The 8-Week Podcast Sponsorship: A Live Decision Simulation
Objective: Run an 8-week podcast + Spotify programmatic sponsorship as a series of weekly checkpoints, deciding when to hold, cut, or rotate creative based on promo-code redemption data, without spending a dollar of real budget.
You're running audio acquisition for Allbirds: a $24,000 quarterly budget split across 3 host-read podcast deals and a Spotify programmatic layer, with a unique promo code per show.
Read each week's redemption dashboard, decide whether to hold, cut, or rotate creative, and land the quarter within budget with defensible calls.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, no ad account or spend required to run this simulation
Free podcaster dashboard, useful once a real sponsorship deal is signed
The process
Simulation
Week 2, first redemption check
Week 2 of 8Three shows launched two weeks ago: a 400k-download business show, a 90k-download design show, and Spotify programmatic running in parallel. This is the first dashboard pull.
Week 2 redemption by promo code ALLBIRDS-BIZ (business show): 340k impressions, 1,150 code uses (0.34% redemption) ALLBIRDS-DSGN (design show): 78k impressions, 410 code uses (0.53% redemption) Spotify programmatic: 1.2M impressions, 890 code uses (0.07% redemption, $10-25 CPM tier)
Two weeks in, redemption looks decent across all three lines. What's the right call?
Final deliverable
An 8-week decision log recording each checkpoint's dashboard reading, the call made, and the reasoning.
See a reference example
HelloFresh, 8-week podcast sponsorship log (excerpt) Week 2: All 3 lines within expected range, hold Week 5: Business show redemption dropped 2 weeks running, creative rotated Week 8: Rotated creative recovered redemption to 0.52%, campaign renewed
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Chooses 'hold' at week 2 rather than reacting to a two-week sample
- Chooses creative rotation over cutting the show at week 5