Well, it’s DoPSoTE here for this week only, as Neil was last seen by an ancient fort somewhere in the desert. We’re desperately hoping he makes it back, especially as he’s only got his Swindon Town branded bucket hat and a tiny fan to protect him from the searing heat.
In the meantime, Michaela (HofLNB) and myself are melting slowly into our chairs from a proper English Heatwave, trying to ignore our Linkedin feeds. Our Linkedin feeds are pretty much 90% Cannes, complete with air-conditioned cabanas, light slacks, floaty dresses and big sunglasses. If you’re reading this on the way back from the South of France, get yourself a big iced coffee for your hangover and settle down for a good read and some Podcast Recommends.
One Second of a Great Idea
We start in Cannes, and the winner of the Audio Grand Prix this year. It’s this wonderful campaign from DDB Africa. They took one second of iconic songs and played them on repeat. There was enough for fans to recognise the song, and want to keep listening. And there were zero skips.
What I love about this in this world of robots, AI and A/B testing is that this is just a great piece of creativity. Great craft, original thinking, proper consideration about how audio works. As we said last week, listening is still the majority core mode of consumption in podcasting (even if it’s just a YouTube tab open) and I love the way audio sneaks into your brain like no other medium. You hear the bar of the song and your brain jumps to the earworm. It’s the same as my favourite posters – the TaskRabbit 6-sheets that use twists on favourite lyrics. You look and immediately start singing the song (or the headline). For more twists on famous lyrics, check out the latest Q&A episode of our hit podcast That’s Just Wild for a stunner of a question that includes the line ‘When the jaws open wide, and there’s more jaws inside, that’s a Moray’.
Winning and Losing the Battle for Attention
I’m obsessed with attention. In this fragmented media world of doomscrolls and screens in every room – I found it fascinating. I love the quirks which are really personal to every household. Who turns their phone over when they’re having a face to face conversation? Who can have a conversation when talk radio is on? Does the TV dominate the living space? Do you skip ads or just stare at your phone? I could go on, I really could.
Those sharp-suited, mega-brains at McKinsey have spent a lot of time noodling over this problem and have come up with this fascinating report. There’s a lot you can argue with in the report, including its tendency to rationalise everything – but for me the big insight is in Exhibit 1. Consumption does not equal profit. Attention Hours do not equal profit. The new formats, like social, are growing to take up a huge chunk of people’s day, but legacy media – like linear video – are still robustly taking up a bigger chunk of money than they deserve. Nowhere is this more stark than live events vs podcasting. The value of an hour’s live event is almost $33, an hour of someone listening to a podcast is a measly 5 cents. Despite being in decline, TV, magazines and books can monetise that attention much more effectively than the newer formats. This kind of stuff excites me, because partly that’s a result of the legacy brand power these older formats have, and partly because money does eventually follow eyeballs, just at different speeds. Building podcast formats that are able to monetise all that wonderful attention is a big hairy goal that we can get involved with.
A Misconception Debunked.
I love a misconception debunked. No happier moment when someone is wanging on with great confidence about their opinion and you have clean objective data to prove them politely wrong. In a similar move, Nielsen have created a whole graph comparing marketers perception of ROI and the actual, empirical evidence.
The result? Search is massively overrated. Podcasts and Audio under-rated. The difference? One has a sexy dashboard that makes it ridiculously easy to spend small amounts of money and leave it be. One requires craft, looking at the data, and doing work with people like Nielsen to measure it properly. Hmm.
Really worth looking at it properly.
Michaela Hallam is ready to commission…
My pod recommend this week is actually a branded podcast. And like a lot of the best ideas, the premise is really simple. Netflix has over 27,000 sub-genres. It’s how the algorithm works out what to recommend you watch next, before the end credits have even rolled. The Big Pitch with Jimmy Carr sees a parade of comedians pitch their movie ideas – based on some of the most obscure of those genres – to our characteristically cynical host. Those categories can get pretty niche: from Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to Twisted Christmas, or even Australian Dysfunctional Family Comedies Starring A Strong Female Lead. This concept combines the classic interview format with just enough brand in the form of the category prism for some conversations you just wouldn’t get anywhere else. It’s an insight into the minds of our guests in terms of how they creatively respond to the prompt – and Jimmy’s at hand both to heckle and to hand-hold as they evolve and explore the pitch together, from casting to product placement. Ultimately, in his role as Mr Netflix, he can green light or red card every pitch. But in this case it’s really not about the win or lose, it’s definitely about how they play the game. There were only two eps when I listened. But I’ll definitely give more of them my own green light.
Izzie Clarke is online…
I stumbled into “Can I Tell You A Secret?” after listening to The Guardian’s “Missing in the Amazon” (Eva’s brilliant recommendation from last week). Can I Tell You A Secret? tells the story of prolific cyber stalker Matthew Hardy. Episode one starts with that key era when MSN quickly became old news and Facebook burst onto the scene. You could speak to more people, share photos, see what people were up to. I remember spending so much time online in high school and not thinking too much about who would see what I was posting. The podcasts points out the naivety of that. That’s exactly the position that the victims of Matthew Hardy were in. And that’s where this story begins. It’s a well-known story from 2022 and was even a TV series so I’m late to the game. However, investigative podcasts from The Guardian are brilliant for capturing first-hand accounts, whether that’s in the studio or on the streets, and carefully punctuated with sound design to bring the story to life. The pace constantly changes but I was gripped. Listen here.
What we’ve been listening to this week
The wrr wrrr of a fan. The distant sound of an ice-cream van. The sound of my cactus bunting whopping gently in the breeze. The heavy sound of my typing. A distant motorbike. It’s wonderful what you hear when you just listen.
What we’ve been doing this week
Discovering a Meal Deal. I’m 46, and I really should have discovered this a long time ago. But I’ve recently discovered the stunning value that a £5 Sainsburys Meal Deal can deliver for me. I go to the shelf and my primary goal is THE MOST EXPENSIVE things (here’s looking at you sexy Poke bowl, hello Innocent Zingy Smoothie) so I can just get that hit of adrenalin when the till tells me I’ve saved ALMOST THREE POUNDS SEVENTY.
My younger colleagues just looked at me and shook their heads sadly.
