What did we learn in Sin City?
By Roger Nairn, Jen Moss, Chris O’Keeffe, Liz Hames, and Matthew Stevens
The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation recorded on March 17, 2023.
During our conversation we touch on:
- Video
- Podcast stats
- AI
- Podcast genres (especially horror and sci-fi)
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
- The podcast industry
- And why you can’t miss The Peppermill if you visit Vegas
Roger: Hey guys, so we’re a fresh home from Las Vegas. I don’t know about you, but I just got the smoke smell out of my clothes. Yeah, um, wow. What an experience at Podcast Movements Evolutions. I’m joined today by my partner in crime, our co-founder and chief creative officer, Jen Moss. Also joined by Executive Producer Chris O’Keefe, Director of Audience Growth, Liz Hames. And last, but certainly not least, audience growth strategist, Matthew Stevens.
So thanks so much for joining us, everyone. Woo-hoo. Hey, I don’t know about you, but when I go to events like this Podcast Movement, it’s sort of like summer camp where you get an opportunity to see some of your old friends from all around the world, and it just reiterates how incredibly friendly and inclusive and collaborative our industry is. I don’t know if you guys felt the same way.
But we definitely got down to work and I went to a ton of talks. I’m sure you guys went to a ton of talks.
You know, I think one of the biggest themes in the conversation that I picked up was this conversation around video. And Jen, you played a big role in that conversation. I know you sat on a panel about video. In fact, it was called Defining Podcast in 2023: When Listeners Have Become Viewers. The panel was moderated by James Cridland of Pod News. It was heavily attended, one of the biggest attended events that I saw while we were there. So, Jen, what is a podcast?
Jen: Oh gosh, you’re gonna put me on this spot. Well, a podcast is a thing that’s going through an identity crisis, and that’s why we’re having this conversation.
But really a “podcast,” I mean, the word comes from iPod and broadcast. It’s a portmanteau word. So if you look at the DNA of the word, it actually has a portable audio technology, the iPod, right at the center of what it is. So, I mean, I’m not gonna get hung up on semantics. I just think it’s interesting to look at that.
You know, the other thing is that a podcast, some people feel that anything that’s long-form content that’s digital that goes out is a podcast. And I would disagree with that. I think a podcast can be any length. You can have a short podcast, you can have a long podcast. You can have an in-between podcast.
It’s still a podcast.
To me, it’s an audio-driven form, but video has an important role to play in it and around it. So the key thing that podcast listeners like is that they can take their podcast with them and that they’re not screen dependent. They can go for a walk, they can walk their dog, go on the bus, whatever, and they’re not constantly screen-dependent.
But that being said, there are aspects of the digital world that I think are connected to podcasting that are very video driven. Like, for example, a lot of younger people discover podcasts on YouTube. And we know this, we have the data to show this. Um, I’m sure Liz and Matt will back me up there. So, so we need to be thinking about, what is a podcast when it is on a video platform like YouTube. Sort of like, “if a tree falls in the forest, does it still make it sound?” It’s, it’s a question kind of like that. So what is a podcast when surrounded by video-based media on a video platform like YouTube?
Roger: I think it’s a great question and I, I don’t know if it was necessarily fully answered at the event I felt, but I think the conversation is very much at the top of everyone’s mind.
I’m curious, Liz, what role do you think video plays in the growth of an audience, of a podcast?
Liz: Yeah. Well, I think like, the reason we’re having this conversation… there’s a couple of reasons, right?
The main one, at least for a lot of us who create podcasts is discoverability.
YouTube solves the biggest problem in podcasting, which is discoverability, because it has, like, the best recommendation engine out there apart maybe from Spotify.
The other thing is that the advertising dollars are in video more so, so when you’re following the money, you kind of end up at video. So that’s another big reason.
And the other is, you know, about a year ago or so, some of the major industry analytics organizations started to incorporate YouTube into the reporting in terms of podcast listening and where people are listening to podcasts.
And then all of a sudden we realized that a significant percentage, if not a majority of people, said that they were listening to podcasts on YouTube. And then if you were to include people who only listen to podcasts on YouTube within the universe of podcast listeners, it would grow the pie by like 10%.
So that’s a few reasons why we’ve started to talk about this more and more, and I love it too, for discoverability.
I think one way to think about it is to think about it very intentionally and to think are our audiences, our target audiences on YouTube, and if so, what are they doing there? What kind of content do they expect and how do we create content that fits in naturally with their habits on YouTube and the kinds of content that they are used to seeing?
One other really interesting framing of this too was I was listening to a panel and Jeanine Wright from Wondery was on there. She mentioned that she’s actually very excited about video for podcasts. And where it will go. She mentioned a few years ago people thought of music videos as just a few guys on stage playing instruments.
Now it’s like a totally different thing, right?
Right now we think about podcasts on YouTube, as James Cridland likes to say, “like two bald guys talking.”
Roger: Two bald guys yelling at each other, two angry bald guys yelling at each other.
Liz: But yeah, it’s really exciting to think about where it could go and what we could do with it.
Jen: I also think that analogy is interesting and that that is one way to look at it, which is that podcasts have taken little hobbit steps onto the YouTube platform and we’re just gonna grow and get more exciting and that – that means we’ll turn to video.
But I think there are questions around, first of all, how are people consuming the content on YouTube? Are they watching or are they listening? Because we don’t actually have full transparency there yet, although we’re starting to get some hints. Like, who was it that was talking to us, Roger, that told us that around 40% are listening?
Roger: Jeff Vidler from Signal Hill.
Jen: So a big podcast survey company said that there was one study done that revealed that about 40% of those people on YouTube, of the sample group that they had (which I think was around a thousand, he said) 40% were actually just listening.
So they had it on in the background, even though it was on YouTube. So that’s the numbers about audience. We have to be aware of that. And then the other thing I think about using the music example, a lot of the students that I teach, for example, they use YouTube like a DJ to sort of bring up music for them.
But it’s just on in the background, right? It’s sound for you to listen to while you’re doing something else. So I think those two things are gonna happen, right? We’re gonna have, like podcasts get more exotic with more video and, and visual components. And then we’re also gonna have people who want that pure audio experience, but who want it on YouTube.
Roger: I think one of the biggest challenges we’re gonna face is if you’re just using video as a promotional clip for the show. There’s very little data that shows that you can successfully move a listener from one platform to the other.
Jen: Yeah.
Roger: And so if you’re gonna see this promotional clip, it’s safe to assume you’re gonna wanna stay within YouTube.
Then the question becomes, what are you showing them next? Is it a full-length video? You know, that’s essentially a video version of your podcast. And depending on the format of your podcast, if it’s two angry white guys yelling at each other, that’s one thing. But if you’re producing a narrative-style show, you’ve then filmed a documentary, essentially.
And there’s a lot of costs associated with that.
And I think when we think about the accessibility of our industry. And you know, it used to be very, very accessible. Get a microphone, plug it in, interview some people, put it on a RSS feed. That was quite simple. Now we’re getting into more complex video production and whatnot.
So, Chris, you attended a ton of different talks at the event. I’m curious, which were some of your favorite ones?
Chris: I thought the video, this isn’t just favoritism, but I thought the, the panel that preceded us, Jen’s panel on video was really instructive and I thought actual work and conversation and dialogue got done during that panel, right?
In a lot of these panels, folks are just waiting for their turn to speak. And this one, I think Jen did a good job respectfully challenging her co-panelists about what podcasts were defined as in relation to video. I think that there was a much more liberal definition at the beginning of that conversation, and that together they were able to work through and, and sort of limit that definition.
And I came out of that with a better understanding of the difference between branded audio versus branded content.
Audio creators and podcast creators versus content creators.
And there’s sort of estuary in between. They blend, they mix, and in some cases, it’s both. In some cases, these things can get mission creep.
And I think it depends on where you’re coming from, right? Some of the people on that panel were coming as content creators. We are coming at it as audio creators who are open to other forms of content, and I think it’s important to look down at your feet when you’re in the middle of any content creation effort, whether you’re native to audio or native to YouTube or, or whatever that is and reorient yourself midway through the process and ask yourself whether what you are doing is native to audio?
And the little signifiers there.
If you are adding video to what is natively a podcast, and at some point, someone says, “can we pull up that slide right here?”, you’ve already broken the model, right?
You’ve broken what you’ve set out to do.
You’ve broken the covenant with the listener, but that’s an extreme way of putting it, but that’s what it is, right? Like, like a podcast is intimate in a different way. I thought that that talk was very instructive.
Jen: I learned a ton there, Chris. I learned so much there. Because what I realize is that it’s really about the client. So if the client comes to you and they’re already on YouTube, then you have to deal with that. If that’s where their audience is.
Roger: The best question we can ask is why.
Matt, I know you attended a lot of these talks as well. From an audience growth perspective, what stood out to you? Did you attend some of the conversations about stats? I know there was one called How to Tell If Your Podcast Stats are BS.
Matt: First and foremost, I’ll echo what you guys said in terms of video. I was at the Brian Barletta Sounds Profitable You YouTube event, with some people that were really successful in this space. AJ Feliciano from the Roost Network, which is a YouTube channel that was prominent before podcasting really, grew it the way that it did, and it turned into a podcast network, and echoed a lot of the same things. Which is, don’t just do video just because video’s available, you’re gonna get enticed by those numbers.
But if you do it poorly, it’s a ton of money. It’s a ton of production time, it’s a headache, and you won’t see the results. Do it purposefully, do it with that in mind, and pay attention to what your audience actually wants. Which, Liz, you had mentioned earlier is exactly what we try to do with podcasting as a whole too.
So I think that’s the big thing that came out of video discussions.
Matt: As far as stats go, I attended a handful of panels about them specifically, and the one with Rob Walsh from Libsyn, about some stats being BS. Illuminating mainly because we talk about IAB compliance and, and IAB certified, and everything that goes along with those.
And it can be really difficult to compare apples to apples when you’re talking about podcasts to podcasts.
Each hosting provider is gonna look at it differently.
Spotify and Apple are gonna look at things differently, and then naturally, because the industry is still young, with the analytics that we get on the back end, it might not always paint the clearest picture unless you know what to dig through and what to kind of shift aside.
So there are a lot of times in which, you know, he pointed out podcasts that had great numbers that were kind of gaming the system a little bit, and ones that didn’t necessarily need to! So, you know, the overall takeaway from the stats were, if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably too good to be true.
And the flip side of that is to build a purposeful audience that pays attention. You’re doing engagement, not just pure vanity downloads.
So pay attention to what you’re actually trying to do and do those things and you’ll be, largely speaking, successful. It’s just gonna take time.
Roger: What else did you pick up from an audience growth perspective? What stood out from you as either something that was shared and taught, or debated?
Matt: I think one of the big things was trying to push away from downloads as an overall metric.
At least for us in branded podcasts, again, we sell engagement. We don’t necessarily sell pure downloads. We’re trying to get a listener to think about our brand in a certain way.
We’re trying to get them to potentially do something after the fact. And looking purely at the download column is not the wisest way to do it from a brand perspective for their shows. Maybe that makes more sense if you’re trying to sell ads. And you can kind of game it a little bit and maybe do those things. Maybe that makes more sense. Cause that’s where the metric really is engagement, engagement, engagement.
Pay attention to engagement. Stop paying attention to downloads.
Roger: Chris, I know you attended a talk called The Power of Horror, Sci-fi and Genre Audio. I’m curious, what did you pick up from that conversation?
Chris: That horror and sci-fi and audio panel was fantastic. One of my favorite quotes was Mark Stern when he said, “you’re gonna scare yourself better than I’m gonna scare you”. And he was talking about one of the great things that listeners bring to a podcast experience is their imagination and not being prescriptive, not over-designing certain things, and allowing listeners to find, in this case, what horrifies them.
That’s not always what we go for in branded podcasts, but there’s a lesson there in imagination.
You know, the listener is coming to it with a reservoir of lived experiences. And it’s possible to leverage those in an imaginative way no matter what you’re doing in the form.
Toby Lawless said there’s a tendency to overpopulate episodes with SFX, and again, that’s not limited to horror and sci-fi or, or limited to narrative.
It’s possible to over-design in every genre for our audio drama friends out there.
Mark Stern also said, “Action is not your friend”. Anyone who’s ever done an action set piece for an audio drama I’m sure understands that it’s really hard to do. You know it’s kind of pointless to try to have a situation where you’re figuring out who has the bigger gun or who’s stronger, things that can work in visual storytelling doesn’t always work in audio.
Jen: You’d have to say: “Jen has the bigger gun”.
Chris: “Oh my god, your gun is even bigger than my gun”.
Yeah… I think some things, as audio fiction creators, that we’ve suspected for a long time, a lot of biases we’ve had, you know, I think have now become canonized.
The idea of like, “Why are you holding that tape recorder?”
Just stop. Don’t do that.
Just have an omniscient microphone narrator presence there. You’re telling the story. Like, everything doesn’t need to be found footage. In fact, I think justifying that real-world use case can actually take people out of the immersiveness.
Jen: Yeah, you’re not supposed to belabor it, basically.
Like, it’s now an accepted enough trope that you can just do it without explaining it.
Chris: Then one other thing that I thought was kind of cool, Toby Lawless said, “listeners have a model of what to expect with genre that general fiction listeners do not”.
So by limiting yourself to genre, you can actually be more imaginative, right? Because you can, you can play with a trope.
If you say “a spaceship” that’s cool, or “a space port, a bustling space port”, like that’s really all you have to do. As opposed to, like, if you’re trying to paint a picture of a small town in Maine, you have to kind of get into all these details of what is, you know, when you’re playing with realism.
It’s almost more complicated than playing with tropes, even though it might be counterintuitive because you think that, you know, if you’re being, uh, generative and imaginative, it takes more work, but it actually takes less in a lot of cases.
A ray gun is a ray gun, as opposed to an army barracks in the 1960s, you know, requires all these details, uh, for, for character, for setting, for place, for time, and all that stuff. So that was a really rich one.
Jen: I was also at that panel with Chris. Also got a lot out of it. And when they were talking about that quote about how the audience, speaking to the audience, “you’ll scare yourself more than I can scare you.” What they’re actually talking about is the co-authorship at the center of the audio medium. They’re actually talking about the deep act of co-authorship that happens every time you speak into somebody’s ears.
Roger: Which, actually, ties in perfectly with our conversation about video.
Jen: Yeah, it does.
Roger: Talking about sci-fi and ray guns, I can’t help but immediately start thinking about AI and the conversation around AI and podcasts.
But I’ll be honest, I didn’t hear as many talks about AI in its use, but I’m curious if anybody picked up anything.
Jen: I think they’re coming.
Roger: You think they’re coming?
Jen: Oh yeah. The talks and the AI.
Liz: They’re coming for our jobs.
Jen: The robots are coming.
Roger: Yeah. I mean, the conversations I had were less about any concern about taking our jobs and more about how do we leverage this technology and the future of it to better produce our shows, but I’m curious if anybody else picked up anything of value.
Jen: Well, we’re already doing that right at JAR. We’re already using ChatGPT in a playful way to generate ideas around names for shows, for example. And we’re using it to leverage tools, brainstorming tools.
Roger: Jumping off points.
Jen: Jumping off points, exactly. Sometimes, what I find about GPT is, it can pull in a wide array of things quickly. That you would otherwise have to spend a lot of time looking up and that can be helpful. It’s great for fact-checking quickly.
Roger: I know some of our Producers are using it for research and it can be useful.
Jen: I mean, AI can also be useful within certain powerful programs like Descript. In order to, like, drop in a fake voice to hear what a certain narrative chunk would sound like once you get your real host in there. It doesn’t sound as good, but it gives you a sense so that when you’re putting it together imaginatively, you can make some kind of concrete decisions based on what you hear.
So in that way it’s kind of useful.
Chris: Well, the podcast industry anecdotally is indexing more optimistic and positive about developments in AI than I’ve heard in other sectors. I think there is a little bit of doom and gloom and “oh my God, they’re coming for us”.
The, uh, I won’t say “water cooler” cuz it was at the, the Westgate Casino. So like, the “ashtray” conversation, the “slot machine” conversation that I had, folks were generally excited about it, right? I mean, these are creative people that are excited for tools. I mean, I, I love using it as a, a sort of boggle box, you know, like shake up, Hey, here’s, here’s 25 words. Give me some titles that kind of play with these words. Okay, cool, like shake them all up. Conclusions that I could get to otherwise, but I can do them in five seconds instead of half-hour of whiteboard. You know, it’s laborious to create 15, 15 word title options that are jargon-heavy and industry heavy, right? Like you can get there. This is a great tool to do it very fast and then to say, “hey, make it spicier”. “Hey, hey, add a few rhymes, add a little bit of alliteration”. “Hey, dial the alliteration back”. You know, uh, extremely powerful for, for wielding rhetoric. Ultimately, you’re still the arbiter of what’s working and there’s, there’s still that creative lens and all the expertise. It just does some of the grunt work for you.
Roger: So you, uh, so you welcome our robot overlords.
Chris: I do, I actually asked it “what is something I could say to anger a hockey fan from Vancouver?” And so I wanna let you know that the 2011 appearance in the finals was a fluke and that you got lucky.
Roger: All right.
Chris: And looking at your face, it looks like ChatGPT was correct.
Roger: It’s good to have you on the show, Chris.
Matt, I’m curious, I know you’ve played a lot in the AI space. Did you pick up anything at the conference around that?
Matt: Yeah, I mean, largely speaking, I think it’s what everyone else said here, which is I, I spoke to a lot of vendors, a lot of exhibitors that were there, and all of them talked about how they were incorporating AI into their tools to make things faster, to make things more efficient, more intuitive.
At the end of the day, I think for us as, as podcasters, it’s another tool in the toolbox, right? Like, you can use it effectively or you can use it poorly.
I think that’s up to you as an individual and as an artist, to figure out how you want to do that. If you want to just straight up record what ChatGPT pumps out for a script, go for it.
But you’re probably not gonna get great results.
Roger: So I thought one of the most powerful talks that I attended, and I think all five of us were at, was, was the conversation around Empowering Voices Through Podcast Storytelling, and it was moderated by our client, Andrea Marquez, who’s the host and producer of This Is Small Business, A podcast by Amazon Small Business Academy.
Would you guys agree? That was incredibly powerful and the panel was so interesting, provided a ton of value. I’m wondering if anyone had any takeaways that they wanted to.
Matt: Best panel that I was at by far. Like I know somebody else had mentioned earlier, they fed off each other really well.
They turned it into a conversation, not just five people up there saying their peace and walking off. Some great meaningful things came out of it, which is, largely, you’re investing in diversity because of people’s expertise. Because of the things that come out of it. Their story that they get to tell, and how that reflects on things.
Everyone at the panel really did mention this: it’s not just race, it’s not just gender, it’s how you grew up poor. Okay. Well that’s gonna reflect in your decision-making. You grew up with this, uh, decision, you grew up in this country that’s going to, to reflect in how you want to do things, um, and the power of that.
Roger: Yeah. The biggest takeaway I took was that podcast production should incorporate diverse voices because podcast listeners themselves are diverse and people want to hear the stories that people want to hear themselves in.
Liz: One of the things that I really appreciate about Andrea, and working with her as a client, is that she really does use her platform to uplift diverse voices. That’s one of the first things that I noticed about it when I came onto the team was how many different perspectives there are.
One of the things that really stood out to me was one of the panelists, she said, write about yourself. Be so detailed that it’s about all of us. And I think when we talk about diversity and, and bringing in diverse voices, sometimes people maybe might feel like they’re going to be a little bit alienated by the content.
But what we’ve seen and what we see more and more and more, and having more diverse voices included in the creator side of the industry is that podcasting is about finding that, like, one human element that speaks to us all.
Jen: That was really powerful. I totally agree. And it made me think about, I teach creative writing, as you guys know at the University of British Columbia, and one of the things that we teach our students here is that specificity leads to universal appeal. When you read writing that’s incredibly specific and personal and really drills down into telling a story that only you can tell, ironically, that’s when you really open up. And a lot of people think that if they write in these, kind of, broad strokes manifestos, that that’s going to make people listen.
And it’s actually the opposite.
It’s when you get really teeny tiny and focused and talk about your toothbrushing routine. That’s when people pay attention, right?
So it’s, it’s really interesting how that works and, and I think it’s because at the end of the day, we’re all human beings and we’re writing about the human experience, right?
There’s universal appeal in diversity.
There’s a business case for diversity in terms of audience building.
And the panel did an excellent job of reminding us of that.
Chris: A real standout kind of chilling quote from, Lori Lizarraga from Code Switch. They were talking about the evolution of diversity, not just as a quota, but as a posture, and as a paradigm shift. And she said, “no one will ever take you into a meeting and give you permission to actually matter.” Which was gorgeous and sad. But empowering to young creators from all backgrounds.
And then Lee Adams from The Midnight Miracle. They asked what his production standard was, and he said “I’m competing with your favorite song,” which I loved.
I always say “it’s an audacious act to look at a patch of silence and decide that you can do better.”
That’s what we’re doing as podcast creators to, to say we’re gonna replace silence in the world with sound and, and it’s gonna be better than that.
He goes even farther and says, “I’m going to replace the time you spend listening to your favorite song with time with the content that I’m creating.” And I think that that’s an incredibly noble approach to whatever we’re doing. To honor people’s time and say “hey, you know, the thing that you would wanna listen to, most of all, you might wanna listen to what I created instead”.
Roger: I thought that was great.
Matt, this was your first podcast movement. I’m curious, what did you think of the whole sort of congenial, collaborative nature of everyone there, but also specifically the other agencies in the branded podcast space?
Matt: You know it was incredible. I got a chance to meet so many other people that you would call our competitors, in any other business, there were handshakes and hugs. Hearing about what you’re doing and, and, “oh, you found success on this. Awesome. Well, this is what we did”.
Just the ability to share that stuff back and forth, and recognizing that there’s enough podcasts to go around. There’s enough business to go around, there’s enough love to go around and, and I felt that in full force there, by literally everyone. I’m constantly amazed by that.
Roger: I also felt the same. And, just outside of the branded podcast space, I also attended a really great talk called Crossing the Aisle and it was folks from the CBC, the BBC, and the LA Times. They talked about the podcasts that they’ve produced collaboratively together and talked about the advantages and disadvantages of teaming up on different shows.
It definitely feels like the industry as a whole is sort of in lockstep with each other. And as the medium grows, there is a ton of opportunities for collaboration. And you’re typically gonna bump into all sorts of collaborative opportunities, but rarely do you ever see this amount of sort of collaborative commercial opportunities with one another.
Matt: That’s exactly it. Just being able to say like, “hey, you know, you have this whole expertise in that. We can fill that and vice versa.” And then knowing that we’re all just trying to make the best podcasts possible.
Jen: Exactly, Matthew.
Matt: I think we’re all storytellers.
Jen: Everyone just wants to make great work. And we’re just looking for places to put the ideas.
Matt: Everyone there is just a storyteller. Regardless what we do, audience growth, sales, doesn’t really matter. We all love good stories and we all love hearing good stories, and we all wanna see podcasting flourish to where we know it can be.
I love that about this industry, in a way that I’ve not seen it in any other industry, uh, and I think it makes us all stronger.
Roger: I was honored to have the four of you there with me in Las Vegas. Vegas is not exactly my idea of a relaxing, chill place to go for a conference. It was a lot. But to have you guys all there helping drive our business forward and the industry forward was a real honor.
So I’m looking forward to Podcast Movement in Denver in August.
It should be a great time.
Let’s keep pushing this industry.
Chris: And look out for our bonus episode about our visits to Meow Wolf.
Roger: And Chris’s time in the sports book. Oh, and Jen and Roger’s time at Chippendales.
Jen: No, but we did go to, where did we go? The Peppermill.
Roger: The Peppermill.
Jen: Roger and I went to, my God, the Peppermill.
Roger: That place was crazy. The Peppermill was like, if you were to draw the perfect American diner, but then throw it into the 1970s. And add in the friendliest staff with a mirrored ceiling and the most delicious food.
Jen: It was incredible.
Roger: Remember that lady ran into the mirror?
Jen: No, no, no. I didn’t run into the mirror.
Roger: I didn’t say you did. I said mirror. You remember when that lady, she went to go to the bathroom, and bumped into the mirror?
Jen: Then it had, like, a lava lake.
Roger: Every bar needs a good lava lake.
Matt: Oh, that sounds interesting.
Roger: Let’s end on lava Lake
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