Show Notes
In this episode Craig sits down for a chat with Steve Pratt from Pacific Content.
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Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 I guess our term, our shorthand for it is, is creative bravery, which is how brave are you willing to make your show in order to like, think audience first and not make it about you, especially when it's coming from a brand. Like how can you make a show that is a gift for your audience that only you can make that doesn't have your products and services as the primary motivation in the show.
Speaker 1 00:00:24 Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the audience podcast. I'm your host Craig Hewitt from cast dose this week. I'm joined by Steve Pratt from Pacific content. Steve, how's it going? Excellent. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm really looking forward to it. I've, I've definitely been a fan boy of the, the blog content that you all have put out and really look at at your blog as one of the kind of authorities in our space and something that a lot of people in the industry reference as like the truth air quotes. And so, yeah, I'd love to dig into, to a couple of things about kind of what, what y'all are up to recently and to kind of some of the things that you're seeing in the industry
Speaker 0 00:01:00 For. Nice. Honestly, we, uh, we just re write about the stuff that we're interested in and it's, it's a pretty small community, so it's, uh, it's really nice to hear. Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:01:07 So for folks who aren't familiar with Pacific content, can you kind of just give the, the bit of elevator pitch of kind of what you guys do and where you sit in the industry? Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:01:16 Uh, pretty weird company in the podcasting universe and that we really only focus on one area. So we don't have our own original shows. We don't have ads on, cause we don't have original shows or network or any of that sort of stuff. So we help other companies think and act like media companies through podcasts. So I guess you could call them branded podcasts. We use language, you know, original podcasts with brands because we're trying to make them into real shows that people genuinely want to listen to. And I think sometimes Brandon has a connotation that it is a thinly veiled infomercial or something like that. So our, our goal is to set a very high bar to earn a lot of audience attention and engagement, and to actually move the needle for the companies that we work with on brand perception or the relationships that
Speaker 1 00:01:55 We'll have with them. And like for folks listening, what would be like an example that we might know of?
Speaker 0 00:01:59 I think some of the stuff that we've done most recently, like we, we just did a big show called bring back Bronco with Ford motor company, kind of about the history of where the Ford Bronco came from and why it was killed. And there's been an underground movement for 20 years to kind of bring it back post OJ. It's a bit of a weird one because it's one of the only shows that we make that is directly about their product and it's in the title, bring back Bronco, but it's done really, really well because it's actually a great story. And the Ford team wanted real journalism and a real audio doc that looked at the story regardless of what the truth is and was like your story, regardless of what the truth is, they were happy to tell it, like they didn't want it to spin a PR narrative for it.
Speaker 0 00:02:38 So it's, it's a really interesting story and it's done very, very well. Like it's been a real treat doing it and we've, uh, we also do a lot of really fun podcasts with, we do trailblazers with Walter Isaacson, with the, uh, with Dell technologies. We do a show about how to make better decisions called choice ology with Katy milkman, with Charles Schwab, one for open web developers called command line heroes with red hat that just wanted Beck best tech podcast and ad week, uh, this week. So we're, we're really lucky. We have, we have wonderful, wonderful group of partners and they, I guess for us, when we talk about a wonderful partner, it's a super collaborative group where we're kind of all coming together to make a podcast together where everybody's on the same page of wanting to think audience first and make something that people are going to love.
Speaker 1 00:03:22 I love that last part. And I heard you say the word stories several times in there, and I want to dig into that specifically because I, I think back to your secret sauce blog post, and we'll link this up in the show notes because it's a must read, I think for anybody, but the premise really, I think is kind of what you're touching on there is that the secret to growing a podcast is making something great that your audience wants is that like, if you had to give it a one-liner does that reasonable
Speaker 0 00:03:51 From my perspective, there's two in, in a way. And so you're right, like the actual making the great show, I guess our term, our shorthand for it is, is creative bravery, which is how brave are you willing to make your show in order to like, think audience first and not make it about you, especially when it's coming from a brand. Like how can you make a show that is a gift for your audience that only you can make that doesn't have your products and services as the primary motivation in the show because people have a good sniff test for when something, when they're being marketed to. And I think, you know, you might be able to trick people to listening to one episode of an infomercial, but they're never going to come back. And, and the win in a podcast is that you get people to subscribe and come and spend a lot of time with you on an ongoing basis over and over and over again.
Speaker 0 00:04:35 And so it has to be great. And then when it's coming from a brand, it's almost like the bar is even higher because they're concerned it might be an infomercial. So that creative bravery is something. When we're doing program development with a client, we kind of will continually check in and say like, where are we on this creative bravery scale? Are we at a, are we at a five or are we at a 10? Are we slipping as we kind of do this? So that's one piece of it. But the other piece obviously is, is there an audience for the show? And the second piece of the, the recipe is, is commitment. Like, are you gonna use all your resources as a brand and commit to making sure that all the right people know about this show and to market it like a show and to make sure that, you know, like when HBO markets game of Thrones, they're not really marketing HBO, like they're marketing the show first and people know it comes from HBO, but it is not, it's not like the, the CEO of HBO is in game of Thrones, making cameos, you know, to showcase their expertise in game of Thrones.
Speaker 0 00:05:30 And I think that people need to kind of think about that, you know, in their own podcast and think about, what's going to have the biggest impact on my audience and is marketing the show from our brand, the most important are we selling the concept of the show and what the value is for an audience member first and foremost, because at the end of the day, the goal is to get people to hear something or see something in the wild and decided to go and give the podcast to listen that they, them clicking play on the podcast is actually the only really goal you want with your marketing, from the
Speaker 1 00:05:58 Creative bravery perspective as you're going through, like you mentioned, program development, which I would assume is kind of this term for, as you're kind of boxing and deciding what the podcast is about and who it's for and what you're going to talk about. How do you put some parameters or some process around making sure that you're giving that voice, you want to the podcast and not selling out. It's not the right word. Maybe that's too strong, but, but that, you're not going to retreating on that creative bravery scale that you were talking about.
Speaker 0 00:06:27 So we have a, I guess a strategy piece that we do before we ever go into production, which is kind of figuring out the answers to those questions and figure out where we can get to on that creative bravery scale. And so part of it is a lot of listening on our part around to talk to our clients around why do you want to make a podcast? And who is this podcast for? And what do we know about them? And what does success look like in a podcast? What are your values as a brand? What's your voice as a brand? And what's the, what's the gift that you could give your audience that only you could give them or the information that they would love to have from you that would, they would actually make a difference for them and help change the way that your brand is perceived, or where do you want to move your brand from point X to point Y how is it perceived now and where do you want it to be perceived?
Speaker 0 00:07:12 And what sort of things do you want to be known for the answers to all those questions that will kind of lead you to a point where you can come up with different ideas for what an actual show might be. And some of it might be there's going to be an education component that we can make very accessible by telling stories around any manner of things, whether it is open source software development, to behavioral psychology, to the values of, of a free and open internet. Like there's tons of different things in there that make for lots of great stories and the goal. In some ways shouldn't be to show how smart you are. It should be to help the audience, understand these things and make them smarter with a really like taking advantage of all the best practices of audio. Like what audio is really good at, which is telling stories.
Speaker 0 00:07:53 And then, you know, even honestly, like if you're, we have a lot of clients who are, would like to change the way their brand is perceived or they're, or they're doing something different than the one of evolve where they're, you know, what people think of when they think of the brand. And sometimes that's literally just telling interesting stories about that subject matter, that if you hear 10 stories about something in a particular area with a particular point of view on it, and it's really good, and it's brought to you by brand X, you're going to think of them when you think of that subject matter, when you think of that area of expertise.
Speaker 1 00:08:21 I think that one of the questions that we get a lot is like, how can I make a podcast that doesn't suck, right? From a, from a content perspective, there's so much competition out there these days and question, yeah, it is, it is. And frankly, we are not the authorities on that. I think you all are much more the authorities on how to make a really great podcast and tell a great story. And I think that's a really hard thing to teach somebody else, especially that doesn't come from a creative background right there, they run a roofing company, or they are, I don't know, even a graphic designer, right. That wants to tell a story that represents their brand and brings people kind of along this journey. But I mean, even for me, I've been podcasting like almost six years and I feel like I'm pretty bad at this just because it's really hard. And maybe I'm giving myself an out there, but, but, but like, as you're working with these brands, like red hat, that is a tech company, they may be, don't have a bunch of people that are used to telling this story. If we could generalize, how do you help people be able to tell that compelling story from like a content and structure perspective?
Speaker 0 00:09:31 It really, honestly, it is a very, very collaborative process. And when we start working with a client, there's really varying levels of knowledge and backgrounds, whether it's on the journalism or storytelling front, or how familiar people are with audio or not, it's almost like every single project is a brand new creative problem to solve with a fresh team of people and figuring out where the expertise lies on the team and playing into the expertise of different people's roles is kind of part of that initial fun problem solving of like, how are we going to do this? So our company does a lot of the production work. So I'm Canadian. This is a very uncommon thing to say, but we have amazing storytellers on our team, like really, really amazing storytellers whose entire careers have been built on telling fabulous stories and audio. And it is a really unique skill and it does take time to develop doing that.
Speaker 0 00:10:19 So a lot of the time that our job is to bring that to the table and to help take ideas that we want to talk about and figure out what the best way to explain that through a story is for people who are trying to do it themselves, and aren't able to work with people, who've spent their whole careers doing that. There's a few different things. I would say. Number one, thinking story, think about telling stories and not just downloading information. Audio works really, really well when you can start painting pictures in people's minds and describing things and having them imagine what's going on and take you through the journey of another person. Often the best way to understand a complicated thing is to hear a story of somebody who's gone through that and what it was like for them and how they solved it or resolved it.
Speaker 0 00:10:57 So thinking stories, think about telling stories, if it's yourself doing it around how to bring concepts to life the first minute or two of every podcast is probably the most important chunk in terms of making sure whether this is going to be a success or not. So I just listened to this wonderful podcast, an episode of, of the a 16 Z podcast from Andreessen Horowitz. And they had two really interesting episodes almost back to back. There's one about Tech-Talk. And then there's one about the future of audio with the R and B head at Spotify. And it just related very strongly to the way we're thinking about podcasting in these first couple of minutes of a podcast also, but the tech talk piece was talking about how people are deciding whether to watch a 32nd video in the first, like couple seconds. Like you've got five seconds max for somebody decides to just flip through and go onto the next video.
Speaker 0 00:11:47 So I guess that's one part, and that's also the same way that Spotify is working. Like how music is where musicians are making songs that have the choruses, or just the hooky as part of the song right off the top. And they're making shorter and shorter songs like there's no written the seventies you'd have like, you know, two minutes of buildup before Freebird started or something. It is like bang right into the chorus because they don't want people to skip. They want you to get in and listen to the show. And I think podcasting is exactly the same, except the commitment level is like 30 minutes or more to listen to a podcast. So you really are making a commitment to say, I'm going to stick around for all of that. And I feel like that opening minute or two is the most important thing.
Speaker 0 00:12:28 Like if you're boring or you don't set out what you're going to get by listening to the end of the podcast, you're going to lose people. And whether that is setting like dropping people into a story that seems really, really compelling. And you want to find out how the story resolves itself at the end. Amazing way to do that. If you're going to talk about what you're going to learn or what you're going to take away at the end of the podcast, or there's a question that's really compelling, and you have to listen to the podcast to answer it, those are all really good ways to just make sure that you're giving people the right preview of where the value is of sticking around to listen to for the whole show. And then honestly, the easiest thing to do. And I say easy in terms of like, anybody can do it.
Speaker 0 00:13:04 It's just the level of work to do it. It's just edit your show. I think that the vast majority of shows, if you can't do stories and you can't do audio documentaries and you have limited time and you're doing it all yourself, the majority of people will do a one-take recording. And we'll just publish that. And if you can actually go through and spend the time to edit out the garbage or to rearrange things, so it's more compelling and it has a more of a structure to it. Anything you can do that respects the time and attention of your listener to make it better increases your odds of, of having a better show.
Speaker 1 00:13:35 My son has been watching he's eight and he has been watching, uh, the DC comic movies, like the recent ones. It's like Superman versus Batman and say, he said, I want to watch the original Superman movie. And if you've watched it recently, like the first 10 minutes are credits and he was like, dad, this is terrible. We've got to turn this off. And we never even watched it cause like he couldn't get past the opening credits and yeah, cause they just don't do that anymore. Right. It's like Hasting all changes, right. It's guns and violence in the first 30 seconds now. And like they got you. Yeah, super interesting. I love, and I say, I love for our type of podcasts that, and we could make this a storytelling podcast, I think, but it's much more of an informational and maybe inspirational podcast to where I love that kind of hook of in this podcast. We're going to talk to Steve Pratt and he's going to talk about how to tell a better story, stick around to the end. So you hear how Steve talks about X, Y, and Z. We very likely to put that at the beginning of this episode. Cause I love, I love that as a listener. And so I think, I think our listeners will too. Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:14:36 Well, it's funny, you know, we can, it's funny, like we've actually done a thing with our, our company where we will sit around. So we have a, just like this super smart creative guy named Dan Meisner on our team who he's our head of audience development. And he looks at a lot of data and we will put together a list of let's take 10 of our most recent episodes or let's look at all of our shows for the last year and figure out what are the top one minutes? What are the top first minutes of shows that we've made? And what are the bottom one minutes of shows that we've made? And we can listen to them and say like what worked here and what didn't work in the other ones. And just kind of keep our whole team thinking about raising the bar on that first minute. Cause it, it is honestly, it's remarkable. You can see the ones where it drops in the first minute and it just fades over time through the episode. And if you get them through that first minute or two, it's just like a flat line all the way to the end. Uh, very few people leaving.
Speaker 1 00:15:31 And where do you see that kind of data? So you can
Speaker 0 00:15:33 Get that in Apple podcasts and Spotify and Stitcher. Unfortunately there's not a unified place to find all of it, but their completion rates, I guess, would be the, the video equivalent of that to see how long the average person is listening through your show. And it's a linear graph time-wise with, uh, you know, starting at a hundred percent and drops down over time. Hopefully not much, but we, you know, in a, in a 30 minute show, we are, we will strive to hit 85 to 95% completion rates on every episode.
Speaker 1 00:16:00 That's cool. I have not heard of folks looking at that kind of level of detail. So that's, that's really interesting. We'll have to dig into our own analytics there and check it out.
Speaker 0 00:16:08 You know, honestly for people who are listening to this who are thinking about, should I do a podcast, that's actually one of the most powerful reasons to think about audio. If you can get 85 to 95% of the way through a half hour with people over and over and over again, I challenge you to find any other medium social media, YouTube, like anything that will get you that amount of time and engagement with people more than once it's honestly, that is the super power of audio.
Speaker 1 00:16:35 Another blog post that I love reading was a, you had a predictions 20 predictions for 2020 on your blog late last year. And obviously it will give you a pass because I don't think anybody had a massive virus will come and decimate a lot of the way we know life, but it would be, yeah, people would, people would wonder if you had like a time Turner, right. But just looking at some of these that did come true, I'd love to like, get your take on like, which of these kind of stand out for you as like, yep. I was right. And that's really cool or really impactful or really important, like for the industry, I take it
Speaker 0 00:17:14 Zero credit for any of these predictions. Um, we go out and do a survey of a lot of the people who we consider the smartest people in the industry and reach out to a ton of them and get their predictions. And we're really just the aggregator. So they're, they've been really smart year over year. They've been bang on with a lot of them. So our number one prediction from the, the podcast leaders last year was, you know, Apple versus Spotify platform. Whereas intensify that is a hundred percent happened in the last year and the amount of stuff that Spotify has been doing to create exclusives and get more people to try and go in and change their podcast consumption entirely to Spotify and to build a closed ecosystem where they can serve ads and do attribution data. You know, a couple of weeks ago, they launched the ability to make shows with music only inside Spotify with the anchor podcast hosting platform that they use, where you can essentially make a radio show with host breaks and play whatever music you want on Spotify.
Speaker 0 00:18:09 They're being very, very aggressive in the space. And I think that a 16 Z podcast episode about the future of audio with the, the, uh, Spotify R and D lead on it super interesting for anybody who wants to hear more about that same thing on the canola consolidation side, Sirius XM, buying Stitcher this year, I hurt just bought Spreaker and through Vox nest, uh, last week. It sure feels like we're in a place where the, a lot of interesting podcast companies are getting bought up by larger companies trying to kind of build a full stack and own an entire user experience.
Speaker 1 00:18:43 Sorry, can I, I just wanted to drill down on that because I think it's important for I'm curious, but I think it's important for what that allows our customers and podcasts, producers, content, creators to do. If there is like that vertical integration of kind of the stack from hosting and distribution and listenership and production, like what, what is, if that happens, what does that give content creators? Well,
Speaker 0 00:19:07 Interesting. I think you'll find people on very opposite sides of this conversation where there's a pot testing has been around since 2004 and it's been very open. The nature of the way it's built is very unusual in today's tech ecosystem, where it's all powered by an RSS feed and it gets distributed everywhere and you can get a, you know, you can publish at once and it shows up in all sorts of different apps. Cross-platform everything. There's very limited data that you can get out of an RSS feed because of the way it's structured. So real targeting and cooking is a lot more challenging. Like you're not getting a lot of information back from Apple podcasts, for example, as a privacy first company, they are not sharing information about you back with the podcast creators when people consume something through Apple podcasts. So there's a, there's a big camp that loves that and does not want that to disappear.
Speaker 0 00:19:58 The companies that are building more of the full stack are trying to think about what are the values of a closed ecosystem, where we can create user experiences that are better because we have the full stack. So, and that the Spotify piece around having music in shows is a great example because you they've got the music licensing inside Spotify. You can't listen to any of those shows outside of Spotify because they can't license the music for it. And it would be a nightmare. And they've got, you know, essentially as much data about you as Google or Facebook does when you're a premium Spotify member, they know who you are, where you live, how old you are, gender, all that sort of thing. So when they're advertising and selling advertising products inside that closed ecosystem, they've got data about you and can provide a lot of information around whether I can advertise directly to a group of people. And I can tell whether they listened and whether they clicked on other things inside Spotify. So I think from a business point of view, that is why a lot of those companies are going with the full stack to try and create better user experiences inside their ecosystem, and to make it easier for companies to come and buy advertising and feel confident that they're effective.
Speaker 1 00:21:04 I totally hear you. I mean, even on this show, we've had people that I think stand on both sides of that fence and talking to with them. And, and I don't know where, where I think I stand. I definitely like that podcasting is an open ecosystem. I absolutely understand from an advertiser's perspective, companies buying ad spots that they want more data just like they get on Facebook and Google, but I definitely see the privacy aspect that I don't love that Facebook knows as much about me as they do. And I think we'll continue to have that as a big focus through the next few years as that folks don't want people tracking them everywhere they go online or how they consume content. So it'll be interesting to see how that goes. Yeah, I agree. One of the ones that you touched on and we'd love to kind of dig into this as is corporate podcasting.
Speaker 1 00:21:46 And I would maybe open it up a little bit, cause I'd love to get your take on just kind of private podcasting. So podcasts that are not intended for everyone to listen. They're not in Apple podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher. And we kind of grouped these into two buckets, one being corporate podcasts. So these are companies podcasting to their employees for a bunch of different reasons or purposes. And the other is we call it just private podcasting. So this is like someone with a membership site that wants to extend their membership site with podcast content, or they have a, a video based course, but won't offer podcast content to their students. Yeah. I mean, since you kind of wrote the article almost a year ago, cause it's like, how do you see private and internal company podcasting evolving? Because it's really new from our perspective and kind of the whole industry.
Speaker 0 00:22:34 It feels like it is still early days for this. And there's a lot of experimentation going around in it. And then I think COVID has accelerated some of that interest, particularly for internal communications where it's harder to have live events. It is harder potentially to do video town halls. And I should say, even with video fatigue, like zoom fatigue for people being able to provide something that people could listen to on a break, if they wanted to go for a walk or have it playing on a smart speaker in their house and to be able to produce everything remotely at high quality, it's a really great solution. So we've seen a lot of inquiries on the internal comms of like, can we figure out an audio solution? That's easy to be able to go out and reach all of our, our teams. And I think it is a wonderful solution to me, the biggest, I guess, decision points for an internal podcast are how secure do you need it?
Speaker 0 00:23:23 And we've had a real varying spectrum of needs depending on the subject matter across different clients. And I think there's pros and cons along that spectrum. And I'd be, I'd be super curious for your thoughts on this as well. When companies are really want to talk about very, very sensitive things and they need podcasts really locked down. There are ways to do that and they can be authenticated SSO in your company and you can encrypt streams and you can do all sorts of things if you need to. The con of that is that it's, you're making people do a lot of work to listen to one podcast episode. It ends probably downloading a separate app and it is probably re authenticating every time. Or you can only listen on your corporate wifi or something like that. So there's a high level of friction at driving adoption.
Speaker 0 00:24:10 If it's too secure in a lot of cases, there's some options where you can minimize the friction and have people still have SSO and, and sign in and be authenticated and only access it through a private feed. And some of those we'll let you listen in your favorite podcast app. And then there's some companies that are saying, you know what? We should actually think about how to make this thing where we're not talking about anything incredibly sensitive and make it public and have no friction for people, people being able to listen. So the company that that Pacific content is part of is, uh, is called Rogers communications. It's a, just a huge telecommunications wireless company, cable company owns sports teams and radio stations and TV stations in Canada. We made a podcast for them kind of about the employment experience called for the love of work.
Speaker 0 00:24:57 And it was originally talked about as an internal only podcast for employees. And they're really leaning into their values and wanting to talk about how they're thinking about what an amazing employment experience is for their own staff at Rogers is about 26 or 27,000 people that work at Rogers. And as we talked about it, they're like, there's nothing that secret here. Like it's going to be a lot easier for all those Rogers employees to listen to this, if we made it public. And it also has the bonus of sharing your employment brand with everybody else in podcast land, if they're enjoying listening to it as well. So we launched that this fall and it's the response has been incredible too. It honestly like launched on a bunch of internal communication channels. The CEO did a town hall and talked about it. There've been emails from all the executives out talking about this podcast and why it's important and the level of pickup internally has been crazy.
Speaker 0 00:25:46 But the feedback on, thank you for making this. I can't believe you made a show that is talking about this and that you value all these things and I'm learning things about how to be more resilient and how to adapt to my workplace during COVID and things. The Goodwill that's generated has been remarkable. So just as one as one case study, I can talk about, cause it's out in public, this stuff really works when you, when you do it well. And I think we're going to see it growing a lot as a way to, you know, to drive and play engagement and, and just overall communications. But I would say the same principles apply. You have to make it a great lesson. Like you actually have to respect people's time and attention and not do a one-take ramble for an hour.
Speaker 1 00:26:24 I definitely agree that in the customers we work with for kind of internal company podcasts, there is a huge spectrum of how comfortable they are from a, an it or InfoSec perspective with the content being super locked down or on a private feed that folks can download to a conventional podcasting app. And I think it goes back to a lot of like, what are they talking about? Like how sensitive is the content they're talking about a bit of their it and security teams appetite for that risk. Because I think the reality is even on a super secure intranet site that can only be accessed and company wifi. You can still find a way to download that or record it.
Speaker 0 00:27:05 You can turn on your voice recorder on your phone and listen to it. Right?
Speaker 1 00:27:08 Yeah. So I think that those it security teams that really understand what's going on, put this at a relatively low risk profile. And yeah, I mean, as you're talking about, we see increasingly a lot of interest with folks from like HR teams and recruiting, wanting to talk about like company culture as like a hybrid kind of podcast. So there'll be some content that is focused around like recruiting almost and like company branding more as a re like, you know, trying to bring in top talent. But then also, like there's a, there's a private aspect of that too talking like you're saying to the internal teams and how they work and how they're living and how they're balancing the COVID, you know, craziness, they're all living too. So yeah, I mean, it's really crazy. One of maybe the biggest single bucket that we've seen is like sales teams and sales enablement content, especially for like remote sales teams.
Speaker 0 00:28:01 Education feels like a huge one, like learning and development feels like another big area outside of internal comms that just feels like, wow, would podcasts be great as an on-demand resource for people to be able to go find the thing that they're looking for, that they need to develop and listen to it in real time when they need it. And not there's a in-person course scheduled or a zoom class scheduled at a certain time, whether you need it at this time or not. Um, so I'm really interested in that. And then I'm curious for you, like, cause you know, we, it is still an emerging group in here, but like I'm curious around some of the stuff around audience development or communications internally that you are seeing, what are some of the best practices for letting staff know that this stuff exists and making it easy for them to listen.
Speaker 1 00:28:43 So we tend to encourage companies to, to, to kind of tend towards this less locked down method of distribution, just because every time it increases the adoption and the listenership from people on the team, so something that's super locked down, like you said, they have to jump through a bunch of hoops that just makes it harder or less people are gonna listen. So as you know, their internal security teams and it has an appetite to do that, we want to get this onto like a, an accessible feed so people can download onto their devices because the reality there is these companies have, you know, it policies on those devices that are company owned, that they can go wipe them remotely, anytime if somebody leaves. So like, I think it's less of a real concern than, than some people make it. But the biggest thing that we've seen is actually, like you said, kind of like regular podcasting in this kind of idea of like leveraging guest exposure across divisions.
Speaker 1 00:29:39 It is like if you, you know, an HR internal comms podcast to have people from different physical locations or different parts of the company, come on and talk about kind of things they're doing or best practices they're seeing. And then for them to share that with their teams as a way to gain exposure and kind of cross pollinate the podcast and the message of the podcast between teams. Yeah. It's great for everybody. I think it's great for adoption and listenership, but it's also great for like breaking down those silos within an organization to say, like, we have the marketing person on talking about this this week. We had an R and D person on talking about this thing they're doing. And so everybody is in the know and a super kind of natural and organic way and kind of putting the ownership of sharing their podcast episode with their teams onto those people that are a part of each episode is like, if you set that expectation internally, I think it just is a natural way to expand and kind of reinforce the presence of the podcast internally. That seems to be the biggest single thing that we've seen be successful.
Speaker 0 00:30:38 No, that's super cool. You know, the other thing I think that is like a really interesting selling point of the internal podcast, particularly for leadership and executives is it's an overused cliche of podcasting, but just the intimacy of it and maybe intimacy is the wrong word, but if you're listening to this right now, it feels like I am talking right into your ear. It does not feel like I am up in front of a stage doing a presentation. I hope. Um, um, but that ability to kind of really connect with staff, especially when everybody is remote and to feel like there is a human connection or that there's, you're really getting to know the people who are hosting the podcast is a pretty major when at, at scale and large organizations, especially when everybody is not seeing each other in person right now.
Speaker 1 00:31:21 And frankly, a lot of people are scared in different degrees and for different reasons, I think, yeah, leadership coming forward and saying, this is, this is the message, and this is what we're doing. This is what we stand for. People hearing that directly from the boss is still super powerful. Yeah. And I'm assuming you're seeing a lot of growth in this space too. We are, we're seeing a lot of interest and a lot of things that we never expected people to use this for.
Speaker 0 00:31:44 What's the biggest surprise. I shouldn't be asking you all the questions, but I'm super curious what the most unusual things you're seeing people use it for
Speaker 1 00:31:50 The biggest surprise has been in like telemedicine. So, uh, like psychiatrists and mental health practitioners wanting to have a private podcast for their patients. That's been the biggest one.
Speaker 0 00:32:02 That's awesome. Super smart. Yeah. Super smart.
Speaker 1 00:32:05 Yep. Just, you know, there's one listener per podcast, but that's even, again, kind of a hybrid. In some cases they have kind of a best practices or message for the week that can go to everybody. But they also have individual shows for some
Speaker 0 00:32:17 It's funny. Cause like I just, as you're saying that I'm like every time I go to a doctor's office and they were like, here's five things or whatever, I'll leave the office. And then in half an hour later being like, I only remember two of them. Oh no, I was going to be able to have that on demand to listen to. It would be amazing. That's awesome. It's really, that's a really smart idea. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:32:33 I feel very fortunate for us to have a tool that people come and say, Hey, I want to do this different with this tool you made and us to say, cool. Yeah, totally. You can do that. That's really fulfilling. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:32:46 I would love to see more of, and maybe it's happening and it just hasn't come through us yet. But universities and college and just in general education where, you know, you're not teaching in person in a lot of cases right now and just fundamentally rethinking what is a lecture look like and knowing that you could get guests for a lecture from all over the world to participate in a podcast that you would never be able to get in a classroom. They're really interesting opportunities. When you think about the constraints of where we're at right now, that opened up a whole new world of opportunities and being able to do a podcast and have world-class experts from all over coming to join you in your class brand new opportunity. It would be super interesting to make shows like that. I bet it would help people understand and make the classes way more compelling too.
Speaker 1 00:33:31 Absolutely. I think that the convergence of, of COVID and remote work and even remote learning at sprinkle in a low podcasting, I think could change a lot of how yeah. How we learn and how we live in the future. Not to be too esoteric or dramatic, but yeah, my kids are eight and 10 and I wonder, are they going to go to college? Like do university, it's going to be right on the cusp. I think of like all that will be different in 10 years. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:33:56 Well it's exciting times. It's uh, I've, you know, I can hear your passion for all this space and you know, our whole team, we're all in this. Cause you're in it. You're at the forefront of a, of a new medium that is still being invented. And it's, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun to be able to do some of these things for the first time and help figure out where it's going to go.
Speaker 1 00:34:13 Steve, this is a ton of fun. I wish we could talk for another two or three hours, but we'll have to have you back on for another episode later on for folks who want to kind of connect with you and learn more about what you guys are up to. Where's the best place,
Speaker 0 00:34:22 Our website Pacific hyphen content.com. I think if you just Google Pacific content podcasts, it'll come up as well.
Speaker 1 00:34:29 Steve Fred, thanks so much. Hey, thanks.
Speaker 0 00:34:30 Craig has been a great conversation. Really appreciate it.
