In Episode 677 of the New Media Show, host Rob Greenlee welcomes Dan Granger, founder and CEO of Oxford Road, for a detailed conversation about how personality-led media is changing what brands buy, how audiences are measured, and what the podcast industry must do to support its next stage of growth. Audiences increasingly follow people rather than traditional media channels. A trusted personality can carry an audience across podcasts, YouTube, livestreams, newsletters, social platforms, communities, events, and direct business relationships. Advertisers, however, still tend to purchase and measure those formats as separate media channels. That disconnect is becoming one of the largest challenges facing creator media. A creator may record a single conversation and distribute it across multiple platforms, yet each platform reports exposure differently. Advertisers are then left trying to compare downloads, streams, video views, watch time, impressions, attribution data, and host-read performance without a consistent standard. Dan has spent his career connecting advertisers with personality-driven media. Oxford Road now describes its work as building performance systems across audio, video, creator, and programmatic media, with Dan serving as the company’s CEO. The conversation begins with Oxford Road’s growing investment in bringing brands, creators, platforms, and media leaders together in person. Dan explains how the company’s CAO Summit developed from the idea of a “Chief Audio Officer,” the person inside a brand responsible for making audio advertising work. That responsibility may belong to a founder, marketing leader, media buyer, or growth executive rather than someone with a formal audio title. The CAO Summit was designed as a peer-learning environment where advertisers could speak openly with other advertisers about measurement, attribution, creative performance, and the practical problems preventing brands from spending more in podcasts and creator media. Oxford Road continues to position the CAO Summit as a meeting point for the marketers, platforms, and creators shaping what it calls “Podcast+” media.  They also discuss the Independent Podcast and Creator Awards, also known as the Indie PaC Awards. The program was created to recognize independently owned creators and shows at a time when consolidation continues across podcasting and digital media. Dan argues that independent creators remain central to the value of podcasting. Creators who maintain closer relationships with their audiences, retain more editorial control, and deliver strong results for advertisers. Oxford Road’s own published ORBIT rankings show that independent shows account for a large share of its strongest-performing podcast inventory.  Defining an independent creator is difficult, though. A creator may own the intellectual property while accepting a minimum guarantee from a