"I feel like [synergy in an organization or company] is overlooked a lot when it comes to marketing podcasts," Blake Althen of podcast-producing company Human Factor told me recently. "At least with organizations I've done work for, the magazine/newsletter department might be doing their thing, the email people might be doing their thing and the events people are doing their thing, but there's not a lot of synergy. And we tried to close that gap and have done it really well.

Two years ago, the Book Industry Study Group, with all of its 138 members, had to make some money. So Brian O'Leary, BISG executive director, decided to do webinars—more specifically sponsored webinars. 33 of them. In one year. All sponsored.

We should not be intimidated by podcasts (myself included). We should be excited. Get a good guest, ask questions for 2 or 4 or 20 or 38 minutes and put it out there. If you can keep it going, you can build up quite an archive.

At the Connectiv Executive Summit in May, John Ebbert, publisher and CEO of AdExchanger, drew a burst of applause when he said that as a mid-sized publisher, he wouldn’t sell advertising programmatically (Ebbert himself noted the irony, given that AdExchanger’s entire focus is covering the emergence of data-driven advertising).