How Brittany Clevenger is effecting change at BetterHelp and broadly across podcast marketing

Brittany Clevenger has a knack for forming partnerships, a skill that’s allowed her to not only make an indelible impact on her company, but on the entire podcast marketing industry where she’s focused. The 37-year-old senior director of growth marketing for mental health platform BetterHelp was brought on in 2020 from Ad Results Media, an audio-focused ad agency, to grow the brand’s investment in audio including podcast marketing. BetterHelp has advertised on more than 1,000 podcasts since she came aboard and Clevenger said she’s expanded its audio investment into terrestrial radio and streaming, while growing the overall audio marketing budget by 79% between 2022 and 2024. Since she joined, Clevenger said the BetterHelp platform also increased audio users by 88%. See all of Ad Age’s 40 Under 40 honorees here As BetterHelp looks to expand globally, Clevenger said it continues to lean on podcast marketing as an effective driver of growth, as that type of “endorsement, word of mouth marketing, is the strongest in the book.” Outside of BetterHelp, Clevenger has led industry-wide change. She notably partnered with players including the IAB, publishers and ad servers to fix an Apple iOS high-frequency podcast issue she helped uncover, which essentially found that a large amount of the company’s impressions on programmatic podcast buys “were going to a very small percentage of listeners,” Clevenger said. The fix was put into Apple’s release of its iOS 17 operating system. Clevenger is now working to unlock more programmatic buying opportunities for podcast marketers. “So far, host-read ads have been the No. 1 driver of performance for brands like ours, but we want audience-based buying and programmatic to be a larger part of the strategy,” she said. She said she’s sharing BetterHelp’s learnings with the entire industry because, at the end of the day, she always strives “to be a great partner. We try to be at the forefront of testing so we can share our wins, and also our failures, and grow those efforts to help Betterhelp, and also to move the industry forward.” If you could have dinner with one person, alive or dead, who would it be and why? This is hard to answer, wow! Jesus, Buddha and Rumi all come to mind. What are the top two social media sites you use on a regular basis? LinkedIn and Facebook. What’s currently on your bedside reading list? “The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga’s Ethical Practice” What was the last show you binge-watched? “Emily in Paris!” I have a 4-year-old boy, so I never have much time for TV. But “Emily in Paris” is so fun that I find the time to watch it when a new season drops. At what age do you hope to retire? I hope to be using my skills for something I love that makes the world a better place, for as long as I can. See all of Ad Age’s 40 Under 40 honorees here

How Brittany Clevenger is effecting change at BetterHelp and broadly across podcast marketing

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