Tory Bartlett, CEO of PopUp Bagels, gave an interview ahead of the Marketing Brew Summit that has nothing to do with B2B software and everything to do with how you should be thinking about your podcast programme. His argument, laid out in a Q&A with Marketing Brew, is simple: marketers keep chasing the next platform, the next format, the next trend, when the actual unlock is picking one channel and building on it relentlessly. He built a bagel brand into a cultural moment on social media not by hopping between TikTok, Instagram, and whatever came next, but by staying disciplined on one channel long enough for the audience and the algorithm to reward consistency.
That’s not a bagel insight. That’s a media insight. And it’s the exact reason most B2B podcast programmes fail before they get anywhere near proving ROI.
The chase is the problem, not the channel
Walk into most B2B marketing teams and you’ll find a graveyard of half-finished channel experiments: a LinkedIn newsletter that ran for six issues, a YouTube series that got three episodes, a podcast that recorded a pilot and never launched season one. The pattern is always the same. Someone reads a case study, gets excited, launches fast, doesn’t see traction in eight weeks, and reallocates budget to the next tactic. Bartlett’s point is that this cycle is the failure mode itself, not a symptom of picking the wrong channel. Social-first worked for PopUp Bagels because he stuck with it past the point where most marketers would have called it underperforming and moved on.
Podcasting punishes impatience in exactly the same way. A B2B show doesn’t compound in month one. It compounds when episode 40 gets referenced in a sales call because a prospect listened to episode 12 six months earlier and remembered the name. If you’re measuring a podcast programme against a quarterly campaign timeline, you’re using the wrong yardstick and you’ll kill it before it works.
Attention isn’t scarce, it’s allocated
There’s a useful companion piece to Bartlett’s argument from Brian Conlon at DAX US, who pushes back hard on the idea that consumer attention spans are shrinking. His point: people aren’t running out of attention, they’re choosing where to spend it, and they spend it on things that reward the choice. A 45-minute B2B podcast episode isn’t competing against a 15-second TikTok for the same slice of attention. It’s competing for a different slot entirely, the one where a VP of Engineering is driving to a client meeting and wants something substantive, not a scroll.
This matters because it kills the excuse marketing teams use to avoid long-form content: “nobody has time for this.” They do. They just won’t give it to content that isn’t worth the time. Consistency, depth, and a recognisable voice are what earn that slot, week after week. That’s Bartlett’s whole thesis applied to a different medium.
What this means for your programme
If you’re evaluating a podcast for your company right now, the decision isn’t really “should we do a podcast.” It’s “are we prepared to run this for 18 months without pulling the plug at month four because episode 9 didn’t get shared enough.” Bartlett didn’t build PopUp Bagels’ following by measuring weekly follower counts and panicking. He measured whether the thing he was building was getting better and more distinct with every post.
Apply the same discipline to a B2B show. Pick the channel. Commit to a cadence you can actually sustain past a year. Stop grading episode 6 against episode 60’s potential. The programmes that generate pipeline are the ones that outlasted the marketing team’s instinct to chase whatever launched last month.
