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Each week Grey brings you five important things happening in the world of social and digital media.
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5Things 8/28/23 Podcast Movement Recap
Daniel Avon: Welcome to the Five Things: This Week in Social, we are the Webby Award-winning podcast that looks at the five biggest stories in social connections, data, content and tech. To give you something smart to say when someone asks you “what's going on” out in the world instead of just, “you know, things and stuff.”
If you're a marketer, an advertiser, or a creator, or just anyone who makes a living using social platforms, or you just really love podcasts about social media or in today's case, a podcast about podcasts, and more specifically, a podcast about Podcast Movement, the world's largest podcast conference. This is the show for you.
Today on the podcast, we have our regular host and a special guest here to discuss the five things they took away from podcast movement. First off, it's This podcast's producer and usual host. Only this time in the panelist's seat. It's Joey Scarillo
Joey Scarillo: Hello, Daniel.
Daniel Avon: Hello,
Joey Scarillo: weird to be on the other side,
Daniel Avon: it's weird to be on the other side of you, So I got a question for you. Podcast conferences. It's kind of an interesting thing. I'm sure it brings in a bunch of interesting characters. Was there anything about this conference that made it unique. Anything that you saw there you didn't expect?
Joey Scarillo: There were two things. One thing that made it unique -- I thought the 7:00 AM yoga that happened each day, which was really fun. I did it one of the days. And I think some of the most unique and surprising people that I saw there were Eric Bischoff and Jeff Jarrett. Former WWE Superstars talking about building community. That was actually the most surprising session that I went to. It was really cool to see those old time WWE legends.
Daniel Avon: Very cool. It's not my culture, but I celebrate it and I love
Joey Scarillo:. 12-year-old me was very excited.
Daniel Avon: Amazing. 33 year old me is gonna introduce our next special, special guest. He is a podcast consultant and producer for hire. He's the founder of LightningPod in San Francisco, and before he started that company in 2020, he was at Vox Media where he produced the award-winning podcast: Recode/ Decode with Kara Swisher. He is also the former host of the internet culture podcast, Follow Friday, and the writer of the Follow Friday newsletter, which you can subscribe to at FollowFriday.email. And if you would like to hear more about our guest, you can learn more about him on LinkedIn or at LightningPod.fm.
This is Eric Johnson. Hi Eric. Welcome to the #5Things.
Eric Johnson: Hey, Daniel. Hey Joey. How's it going?
Daniel Avon: Welcome to our party. And speaking of parties, I'm sure that the Podcast Movement conference was a bit of a party in and of itself. I have a similar question for you.
What was unique for you? This may not have been your first time. Anything different that they did this year that they didn't do in the past?
Eric Johnson: Yeah, no, it wasn't my first time. And you forgot to mention in my bio, I'm also a former WWE superstar. I mean, everyone knows that.
No, it this time it was really interesting because they had the same level of quality of the content on Stage. Podcast Podcast Movement always does a good job selecting who's gonna speak, what the panels are gonna be, having a diverse range of material out there for podcasters at different levels.
But this time they tried a fun social experiment where they put all of these stages into the same expo hall, meaning that the audio from each stage was bleeding over into all the other stages. I think it was a brilliant social experiment to see which podcast producers they could piss off the most. I'm among them, but the actual content was great. I had a great time at the conference in spite of this horrendous audio quality.
Daniel Avon: I do wonder if it was sort, if there's like a test on the backend of who has the cleanest audio in the podcast to come. But time will tell and I'm Daniel Avon, and though I personally was not fortunate enough to be at podcast Movement, I have been to Denver and my sister and her family lived there.
And what I learned about Denver the last time I was there, it, it is a super family friendly and kid inclusive. Environment in all establishments. Namely, you can go to a brewery and while you're enjoying a beer and a burger, children are running around coloring and coloring books. There's usually playgrounds. It's a really great place for all that and a great place to be a good uncle.
Without further ado, let's get into today's extra special edition of the Five Things where we're bringing together the top five things that our panelists took away from the Podcast Movement Conference. Which in my understanding is the largest podcast conference in the world, and it brings together people from all verticals and aspects of the industry.
As a listener of a podcast, you usually just think about The hosts and the panelists, and maybe a little bit of production, but there are a lot of people involved in the whole process. This event brought all of those folks together to meet minds and learn what's new and trending in the space and how others are doing many of the same things that other podcasts are doing.
Why we have Eric on the podcast with us today is that Eric moderated a panel. Joey was on entitled Pods of the Busy & Famous: Strategies for High Profile Podcast Production about how producers get the job done. They were joined by Amanda Freberg, manager of the McElroy Family from “My Brother, My Brother, and Me; The Adventure Zone and so forth. And Jonathan Meijvar senior producer at Pineapple Street Studios and former producer at this American Life and Fresh Air.
So, let's get into the pod today.
First up Joey is going to address the question on all of our minds. Can a video podcast, in fact be a podcast?
Next, Eric discusses his takeaways on how to market your podcast.
Then Joey gets meta and talks about branded podcasts.
After that, Eric will get behind the numbers and data of podcasts.
And finally, Joey will get us up to speed on AI meeting podcasts.
So let's get into it, Joey. help us answer the question, what constitutes a podcast?
Joey Scarillo:. Can a video be a podcast? Using YouTube and short form video to grow and promote your show? Quick warning here. This is going to get really “podcast nerdy”, but let's dive in.
Okay. The two biggest questions I heard were is a podcast still a podcast if it's a video? And how can I use video to leverage my podcast?
First, what defines a podcast is a controversial topic. The podcast purists would say that it has to be audio led and have an RSS feed. An RSS feed for those who don't know, is basically what allows podcasters to put their episodes on the web so that listeners can access them from platforms like Spotify, Apple, PocketCast, et cetera.
And YouTube, in its current state, is not an RSS platform, but does have plans to update that. I was involved in a round table discussion about this topic and landed on what defines a podcast, and basically -- it is not by the purists or the people at Podcast Movement. But rather the culture dictates or defines what is a podcast.
So, what is a video podcast? You've definitely seen them before. Even if you don't know you have, one of the most popular is Alex Cooper's Call her daddy.
It helps if it also helps that it is one of the most popular podcasts. But for her, the move to video was rather natural. Other video podcasts that you may have seen are clips from the Joe Rogan experience - which is uh, a different topic for a different day… and you've probably even seen clips or episodes of the Rich Eisen Show, which is a sports show, but also plays on television.
So you can find video podcasts in most of the places where you can find videos including YouTube. And on Spotify where you can also find most podcasts.
Creators are rushing to these platforms to get their video content posted. About a year ago, YouTube really seriously entered the podcast game, and while there was no clear consensus if podcasting on YouTube would work for every show, I think it's safe to say that Podcasters, networks, brands and the platforms have to reassess their expectations.
Viewers and listeners will not jump immediately to a new platform to consume your content. So at the outset, don't expect a massive view numbers right away and don't expect the same numbers to see and don't expect the same numbers on other platforms. It is best not to set your expectations too high, but rather to just keep them at a moderate pace and test out what it's like to put your videos on these platforms.
When it comes to short form, creators and podcasters are using TikTok, Reels and [YouTube] Shorts to create short form content from longer videos. This can be clips of the show jumping on a trend or using audio in an interesting way. When it comes to the short form content, some of the biggest watch outs I heard were: First, there's a rumor that the platforms value and reward through the algorithm, content created in-platform and not reusing or uploading from others. (However, I heard there are hacks for this.) The second thing I heard is to keep in mind that all content drives to a different part of the funnel. So for us, nerdy marketing folks, that means that not every post has to drive to a link to listen to a full episode.
Awareness, especially on TikTok, is really important. So just like any brand getting into TikTok, podcasters have to use the same rigor. And answering the question of if a podcast should be on YouTube, I say yes. There's no reason for it not to be. Podcasters, just like us should push to be on as many platforms as possible.
Okay, I think that's everything Daniel.
Daniel Avon: All good. So consensus Joey… Podcasts can be with video in some capacity and can live on YouTube.
Now, Eric, what say you, you've been in the game for a while. What existentially is a podcast and is there room for video in the game?
Eric Johnson: think Joey was spot on when he said it's not up to us to decide what a podcast is. In fact Coleman Insights and Amplified Media presented some new research on the last day of the conference and they found that 75% of podcast consumers say that a podcast could be audio or video. Only 22% said audio only. So there's your number right there.
People are fine with video, they're fine with audio, and in fact, a lot of people who consume podcasts on YouTube. They're not necessarily watching all of the video. They're putting it on and just having the audio playing in the background, for instance, on their TV or on their iPad while they're doing something else.
However, I will take issue with one thing Joey said about there's being no reason not to jump into the pool here. I talk to a lot of folks who are more cautious about it because video is more expensive than audio, especially if you wanna do it well, and it's really hard to catch up with all the people who have years, or at this point, almost decades of experience of making top-notch.
Content for YouTube, the sort of stuff that does really well on YouTube, different rules apply. They're completely different in a lot of ways from audio. And so it takes time to really figure out what sort of content works there. Same thing on TikTok. We went to a panel all about making podcast work on TikTok, and one of my favorite things there was they said, yeah, the TikTok audience will punish you if you look like you're trying. They hate the inauthenticity of making a short form video as a marketing engine to try and drive traffic back to your podcast. If there's a whiff of effort involved in your podcast clip that you've put on TikTok, people will be like, “Nope!” keep on scrolling. “Next thing, this sucks.”
So there's a tricky balance to find here between using these video platforms as a good marketing tool, while also not wasting your time, wasting your money, doing something that people aren't gonna wanna watch.
Joey Scarillo: I actually, agree with you on everything you said. And the only thing that I would say about people jumping onto these other platforms, and I get that they're weary and I always tell people come to me and say “I wanna start a podcast, what do I do?” there are incremental steps.
And so I think even when it comes to the video production, there are ways to get in and get on YouTube without needing to go all in on expensive video production. There completely agree. But I think there are hacks, there are ways to get around that, which could be just posting a static image of your show art with the audio underneath it.
So yeah, I do wanna say that there are varying degrees of what a podcast looks like on YouTube. Everything from just a static image to even an audiogram to something full on.
Eric Johnson: and this is something that came up a lot at the most recent, at the previous Podcast Movement conference in Las Vegas earlier this year, people were talking about the different levels of effort you could potentially put into a YouTube video.
And one of the most interesting things I learned there was that the thumbnail the still image that you see in the YouTube grid, that's arguably more important than what's on screen while the video is playing. The thumbnail and the title of the video, because if no one clicks on the video, they're not gonna, you know, even consider whether they wanna listen to your podcast. So, getting people in the door with those little bits of optimization are hugely important, even if you're doing a static image video for your podcast.
Daniel Avon: Very interesting gentlemen, and from the TikTok perspective, the videos that I've seen most successful, it's just people sitting on their couch with microphones like, low production, low fidelity, just people hanging out. So I get it and I'm curious to see if we will see more folks, even more folks taking their podcasts to video with all of this great information that we have for you today.
So Eric, we're gonna change topics and talk a little bit more about how to market a podcast, so obviously you have your own experience and there was a lot discussed at Podcast Movement. So curious to hear what you have to say on the state of the state on that.
Eric Johnson: Yeah, at any of these podcasting conferences, I spend a lot of my time in and around the marketing folks 'cause I'm trying to figure out, just like everyone else, what's the cutting edge of this stuff?
Are there any new tricks, any new hacks that people are using to get a little bit ahead. I always find it interesting just to see what people are talking about and also what they're not talking about.
So in terms of what they are talking about, there was some familiar ground being covered this year. There was a lot of talk about promo swaps --. And what that is where you tell podcast listeners, “Hey, I really like this other show. You should go listen to it when you're done with this.” And meanwhile, on that other show, the host is telling their listeners to go listen to your show. So back and forth. Usually, it's a free exchange in place of a paid advertisement. Really, really effective. The data has always shown that that is really, really good for helping a podcast grow.
Another thing that I'd heard a little bit about before but was glad to hear discussed in more detail: Was a podcasty flavor of SEO, search engine optimization. In Google you only get a little bit of information when you search for something. Same thing with a podcast. You're searching for a show about a specific topic that you like. You just get that little bit of information the, show art, the title of the podcast. And you click through to the podcast and you only get a little information about the titles of the episodes and a few words about what's in each of those episodes. And so it's pretty simple. What can you put in that small amount of real estate that will actually convince someone to click? And how do you do it without annoying your existing listeners or without compromising their experience?
I know I've certainly clicked through to many a recipe website through Google and it's like, oh my God, this is horrible.This is optimized only for Google. I can't find the stupid recipe that I want. Similar thing, you don't wanna be over optimizing this here. But it's an interesting discussion people are having about how do how do you get people in the door while not pissing other people off?
And then finally, another theme that I heard a lot about was video clips. We already talked a bit about this, but it's using TikTok and using other short form video platforms in order to drive people back to your podcast. But like I was saying all of these platforms have their own rules, their own cultures, and so it's a difficult balance to find as I was saying, where you don't want to be appear inauthenticity. Where you don't wanna appear inauthentic to the regular users of those platforms. So that's three big themes that I heard about a lot at Podcast Movement.
But I think that like jazz, you kind of have to listen to the notes they don't play, so other than TikTok and YouTube, there were zero panels about promoting podcasts on social media. Like in all of my conversations with folks around the conference, over three days, the only time something like Twitter came up was in the context of making fun of Elon Musk or someone saying, “yeah I don't use that anymore.” I didn't hear anyone talking about some exciting new way that they have found to use threads, or Mastodon or Instagram.
It kind of felt like we were back in 2010. People were talking a lot about this old medium of podcasting and I barely heard that much about these massive, incredibly popular social platforms – which you guys know a hell of a lot about and you've think about this stuff all the time and I think it's fascinating. Our industry didn't seem to be thinking about them that much at least not at this conference.
Daniel Avon: Interesting. Sounds like they're taking millennial listeners such as myself for granted, because. I personally, I know this is a little bit heresy. I'm not on TikTok and I get all of my information secondhand from TikTok onto Instagram and Twitter and or X now, and therefore, like those are places to. To link and continue to build your network because not a single social platform is a hundred percent penetration or whatever.
Daniel Avon: So you have to have some sort of like diverse strategy and all those things. And I love what you said of get people in without pissing them off.
That is such a stupid, simple, but very smart way of looking at like the user experience and making sure that you're setting up yourself and listeners for the success that they want. Speaking of though, I'm curious, Joey how we are thinking about setting up listeners for success and listening to what they want here at Grey. If you want to give us a peek behind the curtain… tell us a little bit about the lessons you learned.
Joey Scarillo: Yeah, I could give you a little peek behind the curtain.
So when Eric and I met, we actually met through doing promo swaps, and so I'm really glad that you brought that up. I think we saw together a great talk from Lauren Passel who runs Tink Media. She has a [Promo Swap] database and that's actually how we got connected.
And one of the things that I think is so interesting about promo swaps is that when someone reaches out to me to do a promo swap or we reach out to somebody else, we have to remember that what we're aiming to do with these promo swaps is to bring a new audience to our show. So, we're trying to find the right people that would want to listen to the Five Things.
So for us, we're reaching out to shows that are usually marketing shows or shows that creators would listen to because that's who our audience is. And so, whenever we do a promo for another show, we are also vouching for that other show to our audience. It works both ways. It almost feels introducing your parents to somebody that you're dating. - Like you have to vouch for this person now and they are vouching for you to their community. So it, really is a two-way street. And I just can't say enough about how much I appreciate promo swaps and what they've done for the industry and for our show here.
Daniel Avon: Amazing. And I think vouching for brands we can also think about the way that we communicate them. And I know one of the things, Joey, that you wanted to talk about, one of the things that is near and dear to us, is this notion of branded podcasts. So, give us the latest on what's there and what you learned.
Joey Scarillo: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe you've heard of a branded podcast or maybe you've heard one without knowing you're listening to one. {Secret. You're listening to one right now.} So, a branded podcast is any show brought to you by a brand.
We don’t usually think of Grey as a brand because typically we represent brands, but in the grand scheme of it, that's what you're listening to. And so sometimes these podcasts are produced by third parties.
We here at Grey produce our own podcasts, but sometimes these third party agencies like iHeart's, newly formed studio, Ruby, Jar Audio, Pacific Content, or even from media outlets like Vox Creative or T-Brand Studios from the New York Times.
Other times, branded audio can come right from an organization itself like a nonprofit or a small business or a global ad agency, and it will align with the marketing initiatives of the presenter and always always must be entertaining or informative first. Hopefully we succeed at all those things.
So regardless of if a podcast is dubbed, “branded” or not, the audience must be at the center. And this is something you hear over and over and over. Knowing who you're talking to is so important.
There were several panels on the topic that I found insightful. Obviously, coming from an agency and producing our two podcasts, I'm familiar with the idea of branded audio and which shows have been successful. I listened to these panels to hear more from other experts to dig deeper on the topic.
The show I heard the most buzz about was from Mattress Firm called Chasing Sleep.This podcast was produced by iHeart's Ruby. The hosts explore the interesting relationship between sleep and the vast effects on sleep and on our quality of life. People love this show and it has paid off big time for Mattress Firm who saw a 45% lift in incremental sales after the show was released.
If you're a brand thinking about getting into podcasts, then the first thing you need to know is that, people want to be entertained and not sold to. The number one rule that we always say about branded podcasts is that nobody wants to listen to a 30-minute ad for a brand. Entertain your audience and then people will trust you and then they will keep coming back to listen to your show.
We at the agency, we talk a lot about brand stewardship. And so, we really think that when it comes to podcasts, you want to use your podcast to also be a steward for your brand. You don't want to beat people over the head with your brand messaging, you just want to talk to them. Just have a conversation.
I thought that was really fascinating. Just like I said, digging deeper into the latest and greatest from branded audio.
Daniel Avon: Cool. Thank you. I think that the example you brought of the mattress brand's, pretty brilliant, like vertical alignment, but also something that people need to hear about and are interested in listening to. That is a good example, but I'm curious more broadly, Eric, if you think that brands can really organically create community around a branded podcast they might like in a social platform or social environment.
Eric Johnson: I think that entirely depends on the content of the show that they're making. If you have a show that's a fiction podcast that has some light branding elements around the side where thematically you have and the, {I don't know. I'm trying, I'm making something on the spot here.} You could have something where it's a fictional reality where, you know, all of the medieval type heroes are doing battles with nightmares. And I haven't listened to Chasing Sleep, maybe that's what this is it. But you could have a sleep brand, a sleep affiliated brand where they're putting themselves adjacent with a really fun fictional show. I think you could definitely build a huge listener community around that and really passionate fan base around that. But I think the more attainable goal is to offer some nonfiction content that's just useful to people across whatever your target audience is.
So for instance, I went to a session about user testing moderated by Andrea Marquez at Podcast Movement. She's the host of a podcast called, This Is Small Business. It's a branded podcast from Amazon. Which is kind of interesting, right? Because Amazon … not a small business, but they are trying to attract a lot of small business owners to join their marketplace, right?
That's their target audience. And so her show is all about stories of those small businesses and what they're doing. How they're succeeding, things like that. It was also interesting, and she was talking about user testing, the podcast, and one of the things they tested was whether or not to include Amazon branding front and center. Would that makes someone more or less likely to click through to check out a podcast if they knew that Amazon was the one making it?
But anyway, yeah, I think that's something where you really need to define the goals, like the audience you're trying to reach and what you want to get out of them. For most branded shows, they're not necessarily trying to build a gigantic community that's gonna be talking about the show or thinking about it in their off hours, making fan art, posting it on Discord, any of that sort of stuff.
I think really the, smart money is to figure out a very specific audience you want to reach and then just tailor the content of the podcast to that.
Daniel Avon: Very good. And the way you're talking about it. There's a lot of podcasts out there, there's a lot of room for a lot more podcasts to be out there. And this industry that is not so old at this point, or that is not so old, is really maturing and now there are also data tools and so forth that you can learn a little bit more about performance and much more on your podcast. And I know that was something that was discussed at Podcast Movement. I'm hoping Eric, you can tell us a little bit about how data can be applied, the kind of numbers behind the podcast.
Eric Johnson: Yeah, this was my favorite session of the whole conference. It was a talk given by Dan Misner from Bumper and it's called Beyond the Download. The short version of what he was saying was that a lot of podcasters by default point to how many downloads they're getting to measure the success or failure of their shows.
Because in the podcasting space, publishers can't collect as much data about listeners as they could on, for instance, social media platforms. So the download has been the go-to data point, but it's flawed, it's noisy, it's possible to have downloaded an episode and then never listened to it, which is a misleading, worthless piece of data if you're a publisher trying to figure out, “Hey, is my show actually working?”
So in recent years, Apple and Spotify have been rolling out more detailed data. For podcast listeners who are on their apps, which is still a majority of the podcast market, so it's a pretty good chunk of the listener base and what they're telling publishers, “Hey here's who's actually starting to listen to an episode, here's how long they stick around.” And what Dan went through in this talk is he's been developing a dashboard to mash up these new data points. And you can see at a glance, all the different ways a show is growing or not just the raw download number.
So for example, he recommends taking the number that Apple or Spotify provides of how many people are listening to an episode and using that to calculate the average number of episodes per listener per week. Now that sounds incredibly dorky because it is. But if you think about it this way, let's say you release two episodes of your podcast every week. If that number is higher than two, that's a great sign because that means your listeners are going back in the archives and listening to old episodes, not just the new stuff that's coming out.
So that's an example of something where that wouldn't necessarily be obvious from the raw big download number. But if that number is really unusually high, then that's at a very important data point.
So I think within a couple years we are gonna see a lot of podcast analytics platforms begin to offer dashboards similar to the one Dan is working on – plugging into Apple, into Spotify, using these numbers in more interesting ways. Currently analytics and podcasting is very fragmented, but that will change with time.
Daniel Avon: I remember when I was on the media side and we were trying to sell in podcasts to clients to place media and host reads and all these different things. It was around the time that iHeart was developing like a certain ad placement where it could just go into any show as it was being streamed and that made sense.
But as you're saying, like it's so fragmented and it's not the same, not one size fits all and we just have to apply and learn from a branded perspective how to engage.
And as a podcast producer or host Joey, I'm curious for you, either for Grey or just thinking more broadly, like what do you think are additional metrics or different ways to look at the data that other podcasters could benefit looking at.
Joey Scarillo: Hmm. I think looking for trends is really important. For us we host two shows, and we understand that the audience of those two shows the #5Things: This week in social, {the podcast you're listening to right now,} and Grey Matter: A Podcast About Ideas that those two audiences are going to be different. And so we have to understand that going in.
And so when we look at the listenership for Grey Matter, for example, we see that most people do go back and listen to the archives, so older episodes are still increasingly getting listened because people will go back, and that's also by design, right? We created that show to be evergreen so that those conversations could be listened to at any point.
#5Things is a little bit different, right? It only has a shelf life of about a week before the news turns over again. For this show, we see a consistent listener base, which is great. Some weeks we do have spikes, but we consistently see numbers that are pretty attuned to the week before and we can pretty much guess what we're going to see the next week.
Daniel Avon: Amazing. The numbers don't lie. That's the takeaway for me. Speaking of not lying or just things that are a little dubious potentially. We've, spoken about on this podcast a lot about AI, how it's disrupting platforms how it's disrupting search engines and so many other generative spaces but we've yet to speak about how AI is intersecting with podcasts.
And I know that was a topic at the conference. Joey, tell us a little bit about what you learned and should I be scared that my podcast job is up?
Joey Scarillo: I'll admit I am not an AI expert, but I do like to listen and learn about these things. And I did hear quite a bit about the inevitable way that AI will be introduced into podcasting, just like every other category.
So there was first an experiment conducted by the branded audio agency JAR Audio, which I mentioned before where they had an AI team that they called the Red Team, instructed ChatGPTt o create a client similar to Airbnb and they ended up calling it Staycationary - which is a pretty cool name. They requested this AI to suggest topics for the Staycationary podcast, focusing on travel and then ChatGPT proposed a travel related topics within 25 seconds, including “slow travel”.
And podcast that they created through AI was also voiced by an AI. And interestingly, ChatGPT insisted that both of the guests be named Olivia. I don't know why, but I just thought that was really interesting and noteworthy.
Okay, so that was on the AI side. Red team is creating Staycationary using entire, entirely using AI. Now on the human side, they were also producing Staycationary and producers gave personal backpacking experiences. They brought a lot more authenticity. I know it's a word we use a lot, but they also interviewed slow travel experts at a local nature park. And they had an immersive sound design, which added elements to enhance the narrative.
Okay, so you've got these two different podcasts. You've got the one with the sound design, you've got the one with the two Olivia's. Who do you think won Daniel?
Daniel Avon: I am going to guess the human…
Joey Scarillo: That's right. The Human Podcast won. The results were, 96% of the respondents said that the Human Made Podcast made them feel, “Most inspired to try slow travel.”
Interestingly enough, 96% of the respondents also said that the human made podcast quote gave me a positive feeling towards the sponsoring brand Staycationary – which remember is fake. And 96% of the respondents enjoyed the human made podcast the most. This is all great. This is very reassuring to me as a podcast host and producer that at least in the current moment, my job is safe and that the robots aren't coming to produce and host this podcast.
However, like I said on the show before, AI can be a tool. And so there was one company that had a booth at the conference called Podium that made an AI model that will create show notes, highlights, chapters, and transcripts for podcasters. As someone who has to do all this work, I can tell you that a tool like this could be very helpful.
One really impressive thing that Podium was doing only at the conference was creating pod books based on podcast episodes that already exist. So I, of course had to try it out and decided to use an episode of Grey Matter: A Podcast About Ideas as the source material. I was given a physical book that outlined our conversation from earlier this year with Broadway's Jesse Mueller. The book tells the story of the episode in a narrative form instead of just rehashing it in a transcript.
It was really impressive. I can't say if we will use AI to create supporting content around this show right now, but at least I know for the foreseeable future that you will only hear human voices on this show.
Robot voice: Cannot compute.
Daniel Avon: (robot voice) Cannot compute. I'm just kidding. So is our perspective on things. I'm curious, Eric, if you did the same thing and made a book of, one of your shows, or if there are other ways, you're seeing AI, introducing its way into the way you do podcasts on your day to day, or you're feeling about the prospect of AI and podcasting.
Eric Johnson: Now I feel like a moron because I had tested Podium before. It's a good product, but I don't currently use it, and so I skipped their booth. I was like, “yeah, I already know what Podium's about.” I should have gone and gotten a book. I feel really stupid for, not at least stopping by. But anyway, yeah, I have used AI tools.
A lot of podcasters are using AI or AI adjacent tools in their day-to-day. Descript is probably the most popular one, and they recently rolled out a beta feature where if you or a podcast guest flubs a word, it can try to make a deep fake their voice so you can highlight the section of the transcript where the word doesn't sound quite right, and Descript will listen to the model of everything else they've said and try and make it sound more natural. I didn't hear anyone talking about this at this particular conference, but Put a pin in that there's gonna be a lot of tricky ethical conversations that are gonna come up if that feature catches on. I already suggested it at one point to a client and he was like, “you know what? Not feeling good about this, but thanks for letting me know it's out there.”
And then my other thing on AI is everyone I talk to about it. They are fully accepting that generative AI tools like ChatGPT, are here to stay, whether it's like Podium or their competitor CastMagic or one of these other tools people will be using these tools in some fashion, but everyone I talked to was really trying to be cautious. No one wants to release a product that's like that is bringing AI chat bot that would declare its love for users or engage them in unsettling conversations about burning down the world or whatever that was.
And I talked to a senior person at a big media company and she said, yeah, we're developing some AI tools in-house using our existing podcast library, but we are being really careful about it because they do not want to wind up with a situation where an AI is telling people something false. They don't want to wind up with something where it's sick. They don't want to wind up having it say something embarrassing. So there are a lot of risks involved in this, but I think everyone is taking it seriously and is moving ahead with using tools like this.
Daniel Avon: Very cool. I just fortuitously finished a video game called Watchdog's Legion, where it's all about AI and the most sentient of the AIs was some was like an individual brain being mapped. So until we get to that level of technology where you can upload an individual into the cloud, I think hopefully it's just tools to make us work smarter, not harder. And good to hear that people in these big organizations are treading lightly and making sure to do so responsibly, as we've seen some other stuff emerge in the other AI spaces where that's not been as much the case in terms of paying creators and so forth. As long as the intent is there and the coders know what the intent is and they're making it happen. I'm on board.
I don't know about you listener, but I feel like we have learned a lot and it's as if we were there with you all in Denver.
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Of course. I want to thank our panel today, Joey, and a special thank you to Eric for joining us.
And a reminder of how to get in touch with or learn more about Eric Johnson. You can find him on LinkedIn or LightningPod.fm and you can follow along with his Follow Friday newsletter at Follow Friday.email.
And as always, a big special thanks to Samantha Geller, Amanda Fuentes, and the crew at Gramercy Park Studios behind the scenes. That does it for us today.
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