PodMov Daily: Wednesday, September 8

Episode 499: Your Midweek Update

Quality Control: Listen to Your Own Podcast Ads

Podcast adtech has come a long way, but no automation can escape human error. The solution? “Please listen to your stuff.” On the first birthday of Sounds Profitable, guest contributor James Cridland urges a bit of quality control. Unless you read and insert every ad yourself, unfortunate mistakes can creep up.

It’s easy to mess up loudness level, play frequency, and even the ad copy itself. As a listener, Cridland recently endured badly mixed segments (‘BOOM-whisper-BOOM’) from a top-10 podcast in Australia. He later discovered that the ad had been running, weird volume and all, since October of 2020. How?

“Either nobody at the podcast publisher has listened to this podcast for nine months, which is bad, or they have actually listened to this podcast and reckon it sounds fine, which is possibly worse,” he figures. Read on for more reasons to spot check, and thanks to SP for guiding us through a year in the world of adtech.

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How to Efficiently Stalk Your Podcast Guests

When he first began researching podcast guests, Jeffrey Boopathy’s “so-called brilliant idea” was to review a few videos and previous interviews. That’s a solid start, but good old-fashioned ‘stalking’ on social media may give hosts a clearer picture of their guests’ day-to-day interests, passions, and personality.

Twitter’s advanced search is a favorite tool of marketer and podcaster Dave Gerhardt (The DGMG Podcast, Seeking Wisdom). It’s easy to filter your guest’s archive of tweets by the number of likes, number of retweets, or keyword phrase to drill down into particular topics, accomplishments, or career highlights.

Recent activity on Podchaser and LinkedIn is always worth examining, Boopathy says. As you take the time to scroll and listen through this person’s life, enjoy the stalking as part of your due diligence: “Do your homework…You’re on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter anyway. Might as well make your time productive.”

Huge congratulations to Ashley Carman of The Verge on taking over Hot Pod! As a PM21 panelist, Ashley brought a fresh and valuable perspective to “Podcast Leadership: The Future from Every Angle.”

She’s a top-notch journalist the industry is lucky to have, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store. Read more from Nieman Lab, linked in the bullet points below.

I never thought when i wrote my first podcasting story, one about NPR’s ad tech, i’d end up on this beat for years, but i love it. the newsletter will let me write stories and explore topics that might be too niche for the big verge website but are critical for the industry

— Ashley Carman (@ashleyrcarman) September 7, 2021

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Here's what else is going on:

• Musical chairs: Vox Media has acquired the podcast industry newsletter Hot Pod, reports Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab. “Founder Nick Quah will become a full-time podcast reviewer for Vulture and Hot Pod, now written by Ashley Carman, will live on at The Verge as the site’s first paid product.”

• Nailed it: What if the killer was the podcast host all along? Comedy writer Matthew Grimminck steps into character. “I could talk about those serial killers, or I could talk about local crimes that have been baffling the police — crimes that I secretly committed.” Contains violent, hilarious imagery.

• Snail mail: During the pandemic’s peak, Kristin van Ogtrop listened to podcasts on 1.5x speed “just to get through the day.” In The Washington Post she advocates for slowing down, both our podcast listening and our lives. (Bello Collective editor Galen Beebe even takes it down to .8x speed.)

• On repeat: On Thursday, September 23, SquadCast.fm will host “How to Avoid Burnout & Keep Creating.” Brian Baltosiewich, the Emmy-nominated founder of Queen City Podcast Network, will outline steps to keep the podcast production process enjoyable and sustainable. Free registration.