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.
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.
It’s better to be good and liked than to be the best and have nowhere…
We’ve had a busy few weeks since Evolutions wrapped up! This week, we're sharing the…
Experience + continued training = a great end product.
Where you keep and organize your golden nuggets is almost as important as the ideas…
Our true selves are weird. We’re an amalgamation of brilliance, bizarreness, and at times, WTF-ness.