It’s been two weeks since the last newsletter and goodness gracious me a lot has happened since then. We celebrated Easter, there was the 20th birthday of YouTube, Swindon Town lost 1-0 to Bromley, and Fresh Air’s six female staff went into space for 11 minutes because we thought it would be good publicity. The good news is that they all had a lovely time, and the bad news is that Fresh Air will not make any profit for the next 167 years and the only publicity we got for the trip is this paragraph in this newsletter.
The English Heritage Podcast
We’ve been sitting on this one for a while, so last week we were very happy to tell the world that Fresh Air is now producing The English Heritage Podcast, having won the tender last year.
Another new history podcast? Well no actually, because this one’s been running for over 300 episodes, but we’re bringing a new sound and a new energy to showcase the wonderful stories that English Heritage holds. Comedian Amy Matthews is our fantastic new presenter, starting each episode with an object and then, with the help of English Heritage experts, exploring what it tells us about the past and our present.
Our first episode started with a herring in the studio. Want to know why? You’ll have to listen. Does it sound muffled? You may need a herring aid.
Benchmarks, sweet benchmarks
What do you get if you cross Omny Studio – the world’s best podcast hosting platform – and Richard Blake’s fantasy dream? Answer – the Omny 2025 podcast benchmark report, that’s what.
Richard – Fresh Air’s Director of Pressing Send on the Email – is a kindred spirit with Sharon Taylor – Omny’s Executive Vice President of Podcast and Content Delivery, and they’re both equally passionate about understanding what a ‘good’ number of listens means in the podcasting world. Most of our clients understandably, want to know the same thing, but it’s made pretty tricky by the fact that podcast listener numbers are not public. So we’re always on a mission to have coherent answers to the question ‘how many downloads should my podcast get?’.
Firstly, it’s important to say that Sharon’s Linkedin post about this data takes inspiration from The Backstreet Boys, which is an excellent starting point in anyone’s book. Anyway, Omny’s data separates out the number by percentile, and the data measures the number of downloads achieved by podcast episodes after 30 days of publishing. Many podcasts are relatively timeless and have a long tail so there’s plenty of life left in most episodes past this point, but it’s a fair place to judge with over 80% of downloads happening in that first month.
The truth is that the listener numbers for the majority of podcasts are tiny. If you’ve got more than 84 downloads in those first 30 days you’re already in the top 50% of all global podcasts. If you’ve got over 778, you’re in the top 20%. Then it goes up quite steeply. 7,091 are required to get into the top 5% and the top 1% get over 39,000.
So, as with any media, the big audiences are hogged by a small subsection of the shows, but with over 4 million podcasts in the world that 1% is still a lot. News, sport, comedy and ‘society and culture’ account for more than 63% of all downloads, with sport being the hardest category in which to break that top 1% (127,916 per episode).
So what should a brand do? Look to choose one of these biggest categories to ride the wave and go for the big numbers? Or aim to occupy the upper percentile of a smaller category? The truth is that audio branded content should aim to engage precisely the right audience for a lengthy amount of time with super-relevant content. Whether that means you get into the top 20% or the top 1% is down to the goals you set.
And when it comes to that goal setting, Richard has already taken screenshots from Sharon’s blog so you can expect them to pop up in all his presentations for the next year.
TikTok for Business
If, like me, you live in a household where every ten minutes someone does a dance on TikTok, you’ll know the power it has. But what can it do for businesses? Fresh Air produces MAD//Pod – the official podcast of MAD//Fest, and last week’s episode is a conversation with Isobel Sita-Lumsden – the Head of Marketing, Global Business Solutions, Europe at TikTok – explaining how businesses can experiment with, and then master the platform and speak to a whole new audience.
Other recent guests have included Lucky Saint’s Kerttu Inkeroinen, Auto Trader’s Laura McNally and BUPA’s Fiona Bosman. If you want to hear the finest creative minds in marketing, you can find them all right here.
Global Podcast Listening
I see, you want more podcast listening data do you? Well YouGov have studied the percentages of people in a range of countries who listen to more than one hour of podcasts a week. As ever with these things, some of the most dedicated podcast markets can be surprising. South Africa leads with 60%, with Saudi Arabia (60%) and Indonesia (59%) third.
This all ties into the conversations around the numbers of downloads and using the relevant benchmarking. With so much focus and publicity around US and UK-based shows, there is a huge opportunity for brands to target often-overlooked markets where podcasting is even more mainstream, and the audience are hungry for content across the board.
Michaela Hallam finds beauty in storytelling…
We all know that storytelling is at the heart of any type of effective communication. If it makes you lean in, feel something, connect … then it’s memorable. That’s why The Moth is my new favourite podcast. It’s been going since 1997, but I’ve only recently discovered it. Every episode is built around a theme with several stories told under that umbrella. The storytellers stand alone on a real stage, in a real venue, under a spotlight, in front of a standing-room-only audience of strangers. They have no notes. They only have about 5 minutes. Many of them have never done anything like this before. And there’s something really magical about the very much shared experience between them, the audience, and the telling of the story. A shared vulnerability. A mutual desire for a happy ending. In the telling, if not in the story itself. And despite it being recorded at an event, the magic translates as a podcast listen. There’s real, raw beauty in the simplicity of one human being sharing their story. It’s very much worth a listen.
Neil Cowling takes his turn…
Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of something that helped to change my life – the launch of the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Radio 1 on 24th April 1995. I’d loved The Big Breakfast during my teenage years and then at the age of 19 in February 1995, I’d discovered that a live radio studio was the most exciting place in the whole world. And then in April came Chris, Holly Hot Lips, Dan The Sound Man and Johnny ‘Boy’ Revell. I was obsessed. I listened constantly. He was the most creative radio presenter I’d ever heard. Simple ideas were genius, his life and the show were intertwined, he went a bit mad, he asked for Fridays off, he got fired, and it was all part of the journey.
And so ‘Breaking Breakfast’ is right up my street. The crew, sadly minus Chris, are back together around microphones telling stories of the best ever R1 Breakfast show. Everyone went on to do their own thing. Dan wrote the theme tune to Strictly Come Dancing, and Chris sailed into middle age on Virgin Radio via Radio 2, having given birth to multiple poor imitations with a fraction of his talent. This podcast reminds me why I loved him, as well as why he ended up destroying, and being hated by, so many people around him.
What we’ve been listening to this week
The Titanic.
I love podcasts that go to the effort of including original music, and I love nerding out over how music is put together, so therefore I love this video of how the team at Noiser put together the soundtrack for their most recent podcast ‘Titanic, Ship of Dreams’.
Gasp at the number of faders, listen to the care taken over hitting metal sheets with hammers to build that ‘ship on iceberg’ sound. It’s ace.
What we’ve been doing this week
Easter has been and gone, but Michaela – Director of Content and Head of Loud Nose Blows – has only just got back from her gorgeous holiday in Thailand. So she had some catching up to do on the chocolate-eating front when she came for her first day back in the office.
However … and I don’t say this lightly … her behaviour shocked us all. It happened at lunchtime on Wednesday and left many of us struggling to concentrate on our work for the rest of the afternoon. I’ve known Michaela for over 20 years and consider her to be one of my very best friends, but even I was left wondering whether I ever really knew her at all.
Reader, Michaela eats a Cadbury’s Creme Egg with the end of a spoon.
She peels the top and opens it up, like a soft boiled egg ready for soldiers. That’s fine. But then she gets a spoon and, using the end of the handle, not the eating end, she scoops out the creamy goo and eats it tiny bit by tiny bit. Part cultural abomination, part ridiculously posh. It’s as if she’s never seen a Cadbury’s Creme Egg, or indeed a spoon before, and has suddenly decided she’s Marie Antoinette.
Michaela’s explanation for all this is ‘I think out of the box. I’m a Creative’, which I suppose is one answer for it, but we will all be watching her eat far more closely from now on. If she ever packs a corn-on-the-cob for her lunch we may have to sell tickets.
