On the other side of the table, as a former sponsor of a season or two: it was the best marketing we (Crusoe) could have done. We had more high quality inbound from our audience than any other channel, by a long shot. They deeply understand their audience and target appropriately. Strongly recommend to anyone trying to reach a decision making audience (customer and investor).
1. I believe they require that you have an acquired specific landing page (e.g. crusoe.ai/acquired), which we saw directly as conversions through to our waitlist. The volume was lower than other channels, but the signal was much, much higher.
2. To @scarface_74's comment, "you talk to customer and you can ask them where they heard about you from" is mostly why I made the claim. In particular, when fundraising, basically everyone I talked to said, "I heard about you on Acquired, really interesting business model that I hadn't considered, let's talk more about it."
Sponsorship isn't cheap (I would go so far as to call it expensive), but relative to spending an equivalent amount on search or display ads/billboards on 101/etc., I think it was the right choice at the time.
My only analogy for this is what I call "cruise missile marketing" where you're investing a lot of time/money in building something that is very specifically targeted at high value buyers. It works really well for large, infrequent transactions (raising capital, selling GPU clusters, etc.) and less well for commodity SaaS or B2C products where volume >> everything.
If they had separate behind-the-scenes episodes with B-side detail and research discussion, they’d be the total package.
Not saying it isn’t well done! And it’s clearly landing with an educated audience. I know many fans.