View all case studies The Podglomerate
How The Podglomerate builds relationships with journalists and lands clients media coverage with Muck Rack
About The Podglomerate
Named the “Best Podcast Production & Marketing Agency” by PR Daily, The Podglomerate is a full-service podcast agency specializing in podcast marketing, production and monetization for independent creators, institutions, media organizations and brands.
Since its start in 2017, The Podglomerate has helped hundreds of podcasts grow their audiences, secure sponsorships and achieve industry recognition. Today, The Podglomerate represents more than 70 podcasts accounting for more than 30 million monthly downloads with shows topping the podcast charts and receiving features on every major podcast distribution app with national coverage across print, digital, radio and television.
Clients include a wide variety of shows from leading media networks like NPR, The Boston Globe, and Netflix to institutions like Harvard and Stanford, as well as Fortune 500 brands like CVS and Microsoft.
This founder’s introduction to Muck Rack: ‘At the time, no one was doing that’
About 10 years ago, The Podglomerate founder Jeff Umbro met Greg Galant, co-founder and CEO of Muck Rack, for coffee. During their conversation, Jeff remembers asking Greg, “How do you source the media contacts for your database?”
“At the time, no one was doing that,” Jeff recalls. “I used a competitor, and they basically did two things: They had a database that was ancient and often out of date, and they did press release syndications, which—even back then—were not effective in my opinion.”
Then Muck Rack entered the picture.
Muck Rack was pulling real-time data and providing updates to people’s jobs and contact information. I was like, ‘Wow. This is incredible. This will save us so much time.’
—The Podglomerate’s founder
Jeff demoed Muck Rack at South by Southwest (SXSW) around 2015, and he tried to convince his then employer to switch from a competitor. The team was talented—but resistant to change. (That company has since shuttered.)
In 2017, Jeff founded The Podglomerate, and as soon as the podcast agency had a big enough client base, he reached out to Muck Rack and began using the platform in 2020.
“I didn’t pay myself for the first three years,” Jeff shares. “I had a side gig doing freelance PR while I tried to get the company off the ground. Before I paid myself, I purchased a license to Muck Rack. It was worth it. It grew the company and what we were capable of doing.”
How Muck Rack helps The Podglomerate lands clients’ media coverage
When Joni Deutsch joined The Podglomerate in 2021, she was familiar with Muck Rack as a journalist. She’d worked in the world of public radio and podcasting, including at NPR, for years. But she was surprised how expansive Muck Rack’s ecosystem was from the PR side.
It definitely widened my view of what was available to us—to be able to amplify our work as a brand, The Podglomerate, and also amplify the work of the various clients we represent.
—The Podglomerate’s VP of podcast marketing and audience
Now, as the vice president of podcast marketing and audience at The Podglomerate, Joni oversees the marketing team, which uses Muck Rack to help accomplish several of the team’s goals.
Building relationships with media professionals
Generating media coverage for their podcast clients is one of the primary functions of The Podglomerate’s marketing team. The podcasts they represent cover a range of topics, from climate to crypto to true crime—even recap episodes of “The Love Boat.”
Muck Rack is the team’s first step in finding and building important media relationships.
“Having a reliable database of writers, outlets and their contact information is key,” she says. “We can use that information in a variety of ways to help market and grow our clients' shows.”
Each journalist’s profile also contains links to their recently published works, helping Joni’s team confirm that a writer’s beat and style aligns with a client’s story. And because Muck Rack continuously updates its database, they can track when journalists change jobs, switch beats or move locations.
“Over the past four to five years, there have been gigantic shifts in how people are working, where they’re working and when they transition jobs,” Joni says.
Muck Rack has been useful for us to just make sure that, if we’re reaching out to someone, it’s not resulting in a bounce-back.
—The Podglomerate’s VP of podcast marketing and audience
Creating media lists that help land podcast clients and hosts coverage
Using intel from Muck Rack’s media database, Joni’s team builds detailed media lists for each campaign or client they represent.
And once those lists are created? They can yield results even months or years down the road.
“We've represented clients over the years that may have overlap in content and audience and regionality and goals of what they'd like to get featured in,” Joni shares.
So for us, we've been able to go back to our previous campaign work or list on Muck Rack to be able to see what we previously pulled at that time and then see if that's still one to one with what we'd like to do now with our next client or a different client. It’s a nice little bookmark.
—The Podglomerate’s VP of podcast marketing and audience
Because Muck Rack’s media lists update automatically, they can revisit these lists during future launches—and catch up on any profile notes about contact preferences or previous conversations.
This strategy has paid off. For example, in the past year alone, The Podglomerate has landed several features in People magazine and other major outlets.
Tracking The Podglomerate’s coverage and brand visibility
Beyond client work, Joni’s team also tracks The Podglomerate’s own media coverage.
They use Muck Rack’s Alerts to monitor brand mentions, which often outperform Google Alerts in scope.
Google Alerts isn’t the best at showing social media alerts, unless it’s Reddit. With Muck Rack, I can see when a journalist posts on X about something The Podglomerate wrote about.
—The Podglomerate’s VP of podcast marketing and audience
Final thoughts from The Podglomerate team
From that first conversation over coffee to today, Jeff still remembers what made Muck Rack stand out: It was doing something no one else was. Years later, that’s still true.
“The biggest issue with SaaS organizations, in my opinion, is that they very quickly become outdated,” Jeff says. “But Muck Rack has just continued to add new features to make it even more effective at doing all we want it to do.”
If it weren’t for Muck Rack, Joni says her job would be much more time-consuming.
For one, the team would have to rely on Google to find contacts and, with its algorithm updates and emphasis on AI Overview snippets, ”it’s just not giving us who we should be reaching out to based on our goals,” she explains.
Jeff adds:
Muck Rack saves us a ton of time, and time is everything in what we do. It allows us to send more pitches for more clients, get more opportunities and do it in a smarter way—not just a spray-and-pray approach on every campaign. We can only do that because of the tools Muck Rack provides.
—The Podglomerate’s founder
