making hires, you can pick up people in different locations. So very much a hybrid environment, but I feel like it's working really well for us.

‍

Justin Levinson (27:12.27)‍

Yeah, when you're finding people, you, what sort of, I guess when you're finding people, like what sort of places do you typically find success like in what sort of like, I guess adjacent industries, you know, or do you find people that are from direct competitors typically, or is there a sweet spot of, you know, apple to apples for you?

‍

Jordan Fox (27:36.3)‍

Yeah, it's a mixture and we have really good recruitment support. And so the answer to that question is different for different things. Sometimes you just need someone who's really categorically good at a function and they can learn the nuances of audio. And sometimes you need someone who has spent years in audio and knows all of the counterparties and knows what a good CPM or a bad CPM is for a certain show. So it really varies.

on a case by case basis for junior roles. We're not, we're just trying to find people who are smart and care about this space and, and are teachable. I think when you get more senior, sometimes you want to wait heavy on kind of technical expertise and we'll teach them the audio stuff. And sometimes you want to weigh heavy on the audio expertise.

‍

Justin Levinson (28:25.922)‍

Yeah, what are typically like the hardest, you know, people to find? Are there any specific roles that are like, that's a tricky one.

‍

Jordan Fox (28:36.098)‍

That's an interesting question.

‍

Justin Levinson (28:41.272)‍

There's always so much paid media. always see on LinkedIn, there's so many companies. They're always looking for, that's such a common rule. wonder if that that one that's tricky or is that pretty common?

‍

Jordan Fox (28:51.994)‍

Well, it's like, here's why I paused. The reason that I paused is because sometimes it's hard just to find candidates, right? It's like, if it's really niche, it's just hard to find enough candidates to run a good process. If it's some super niche thing and you have to have like produced tons of this particular type of audio spot or whatever. Other times you get tons and tons of resumes, but it's still hard because sifting through all the resumes and figuring out who really possesses the qualities.

that will lead to success is the tricky part. I don't know, hiring is always hard in our business, whether or not there's a thousand candidates or a dozen candidates, because finding the right person is like a separate question from candidate volume or anything else, you know?

‍

Justin Levinson (29:42.274)‍

Yeah, no, I totally understand. I do some work in the recruiting space as well, so I'm always just interested in seeing what are the pain points, what are the roles that are tricky to hire. I know in everything creative, it's always, it's a tricky niche because it's not just, you're judging people's creative a little bit as well, which is to the extent

‍

Jordan Fox (30:10.261)‍

Yeah, we've had some easy, some easier experiences, honestly, on the creative side lately, because there is so much liquidity in the market, right? There's just like a lot of people who started freelancing kind of during the COVID era during like that big wave of people shifting to freelance. And then like now there's a little bit, I don't know if you're seeing this, but I've seen like a little bit of a backlash of people who've like tired of the

instability of freelance life and are now looking for full-time roles again. And so I think right now I'm seeing a ton of really talented people on the creative side and a decent chunk of them fit into that category of people who flirted with freelancing, but actually like want more stability and reliability.

‍

Justin Levinson (30:56.14)‍

Yep, I've definitely noticed that. But that can be tricky too because when you deal with candidates that have been going on the freelance train and have done that for a while, sometimes you go to employer and they're like, well, why did that person always want to go freelance? If we bring them on staff, are they gonna want to go freelance again? Sometimes it can be a little bit of, it can be little bit challenging once you've gone to the freelance world to sometimes come back into the staff world.

Right now there are a lot of people. I mean, obviously there's just been so many different things in the entertainment, especially with the writer strikes and the actor strikes and like the lot of in-housing going on. There's just, you know, there's just, you know, budget cuts in the agency world is pretty ubiquitous. So it is, I think there are people that who have been on the freelance role world and are saying to themselves, yeah, I really like to just have a job. You know, something that is like steady,

day. That and there is a lot. There is a lot of talent out there, I think, but then that also for agencies becomes another staffing issue. Because like you said, when you put out a job, and you get 5000 people that apply to it, when you know, less than 1 % are actually going to be qualified, somebody has to go through all those people, which is time consuming, takes in time to go through all those people. Yeah, it's

‍

Jordan Fox (31:55.224)‍

Yeah

‍

Jordan Fox (32:17.324)‍

Yeah.

‍

Justin Levinson (32:22.574)‍

You know, is what it is, but it's a thing.

‍

Jordan Fox (32:27.04)‍

Yep, it's a thing.

‍

Justin Levinson (32:28.576)‍

Yeah, but that's pretty cool. So you guys are set up fairly remotely, you also have, you also are doing stuff in-house. Do you get to travel to Texas to that office often?

‍

Jordan Fox (32:41.088)‍

Yeah, because we have team members in Houston and Austin. So I'm in Texas at least quarterly. I hosted our last All Hands in person from that office. But of course, we also zoomed it to everybody else. And then every December, we do kind of like a team, a multi-day team offsite into holiday party, which was extremely fun last year. look forward to this year's.

‍

Justin Levinson (33:05.806)‍

cool. You like Texas? I've never, I haven't spent too much time there except for I've been to Austin a few times. Was it kind of fun to

‍

Jordan Fox (33:10.677)‍

I do, like all, like, where are you based?

‍

Justin Levinson (33:14.136)‍

Well, we are based in Los Angeles, essentially, but right now I'm at my home in Vermont. So we have a, have that here, yeah.

‍

Jordan Fox (33:21.953)‍

nice. Okay. So like, like everybody from a coast, my only not like, you know, speaking generically, like I had only really been exposed to Austin. It sounds like you're, you're the same. So I had never been to Houston before I, joined this company. And it is, first of all, it is like an amazing, amazing city. It does not conform to any of the kind of coastal stereotypes that you might have about what big city in Texas might be like. It's awesome.

Amazing food, amazing Vietnamese food, amazing people, super, super diverse. big, big Houston fan now that I've actually spent time there.

‍

Justin Levinson (33:58.862)‍

Thanks, yeah, I'd really like to go. That sounds pretty cool. Austin's my only experience because my wife lived out there for a while, so we spent some time, but yeah, haven't been out there before. And you're in New York? Did you grow up in New York?

‍

Jordan Fox (34:14.104)‍

No, I grew up in Maryland, but I moved to New York after I graduated college, and so I've been here for over 20 years now.

‍

Justin Levinson (34:22.702)‍

Wow, that's pretty, does it, do you like the intensity of New York City? Do you like the vibe out there?

‍

Jordan Fox (34:29.247)‍

Yeah, I do. My wife and I both grew up in kind of like sleepy suburbs. And I think we both kind of like longed for this vision of kind of like a busy, sophisticated, urban life. And like sometimes those are like childhood feelings that fade. And sometimes you like build your whole life around that. And we're like in the latter category and we both really want to like have a family in New York and we do and it's awesome.

‍

Justin Levinson (34:53.174)‍

Yeah, I had that same sort of romance with Los Angeles when I was there. I was just like, the palm trees and like, this is amazing. And so I can totally get that. Well, we don't have too much more time here, but I'm curious, you, you know, I'd be curious, like, as a CEO of a company, do you have, you know, what's like your like secret sauce? you into like, you know,

‍

Jordan Fox (35:01.902)‍

Yeah!

‍

Justin Levinson (35:21.966)‍

Are you book reader? Are you an exercise guide? Do you have any mindset sort of, you know, philosophy? Life. Yeah.

‍

Jordan Fox (35:28.361)‍

like my secret sauce for like, keeping my shit together? Like that kind of secret sauce? Yeah. So for me, I like have to work out at least twice a week or I like, it's not good for me mentally. Like I don't sleep as well, my focus is diminished. think like...

my mood is less stable. So for me, working out two times a week minimum and ideally three is what keeps me centered and focused and feeling, feeling good and energized. That's like far and away number one. I think like I read books when I can. I recently read like an amazing novel called Long Island Compromise that I highly recommend. But like I read that when we were on like a little

mini vacation, like that's when I can sit down and actually spend a couple hours reading a book. no, that's books aren't really the secret sauce. think, I think minimizing screen time and cutting down on the number of apps that I permit to like give me push notifications and working out are the two biggest things. Like I don't get any news notifications anymore. the New York times app on my phone. turned off notifications like because you know, I don't know.

If you want to be distracted in 2025, you can be distracted in fairly unpleasant ways, like all day and all night. And I think for me, for me, at least like I lacked the willpower to turn that stuff off just by like swiping away those. would like read every push notification that I'd be like, that person said what? And then you lose 20 minutes of your life in like a negative internet hole. So.

‍

Justin Levinson (37:14.947)‍

Yeah.

‍

Jordan Fox (37:16.354)‍

For me, it's that stuff. It's like time limits on certain apps and like very few push notifications that aren't like work or family specific.

‍

Justin Levinson (37:24.214)‍

Yeah, that's cool. I am I'm a big supporter of insight timer. That's a app that I do use every night

‍

Jordan Fox (37:31.551)‍

Tell me about that, I've heard about it.

‍

Justin Levinson (37:34.254)‍

Yeah, it's just a meditative, meditative app, that's the meditation app. And you can choose all different kinds of things. So can have like kid stuff. So it'll tell you like kid stories. I do that with my kids a lot for bedtime. We'll sort of just put on a sort of like the intro to meditation, but it's kind of like, welcome to the very safe forest and there are trees, you know what I mean? It's like very like.

‍

Jordan Fox (37:43.058)‍

Yeah.

‍

Jordan Fox (38:01.768)‍

Yeah!

‍

Justin Levinson (38:02.93)‍

got that kind of imagery in it. I think there's some good ones for adults too, you know, so sometimes put on a little white noise, little insight timer and sort of just, you know, let the day go, you know.

‍

Jordan Fox (38:04.852)‍

Yeah!

‍

Jordan Fox (38:16.105)‍

Yeah, that's cool.

‍

Justin Levinson (38:17.71)‍

And it's free, so highly recommend that for any. Yeah, and this is not paid by Insight Timer. We have no paid. Not yet, not yet. But hey Jordan, thanks so much for coming on here today and speaking with us and giving us just an insight on ARM and all the things you guys do. I really find it fascinating, so I just want to thank you for your time today.

‍

Jordan Fox (38:22.101)‍

I will check it out.

‍

Jordan Fox (38:28.093)‍

Noted. No SponCon on this podcast.

‍

Jordan Fox (38:46.164)‍

Thank you. It was great to be on.

‍

Justin Levinson (38:48.351)‍

Alright Jordan, be well man. Thanks.