The Ruler and the Regent; The Audio Monarchy [ENCORE]

Welcome to the Sound in Marketing podcast. The Sound In Marketing Podcast explores and defines sound on purpose, in marketing and in advertising. I'm your host Jeanna Isham, owner and founder of Dreamr Productions and Sound in Marketing Learning. I create, consult and educate brands on the power of sound in marketing.

Season nine is coming soon, but as I gear up for that one, here's one more encore episode to share. This one was commissioned by Oxford Rhod’s, Ad Infinitum. Remember the state of Sonic branding episode? Yep.

Same people. So sit back, relax with a cup of coffee and you're make sound on purpose mug and learn with me this time about King Radio, Prince podcasting, and all the other regents that follow. The Ruler and the Regency. The audio monarchy.

Take it away, Stew. This is ad infinitum. AD infinitum is the award winning podcast solely focused on audio ads. The creatives who make them endure the latest thinking that informs them how the space is evolving.

And my favorite part? A roundup of recent audio ads with analysis by yours truly, Stew Redwine, and each episode's guest. Today's episode is something a little different. No ad roundup, no scoring, no guest interview.

Instead, this is a special editorial episode written and hosted by Jeanna Isham, a voice I deeply respect and one I trust to interrogate audio at the level it deserves. If ad infinitum usually lives in the how how ads work, why they convert, where they win. This episode zooms out to the why. Why sound matters, why sonic identity isn't decoration, why audio isn't just another channel, but a system.

Historical. Emotional, cultural. This episode sits in the lineage of the state of sonic branding. It's not commentary, it's perspective.

A map of where we've been, what we've forgotten, and what's quietly becoming unavoidable. Jeanna brings rigor, restraint, and a deep respect for the listener's intelligence. She doesn't overexplain. She connects dots.

She let sound do what sound has always done best. Carry meaning. So listen closely. Not like you're consuming content, but like you're stepping into context.

Long, long ago, in a faraway land, King Radio ruled. No one had ever seen or more accurately, heard anything like it. Because this kingdom was forged from silence. Prince, podcasting and all the other regions were born from the laws that King Radio first established.

These six sonic laws govern the audio monarchy to this day. Law number one. Attention! Earn it fast.

Law number two. Trust. Law number three. Memory.

Make it stick. Law number four. Proximity. Understand the context and deliver it personally.

Law number five. Monetization. An absolute must and law number six the covenant. The promise not to abuse the listener's time and to respect their loyalty.

To fully understand the significance of the Six Laws, how they shaped advertising, and the ownership of time, we need to revisit the early days of yore. The inception of King Radio to help us along our quest, we are joined by the Royal Counsel, Kraig Kitchin. Chancellor of the airwaves Cynthia myers, the royal historian Paul Riismandel, and Tom Webster, the royal scribes and arielle nissenblatt, Shaun Colon, and Dallas Taylor, the Royal Troubadours. King radio was invented from nothing.

Its mission was to bring together a nation through a unified voice, and in doing so, it became the gatekeeper to culture, knowledge and entertainment for all future audio regions. The entities who governed the airwaves were the royal ministers, the networks and the broadcasters, and the grand viziers were the advertisers. We start our journey with Kraig Kitchin, chancellor of the airwaves, and Cynthia myers, our royal historian. It was at a time when newspapers and newsreels were really the de facto way that people obtained information.

Before we had broadcast radio, the only way you could hear somebodys voice was going to an event where they would give a speech or play. When the radio first came into a home, it was a brand new experience. A large oversize radio went into the center of their living room and homes. You see little Johnnies on the floor looking at the comics.

Mother is knitting. Father has the newspaper out. Little Susie is playing with her doll while they're listening to the radio. King radio fulfilled law number one by grabbing the listeners attention fast.

It also fulfilled the promise of Trust Law number two through proximity Law number four. I have to imagine how even more amazing radio was when it debuted. Here is something just in the air, and all you needed was a little transistor to really get access to it. And Sean Cologne, a royal troubadour, mentions this new voice was stunning and revolutionary.

The audience was instantly invested in the 1930s. Everybody had a radio, which meant that advertisers were able to access massive, massive audiences of millions and millions and millions of households. The radio moment was almost like an anomaly. There was not really a time in history where you could have one thing where you spoke to everyone.

There were only two national networks in the 1930s. You could only have one thing going out on the feed at a time. As Paul Riesman Doyle, one of our royal scribes, points out. Radio is founded on scarcity.

There's only so many stations, only so many spots on the dial. You only had so many choices. To ensure a captive audience. The royal ministers, aka the networks, enforced live programing.

The networks were afraid that if they let stations play recorded programs and recorded music, then the audiences would tune out because it wouldn't be so exciting. Radio had an audience, but profitability lie number five had yet to be seen. However, in order to become profitable, someone was going to have to fund the programing. Enter the grand visitors, the advertising agencies, advertisers stepped in kind of when nobody else did.

Broadcasters themselves, they didn't want to pay for the content because they had no way of charging the listeners. So unlike theater or movies or vaudeville, you can have a door and you could keep the door locked against the people who hadn't paid for a ticket. You couldn't do that with a technology that just sort of spreads. Networks radiates outwards without any way of really controlling who receives that signal.

Seeing as the grand visitors were in charge of Law number five, monetization, it was only natural that they would control the content. The advertisers chose the program. The ad agency produced it. J Walter Thompson, for example, produced Kraft Music Hall for Kraft Cheese.

There must be some. One way they connect it to their audience by hiring Bing Crosby to be the MC. They were connecting the brand to a personality who people already liked. Radio host.

Whether or not it was Orson Welles who was probably the highest profile of all of them, or any number of other dozens and dozens of hosts would find their way to building trust with the audience, believing that the news and information they shared was worthwhile and proved to be true. Those voices came to be trusted. The power of audio is a tremendous thing that trust that relationship. The value in people's time, those things carry over trust.

Relationship and valuing people's time is the essence of law. Number six the covenant. There was a time when the radio medium was the champion audio medium. In the 1930s.

It rivaled newspapers for credibility of information, and it had the added benefit that if something happened in the news cycle, the radio industry could bring it immediately to a listener. Human nature wants information quickly. Radio was the one to many way to get information out. Not just news and entertainment, but also advertising mediums.

Radio learned early on that profitability was key in order to remain profitable. Law number five, monetization was established to secure the monarchy's lasting reign. Thus began the age of advertising and as the advertisers, the grandfathers now owned the time, they also owned the content. Thus, the brand was the show, so it was called craft Musical.

It wasn't called Bing Crosby Musical. If people liked the kind of entertainment that they were hearing, the next time they went into the grocery store, they would ask for Kraft brand cheese as opposed to another brand. Radio advertising was a brand new thing, and without knowing all the lessons of King Radio that we know today, the grand visitors were experimenting. Advertisers are really worried about listener attention.

They didn't expect that everybody was listening actively all the time. And so the commercials themselves, those could be up to two minutes long. They insisted on repeating everything in order to make sure that the message got through. One of the main strategies that they used in the 30s and 40s was to avoid interrupting the program with a separate ad announcement.

So one of the strategies that they used was to integrate the brand into the program itself. For many, many years, that was the de facto thing on broadcast radio. It vanished sometime in the late 50s, but it was pervasive in the 30s, 40s and 50s. These shows relied heavily on celebrity influence.

You had the comedian Jack Benny, whose show was sponsored by Jell-O. He would open his show by saying. Thank you, fellows. Thank you, Jell-O again.

There's a Jack Benny talking and done. That was a fine build up. The Gibson family, a drama sponsored by Procter and Gamble, the soap company. They had a scene in which one of the members of the family is talking to her, made about, you know, different facial soaps and how important they are.

Do you can. See the poise of your skin with beauty, oils, the mysterious. Ingredients? And so it sounded the same as the program.

It was delivered by the characters in the program. And it also was a way of sort of keeping the audience from being annoyed and therefore maintaining trust. It was all part of the 60 minute experience, or 30 minute experience that somebody turned on the radio to get. One of the strategies they used was actually repetition, repetition, repetition, law.

Number three memory. Make it stick. Soap operas. They were produced and created and sponsored by soap companies like Procter and Gamble.

Every 15 minute episode, you would have to wait to the next day to find out what would happen next. The brighter day brought to you by cheer New Blue Cheer. The only subs with the Blue Magic Whitener. Action would take weeks, like one scene would take many episodes.

A listener could miss an episode or not be paying attention, but they would find out from the announcer who would do like a recap or summary at the beginning, and then parts of these scenes would be repeated. If there was an advertising message before the drama started. It was because the sponsor providing the entertainment felt that you needed to know something. Radio listeners were so enthralled with the new medium that they accepted all those rules.

Where commercials were placed was just standard practice. During those soap operas, they would have a two minute announcement about the soap, which was extremely repetitive. What they were doing was listing all the product attributes. So the soap gets the laundry whiter.

It doesn't make your hands red. It has more suds than the competitor, etc., etc.. You were selling the product based on the product attributes, not on the brand image that comes along a little later.

They thought that the way that you made the sale was to say this soap is better, so you need to buy it. And then they would repeat it over and over, and then they would spell out the brand because they were afraid that people wouldn't remember it. So you would hear o x y d o o for utz at all, or I n s o for orange. So, I n s.

O rinse. And repeat this over and over again. It was based on this assumption that this was necessary in order to imprint the brand into the brain of the listener today. That's just agonizing to listen to.

We are more accustomed to compressed time rather than extended time. But back then they were operating on that assumption that people needed that extended time, that listeners needed to have everything repeated to them. They were worried that if they just talked about the brand in an emotional way, that it wouldn't work as. Well as radio reach critical mass.

But the number of advertisers multiplied over and over again. Individuals who were advertising on radio realized that if I invest in radio and I use somebody's voice because they've earned the trust of the audience, you're going to get a good return on investment. Capitalism, as they agreed, is their diversification for having no reliance on one sponsor was very, very prominent, but it was all in control of the radio broadcaster at that time. Similarly, on television in the 1950s and 1960s, the same thing was true.

New methods of purchasing were introduced to help persuade customers that they could in fact afford the products. You could take advantage of the purchase of an appliance, for instance, and only put 2 or $3 down and do the rest of it on layaway. Or you could purchase the car for $50 down and the rest of it on layaway terms. The sense of urgency of being able to actually buy something immediately.

The hard sell was insistent, pushy, and in-your-face, and there's just so much of that that one can take. There was a limit to just how much hard selling could go on. You couldn't have 4 or 5 commercials in a row that was just repeatedly hard sell hard sell hard sell. The boss, who was harsh to the ear and radio programmers knew that and knew that if they wanted to hold the attention of a listener, they needed to include and encouraged a soft sell advertising.

You're asking folks to retain a whole lot of information in a short amount of time, and if you have that catch line, if you have the slogan, you want to get that in there at the beginning, in the middle, in the end, they match it up to the right brand of insurance, the right brand of mayonnaise. You know, the right brand of mattress. They make that connection. Law number three.

Memory was important. I suffer from short term memory loss. Sonic branding was the perfect addition to ensure memorable and effective ads. A jewelry store or a car dealership for a furniture retailer would actually hire a set of musicians to actually sing a song, or create a jingle about a particular store or a service.

And in the process of that, it became a lot of companies like Maxwell House, the coffee brand, as an example, that would sing a song about good to the Last drop, Maxwell House Coffee is Good to the Last Straw. Singing songs on the stage to promote a brand had already been happening in vaudeville and in Tin Pan Alley. Whether or not it was music or it was just a soft voice, something nonspecific in terms of a call to action, gave people a branding message, gave people a warm, reassuring feeling.

It built trust without necessarily asking somebody to take action in the next 4 or 5 hours. Tom Webster, our second royal scribe, not only concurs but states evidence to prove Craig's point. With sound elements tied into the messaging. In an ad, Daniel Kahneman and Amos two first key would have called system one and system two thinking.

System one thinking is the gut instinct, the irrational kind of impulse to it, and then system two thinking. Is that rational? Here's the message of the ad. And the thing about great sonic branding is it's a shortcut to an emotion.

It's a shortcut to familiarity. If that accompanies a rational message. You have both systems working at once. One kind of paves the way for acceptance, and the other gives you the rational reason why you might have accepted it.

People remembered, and we see lift for that sort of sonic element. The Grand Vizier has realized that playing to one's emotions could be just as effective, if not more effective, than a long list of product attributes. People loved music, and attributing a brand to a song made radio advertising even more relevant. Shortened, simplified, and culturally relevant messaging attached to sonic branding addressed many sonic laws all at once.

Attention, trust, memory and proximity. Jingles back then sometimes could be as long as a minute or even two minutes, and sometimes they were also released as a popular song. Pepsi had a jingle in the 40s. Pepsi Cola hits the spot at the corner.

Hit the. It actually would show up on jukeboxes. BBDO had in-house composers that wrote a jingle for Chiquita Bananas. I'm cheeky.

The banana. That's my band, you see. Very popular people bought records of it. Advertisers also started adapting pop songs, and then they would just change the words, the lyrics, in order to promote the brand using sonic elements in association to a brand, became so successful that we still use it to this day.

I worked for. A radio station in Chicago as a consultant and UA, which was a smooth jazz station for all you smooth jazz fans out there, and it had a marvelous jingle. In fact, I might say it's the greatest jingle in radio, and it was written by my boss, Frank Cody. And it was, you know, sort of w.

When you weigh. 95.5. And when you pay 95.

5. Thank you. I'll be here all week. All throughout Chicago.

W anyway, stopped playing their music to the local indoor malls and like shopping centers and Michigan Avenue. And they said sure, but you can't run ads, you can't run the station. We don't want ads playing in our mall. And they said, fine, we'll give you the music.

But they put the jingle, the sax line of that jingle in between every third song or so, and people would come out and they would swear they were listening to W when you pay, when they were just in a mall on Michigan Avenue. That created a feeling that created a familiarity that, when it's accompanied with another message, sort of paves the way for it. By the mid 1930s, King Radio was everywhere and establishing dominance throughout the land. It had overtaken newspapers with the ability to supply almost immediate news and information and a new form of entertainment from a select group of ministers.

The monarchy was becoming financially successful. The Grand Vizier owned the time and in-kind controlled the programing the ministers sold that time to the visitors for an escalating price. The Grand Vizier initial attempts relied heavily on product attributes, but in the end the soft cell musicality and sonic branding brought emotions and brand image into play. This adoption demonstrated the need to master Law number three memory and Law Number two trust to maintain the covenant law number six the visitors and the ministers were making money, but an uprising of power was about to take place.

Ownership of time was about to change. As far as advertisers were concerned. They were the ones who were producing the audiences, the attention, and they would get really mad when the broadcasters, the networks would then charge them more rent for the airtime because they were reaching larger audiences. And advertisers said, wait, wait, we're the ones building the audiences.

In other words, maybe you should be compensating us in some way instead of charging us more. Around the 1950s, the grand visitors lost their control. Over the time, broadcasters eventually took over, and instead of selling chunks of time for programs, they just sold minutes of time for interruptive ads. The advertisers no longer owned the time, but what they did have was control over where they placed those interstitial commercials, those interruptions, and that then would shape the programing strategies of the networks who obviously had to sell those interruptions to the advertisers.

And if they couldn't sell them, then they wouldn't make enough money. The royal ministers, the broadcasters and now had control of the programing and the time, but the programing still required funding, which came from the Grand Vizier. Two networks turned into three NBC, CBS and ABC. As broadcast stations increased, so did the programing.

More programing choices gave the royal ministers leverage to increase ad pricing to the Grand Vizier. The advertisers had the leverage and the upper hand during the 30s and 40s and even into the 1950s, and then by the 60s and 1970s, the networks had the upper hand. They were controlling the pricing of the airtime much more, and the pricing of airtime went straight up. Now there was choice.

There were options. The audience wasn't limited to 1 or 2 programs at a time, and with more advertising slots available came more and more visitors to fill those slots, with more and more products, creating more and more commerce. This fragmentation challenged the monarchy's control and stability, proving that while the royal ministers had won the time, they were now losing the singular attention of the very audience they created. They've lost.

That captive audience. In that broad based. What they gained is very specific information about who's listening and very specific information who they're advertising to. And how do we gain that very specific information by listening to the audience.

That's the end consumer, the listener that is choosing at that time and at that place in his or her life. I want to listen. I want to be entertained. I want to be informed.

I want to be conversed with. By the early 1970s, the audiences likes and dislikes and listening habits were a commodity that needed further research. Advertising is always based on assumptions about the audience and the consumer, and those assumptions have changed over time. There came a time in the 70s where King Radio started to do content research, research on audiences and what they really did, and did not like and what their sources were for.

That. And only a few stations did it, and those stations that did it vaulted to the top. It was an enormous competitive advantage. It got to the point where everybody had to do it or they just they were simply not competitive.

Early radio drew in huge audiences over a select amount of channels. To appeal to many, it had to play it safe, maintaining uniformity. But in the 70s and beyond, the landscape was changing, voices became louder, and that uniformity was being challenged in order to remain relevant. King Radio had to become a little more outrageous.

And back in the radio network era, and including the television network era, outrage was not okay. Advertisers did not want to create outrage. They did not want to create offense. They wanted to keep everything accessible to everybody in the family, from the five year old to the 85 year old, which meant that everything to our ears now sounds a little bland, very middle of the road.

But when we're in another context in which getting audience attention sometimes requires being more outrageous, and the next guy, advertisers then have to adapt to that situation. Change was happening whether the ministers or reserves wanted it to or not. Culture won out in the 60s and 70s. Individualism, equal rights and diversity became popularized.

The desire for unfiltered voices to more and more niche audiences grew rapidly. Music was being used as a part of self-expression and identity. Over the next three decades, King Radio grew more cautious and risk adverse. Struggling to fight the rising fragmentation but unwilling to divert from mass market uniformity, it began to forget the importance of law.

Number two trust and Law number six, Covenant Radio. At least in the US, disinvested in talent and voices. In a lot of ways. A lot of times the personalities have gone to the background and you can't really distinguish between stations because they have the same playlist and the personalities don't seem to take over.

And I think that's a lesson for podcasting. Not to forget the trust component and the voices really do matter. For a long time, the radio industry had a really reasonable amount of advertising compared to content 8 to 10 minutes, an hour of advertising, and 50 to 52 minutes an hour of content. And the consumers, they signed off on that, that set the standard.

And it also set our mind on how much advertising is enough. There are some talk radio stations that air 20 to 25 minutes of commercials and 35 to 40 minutes of content. That's not an equal balance compared to the other audio mediums that are available. The disinvestment in personalities, abuse of the listeners, time through ad load inflation, and a vagrant attempt at being more outrageous.

A new region was inevitable. In the early 2000, Prince Podcasting took to the stage with a very specific message served up in a very unique way. It was Inauguration Day. George W Bush was.

Sworn in as president. Of the United States, and Dave Winer was not at all happy about it. And he took to his blog. But he didn't just write a post.

He had this new ability to send out an audio file. I looked around for some content that I could throw together into a feed from for my blog, and I thought of using the Grateful Dead, the Grateful Dead philosophy, and the podcasting philosophy. Really good match. The way I put it is it's come as you are.

Don't get dressed up when people put all this production into it and they have all these ideas, oh, I'm going to get rich doing this. I'm going to start a business. You don't do that here. So I put the Grateful Dead on there.

To level you as blue as. This song was written decades earlier to protest the Vietnam War. They thought it was the perfect symbol. He sent it out by RSS.

It was the very first audio file to be published that way, making this song the very first podcast. And that was the beginning. I'm going to cry, but that I'm trying not to. But the point of us blues is that this is everybody's holiday, so I'm not a Deadhead.

And if you're not either, you might need some help here. Dave Winer was thinking about how the Grateful Dead let people tape their shows, and then trade those cassette tapes with each other. Most people in the music. Industry would never allow.

Such a thing. But the dead was this hippie. Band, radicals, pro freedom, and that kind of anti-establishment attitude that is. Hard coded into podcasting.

This moment is huge, if you think about it. It's before Twitter, pre YouTube. There's no Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok. It's a profound shift.

Culturally and historically. Prince podcasting was born on the principles of abundance, not scarcity, and focus on purposeful communication, not time. Sold to brands, this anti-establishment model required strict adherence to law number one attention, law number two trust and law number four proximity leading to a powerful connection to law number six. Covenant podcasting is founded on abundance.

There's no fundamental limit on how many podcasts there can be. You must vie for attention in a way that you don't have to. When you're one of 20, when you're one of millions, all attention has to be on the audience with this. On the limited selection, the audience was going to be much more selective.

They know if I don't like this podcast, I got dozens and dozens and dozens to choose from versus, oh, well, I've only got five to listen to the consumer. The audience gets to choose when and where and how they access that content. Podcasting has become narrow, casting 1 to 1. The intimacy of being able to listen to it on demand when you're ready, it purposely is meant to have conversational tones to it.

It's meant to be companionship oriented. It's meant to have lower commercial inventory. Whatever the podcast is. This 1 to 1 connection was the fulfillment of law number four, proximity.

Prince. Podcasting went by many names. At first. It wasn't until 2004 that it deemed its accidental official naming.

I'm Ben Hammersley, and I do many things, but mostly I'm the person who invented the word podcast. Ben, I don't know you. I don't blame you. But I resent you.

And I'm. I'm very sorry. I can tell you the story. This was in 2004, and I was a writer for the for the Guardian newspaper in the UK.

And at the time, the newspaper was paper centric, which meant that all of the deadlines were for the print presses to run. And I'd written this article about this sort of emerging idea of downloadable, audio content that was automatically downloaded because of an RSS feed. I submitted the article on time, but then I got a phone call from my editor about 15 minutes before the presses were due to roll saying, hey, that piece is about a sentence short for the shape of the page. We don't have time to, you know, move the page around.

Can you just write isn't on the sentence. And so I just made up a sentence which says something like, but what do we call this phenomenon? And then I made up some silly words. It went out.

It went into the article. I didn't think any more of it. And then about six months later or so, I got an email from the Oxford American Dictionary saying, hey, where did you get that word from? That was an article you wrote.

It seems to be the first citation of the word podcast. Now, here we are almost 20 years later, and it became part of the discourse. He wasn't trying to coined the term. People really decided what it was going to be.

Podcast, I think, became the term for this distributed audio on RSS because that's what people gravitated toward, not because Apple and a marketing team decided that was what they were going to push. Now that the region had a name, it needed a definition to explore the creative heart of the new court. We turn to the Royal Troubadours Ariel Nisan Blatt and Dallas Taylor. The sticker on my phone says something for your ears when your eyes are busy.

That's a definition of what a podcast is. I listen to talk radio as a kid, which is all storytelling that turned into finding this American life and falling in love with what audio stories or narrative storytelling could give me. Feelings wise. And I loved I got addicted to those feelings, not knowing which direction my feelings were going to go, but just trusting IRA Glass would take me there at the time I went.

If I'm going to celebrate sound, I need to only use that one sense to do it made sense. Podcasting was that Lane. Most people think it's two people. Talking to each other and they experience it as a genre.

This is a medium. It's a way of using audio to sell a product, tell a story, advocate, do a piece of art. It's so many different things. To ensure that this new audio content would stick.

Prince podcasting borrowed a tactic from the King to fulfill law number three memory, a. Sonic branding carries over from radio into podcasting in a strong way. Saying that to my mind right away is a radio topia or PR. At the end of one of their shows, they'll have by PR, PR and so you kind of have an association with the quality of that podcast or the type of content you're going to receive.

And there's a visceral association that connects to not just an idea, but also an emotion. This visceral emotion requires more than just passive hearing, unlike the background noise of the later radio years, Prince podcasting demands active attention. When people listen to a podcast. The job is what I want to learn and consume from that episode.

What is the point of me listening to this? I want something from this episode, however long that episode is, so it's doing a more active, lean forward job. Podcasts require attention in a lot of other media forms. They expect that your attention is in and out.

They designed for that. With podcasting, things tend to be longer. Dialogic. There's not the reset that you have in radio, where every few minutes they come back and say, hey, reminder you're listening to this and such they expected you're paying attention the entire time.

Listeners and audiences respond similarly. They pay attention and they want to pay attention. But asking for this level of attention requires a promise, a promise not to waste that time. This is the essence of law.

Number six, the covenant. If someone has. Clicked on your podcast, they have chosen you, getting them to the point of pressing play. That's the challenge.

Once they've clicked on it and they're listening. To you. They've chose you by them choosing you, you are entering into that covenant. You're making a promise.

You listen to this thing. I'm not going to waste your time. I'm going to give you value for clicking play, give you an emotion, or I'm gonna give you some type of education, or I'm going to give you some type of information. Every time you see a time of how long something's going to take, there's an instantaneous judgment.

Will someone spend 47 minutes learning about behind the scenes of mixing a major League Baseball game? No, they will not. Will they look at a 12 minute video and go, oh, you know what? Yeah, I'll I'll check that out.

And that could be the difference between 300 views and 300,000 views. Something I always go back to when I'm thinking about the future of the podcast industry, is that we as the podcast industry folks, the people that are running the companies or work for the companies or write recommendation newsletters or podcast about podcasts. We are not the people that are going to dictate how people refer to podcasts or how people consume these podcasts. We really need to be in the habit of listening.

That trust between host and listener, DJ and listener, and in some cases, station stations that have strong, strong identities. You love that station because of that, it's built on trust and that must be respected and maintained. Trust and not wasting someone's time has been the number one thing from the very beginning. With the podcast.

We often will take two hours, three hours, four hours worth of tape and get that down to 20 to 30 minutes. That trust relatable, inconsistent voices, something which podcasting has excelled at. The negative lesson is to not squander that, not to lose it. So what should a host or producer do to keep that attention and relevancy activated?

Asking them to leave a review but giving them something specific to write. What is a topic that you think I should cover or leave me a review telling us who you think is funnier, this host or this host? We promise not to be offended, you know? Have some fun with it.

Just remember to have fun out there today. And then come back the next episode and call out the people that did actually follow up on that call to action, or read some of those answers out loud and let people know that you will be doing that so that they can be excited about being featured. Listening to the audience also means adapting the content to fit their needs. As podcasting matures, they're picking up that lesson to grab them and grab them early.

There's a podcast, hey listen to regularly where I've heard them shift from starting off with small talk to starting off with basically a statement of purpose. This is like what we're going to cover on today's episode. And then the small talk gets demoted. And it still happens, because the small talk can be important for establishing that rapport with the audience.

This evolution of content brings us back to law. Number four proximity. Today, proximity isn't just about intimacy, it's about context. It's about the stage where the content is presented.

They have to start with the audience first and then where that audience is located. Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are not bulletin boards. The number one metric for a platform is to keep you on platform. So number one, if you say, go check out my podcast and that platform sees, oh, everyone is leaving, what should our algorithms do?

Stop feeding that. These are not bulletin boards. These are stages. And you're standing on the stage saying, go across the street over there and everyone's like, but we're right where we're we're here.

And these stages are massive. This brings us to a crucial new challenge for Prince podcasting. Knowing the platform. Podcasting has about 550 million monthly active users.

Very debatable of how many of those people are listening to highly crafted podcasts and not Joe Rogan. Let's be super generous and call it 100 million. LinkedIn has roughly 310 million monthly active users. TikTok is about 1.

8 billion, Instagram is estimated between 2 and 3 billion, and the YouTube's monthly active users are 2.7 plus billion. I mission is to get, you know, quote unquote normal people into how cool their sense of hearing is. I don't feel comfortable with doing video, but my mission is telling me that I need to because I can't reach a huge portion of the population with the amount of commitment that is required to go into a podcast.

The landscape was changing and the demand was increasing. The royal ministers had lost their gatekeeping power. To Prince, podcasting is abundance. The Royal Troubadours could now proclaim their speech to their devoted niche audiences without permission by mastering law number one attention, law number two trust and Law Number four proximity.

They built a devoted covenant law number six. With this fragmented but invested audience, however, relying on a strictly audio transmission was only the beginning. YouTube's entry into podcasting is a strange historical accident. No one would have designed podcasting on YouTube from the start.

I think back to a few years ago when I was like, you watch podcast, what does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. And now I'm like, you know what? If you say you watch podcasts, then who am I to correct you?

There came a point where more people started to consume things in ways that didn't really exist. Back when I started the podcast, YouTube was in its infancy. Instagram did not exist. TikTok was way far away from existing, started going, gosh, there's all these people that I'm just not reaching.

Taking that mission into another place, telling these same heartfelt stories in another place, opens up the ability to reach so many more people. Video is incredibly expensive to distribute compared to audio. YouTube essentially subsidize that cost for everyone, provided you play by their rules. If video podcasters had to pay for all of their distribution in the same way that they currently pay for their audio distribution, so many would not have chosen video to begin with.

So it's a strange accident that YouTube and Google, by extension, decided to subsidize video distribution bandwidth, which opened up the opportunity now to leverage it for podcasting. By subsidizing the distribution and setting the rules. YouTube became a powerful new royal minister of the Audio monarchy in the early 2020s. It's sort of ironic that if you produce a podcast, by and large, you have to pay for your audio bandwidth, but not your video bandwidth.

It's a minimized tab. It's an app in the background. It's going to another page in a browser while something else is going on. And so it's a mistake to think of YouTube simply as video.

I don't want myself to be so blind to my comfort level of format that I miss the overall picture. My 2013 Prince podcasting had clearly established itself as a profitable kingdom, but its very definition was about to be challenged by the arrival of a massive new minister. YouTube radio. At its best, remains the gold standard of community, of engagement, of shared experience.

Those are the things that I hope we always try to continue in podcasting, try to maintain a shared experience, try to maintain the quality of the environment, try to maintain a connection with the audience as best we can, because the radio stations that did that one and the podcasts that continue to do that in the future will also win 20,000Hz. A nine months ago, I thought I was going to end because I didn't know how to reconcile what the future held with video, with the audio.

At the same time, it's not moving on from it. It's a delightful flowering of the mission. It started to spring up other flowers. The original flower is just as beautiful, and if anything, now they're feeding off each other.

Everything's getting bigger. Had that podcast not given me those nine plus years of training ground, there is no way that the video effort that we're doing now would be successful, because everything that I'm doing in the videos, The Secret Weapon, is everything I learned in audio, and everything I learned in audio came from radio. I know that video is the next phase. I don't think you can do things with video that you can't do with audio.

I think there is a separation. This royal troubadour tends to agree. I went to Disney Imagineering and he talked about these technologies that could put like sound in my head and how they sync and how they work. And I did it all visually.

We walked through the entire Imagineering facility, but then I sat down with these two, the head of sound and the head of music, and we did a podcast version. When we sat down, we started telling stories like around the campfire. We weren't bound by showing anything, stories that would only work for the podcast. And then as soon as we wrapped that, I picked up a camera and the entire communication style, just as humans changed entirely because we knew.

Now you can see what we're doing. So therefore you communicate in a completely different way. That information just simply does not work in audio. And that storytelling that we did in audio simply does not work without incredible resources on YouTube.

The visual requires you to give it its full attention. We talk about doing the dishes or doing those kind of things and moving around the house. If it's demanding your visual attention, there's certain tasks that you cannot do. Even people who put on podcasts on YouTube are usually putting them in the background and listening to them.

They're not watching the entire time. I think people often mix up in their head YouTube and video as if they're absolutely synonymous and they're not. In the last study that we released, with the assistance of Signal Hill, the podcast landscape, we had a stat in there for people that say that YouTube is the app that they use the most to consume podcasts, and almost half of those, about 47% say that the majority of their podcast consumption on YouTube is audio. As the definitions of what is and isn't a podcast continue to get messier and messier, it's really harder and harder for us to draw a sense around what it is we do and say.

What we do is just better when what we're doing is spilling over into everything else. Even though we're seeing emerging trends of people consuming podcasts through their smart televisions, we're not yet seeing indications that means they're paying any less auditory attention. It's just a different device. YouTube has been a net plus for podcasting.

It has helped to grow the audience. It's also given existing audiences different ways of consuming podcasts. The emergence of YouTube and video in general. By 2013, the data confirms, Prince podcasting had officially cemented itself as a profitable kingdom.

But with the rapid growth of platforms like YouTube, the nature of that profitability was changing. 2010 to 2013. Podcast advertising really sort of cemented itself as the primary way the podcast to be monetized. This new minister didn't just offer reach, it offered something Prince podcasting had been lacking for decades.

Concrete data. I feel like me and my team have, like, zoomed so far out and the podcast is part of something. It's just a special. But the podcast is getting better because of it.

And now we actually, like, have a real quantifiable data that we can pull from video to apply to the podcast. And it's not that video algorithms are changing the way we do the podcast. It's just that hunches that we had of things that worked and didn't work are now being confirmed on video, because there's more data there. Live events enabled by YouTube also brings us back to a learn of King Radio Law number four proximity draw close to the audience.

And what radio did and still does really well is live events. The relationship that people have to their favorite radio hosts, their morning drives, companions. They also have the radio personalities there to mingle with the crowd. And I think that I have started to see more and more of that, not just in live events, through podcasts, but also through contests.

Another thing that translates really well is specific segments that are named, that people can then be excited about. When it's that time of week or that time of the episode. Engage people, get them excited, and also call back to a different era. Understanding the audience is key, and when Prince podcasting understands their audience, a level of new creativity and content is available both for the audience's benefit as well as for the creator.

I hosted a podcast at the beginning of the pandemic with a friend called Counterprogramming, where each episode focused on a different type of counter counter, anything with the word count in the title was up for grabs. We had the first season all about counter tops and it was nuts, but really fun to do and really creative and we built up a pretty great listener base. We were lucky enough to be featured on Apple Podcasts New and Noteworthy, which now is new podcasts on the Apple Podcast Browse page.

And that really gave us a huge spike in downloads. And a lot of the people that found our show from that continued to listen and we heard from them, which was great. Audience growth is vital, but as King Radio learned, floor number five, monetization is an absolute must. To achieve this, a good host had to know how to read the room.

We read. The room. Taking the time to change up your copy and the way that you deliver that message, either from episode to episode or every few episodes, is a great way to stop the scroll in a more auditory sense, you want them to stop in their tracks and say, okay, they deliver that line differently. I'm therefore must pay attention.

They're giving me a reason to do this thing, which involves me and makes me feel like I want to participate through attention law number one, trust law number two, memory law number three, proximity law number four, and the covenant law number six. Prince podcasting built a roadmap to monetization. Law number five by utilizing the creativity of the troubadours, the audio monarchy established a new form of advertising. They moved away from selling product attributes to selling brand image and personality.

But to make this new form work, the grand visitors had to avoid a common trap. It's a trap. Advertisers often want to kitchen sink it. They want to get everything into their ad.

And when we test ads like that, we get fairly mediocre results. Folks don't retain anything in particular, but if you narrow in and you focus on a single copy point on a slogan and you repeat that, you make sure it's clear it gets retained. And by repeat I mean two, three times. The thing that pops in my head is sell the sizzle, not the steak.

I think we've switched to the sizzle much more now. I mean, there's a lot of advertising that you'll find they might not even mention the product at all. They're trying to associate an idea or a feeling with the brand. That almost secondary is the attributes of the product itself.

And it seems to be pretty effective. And the data proves just how effective it is. When advertisers utilize the audio medium effectively, there tends to be high retention. We recently published some data with the field work done by Signal Hill Insights, called the Advertising Landscape, and one of the questions that we asked in the past week, can you recall a specific at 86% of podcast users so that they could recall an ad, and that was the highest amongst everything?

Many of the ad supported platforms that it vaulted over, like Facebook, for instance. Facebook was markedly lower. People are paying attention to podcast ads. The environment of podcasting is conducive to delivering those messages in a way that people recall.

This attention is so resilient that it even withstands the visual distraction of YouTube. We did a study a couple of years ago called sound, You Can See, and it was really a deeper dive into video podcasts for the video podcast audience. One of the questions that we asked was two people who were YouTube premium subscribers, people who paid money to avoid ads, and they told us that that's why they subscribed to YouTube premium. But two of the top three reasons were advertising avoidance, and we asked those people what they thought about the baked in ads in the podcast that they were consuming on YouTube, and there was virtually no rejection of those ads.

It was sort of split between, I don't mind them, and I like them. They're part of the content, they're part of the host, they're part of that parasocial relationship. So you have an audience that is predisposed to just naturally sort of over claim something here. I always skip ads.

I hate ads, and that is not at all what they did. So that tells me that we haven't wrecked it yet. When I worked at Mineral Media, the network that owned the Earwolf comedy podcast network, we rolled out a subscription ad free product called Howell, later Stitcher Premium. We had really good adoption amongst the Earwolf faithful, like the hardcore listeners.

One show in particular called Hollywood Handbook, they said, can we get the ads back? Because they're hysterical? You wouldn't surely expect to hear that from folks. When you're spending that kind of time with someone, you develop an affinity for them and that trust starts to build.

Didn't have to be someone that's a celebrity. It's someone that's like, oh, this is like my friend. This is someone I'm hearing from every day. There may actually be a little bit more trust because you don't necessarily think of that as a sell.

Having a third party tell you about a product has more weight than the people actually selling the product. Pretty powerful way to advertise. The ad tolerance that we continue to see is sort of remarkable by anyone's measure. It's kind of special.

What I hope we continue to do as a medium is put as much effort into creative execution of advertising as we do the content, because we still have an advantage. And if there's one thing that broadcast commercial radio should teach us is that that advantage is fleeting, that you can lose it. You can start to run too many ads and too many bad ads, and people just don't come back. Monetization is an absolute must.

That's where I think it's really important to either have a great relationship with the advertiser or the intermediary that's helping sell those ads on your behalf, on your show. To monetize without breaking the covenant. Prince podcasting had to get creative. Interruptive ads were the old way.

Integration was the new path. Interrupting content is annoying, so they're looking more and more into different ways of integrating, mostly collaborating with creators rather than their own branded content. Ironically, this modern integration is just a page torn from King Radio's original playbook. The Prince didn't invent Pre-post and Mid-roll ads, he simply resurrected them.

Pre-Roll in a podcast is something that people listen to because they have anticipation for the podcast they're about to hear. The Mid-roll is because we're engaged in the middle of a conversation, and we haven't yet revealed all the information. The post role is still there, because we know that if somebody truly listens to the end of a podcast, it's because they truly believe the host and they want to hear all of the content. That's no difference in some ways than hearing the Maxwell House commercial before the drama series on radio start it, or relying on the announcer halfway through the hourlong serial drama on radio that would have been considered a mid-roll, or at the end of a show, when you feel so gratified on what you've just experienced, this new sense of audio, we would call them post Rolls today, a podcast form.

Beyond these traditional ad slots, Prince Podcasting also explored the subscription model, creating gated content for loyal patrons. Some use Interruptive ads, some as we've mentioned, use those host commercials which really depend on the host having a parasocial connection with their audience. And then some are using subscription formats. Non-subscribers don't hear the episode at all, or only part of the episode, with the idea being that you're going to be willing to pay a subscription fee to hear the complete episodes.

This brings us back to the cable era. She didn't pay for that wire access. You did not get MTV. You did not get CNN.

They didn't have to rely 100% on advertising revenue, which meant that they could then specialize their programing. Most podcasts are like cable television networks in that they develop a certain type of content or a certain topic, or a certain personality or set of personalities, and they create a kind of world within that podcast that's going to attract only certain types of audiences. About ten years ago, I thought, oh, advertisers are going to go back into sponsoring programs, but that hasn't really happened because it hasn't really worked, because advertisers don't know what programs are going to work.

While sponsorships struggled, the standard ad model thrived, creating a sustainable economic foundation for the monarchy. But with high retention and real revenue. The stakes were raised. To mitigate risk.

The prince called upon the royal scribes. There's this prevailing sentiment that research somehow stifles creativity. It doesn't say to do this or don't do this. It says, if you do this, this will be the reaction.

And so let's mitigate that. Well, we were going to do that. Well that's actually not going to work. So we have to come up with something else for you to do this risky, groundbreaking thing that we want you to do.

It gives you constraints. It doesn't tell you what to do. It just tells you how people are going to react when you do it. And why would you not want to know that?

I worked inside of a podcast network for eight years. Twice in those eight years was I ever asked to do something that looked like content research? It was usually a bit more post-hoc why isn't this working? Instead of doing it ahead of time, either to sort of justify a decision that it had already been made, or to help refine how we would promote it.

As stats get better, the stats will speak louder than words. In many cases, all these things are in balance and there's no one right way. But it is also something which, if we lose sight or forget to think about them. Therein lies the risk.

King radio established the laws. Mastering law number one attention, law number two trust and law number three memory. Prince. Podcasting expanded the realm, deepening the trust through law number four proximity.

As the regions continue to solve the puzzle of law number five monetization, they must rely on the royal scribes to map the expansion. However, maps only show the terrain to ensure profitability. The audio monarchy must understand not just the audience, but the context of the platform from which they are speaking. The story itself will dictate the platform that it works best on.

For example, what works beautifully on a podcast is the same type of thing that would work beautifully. Sitting around a campfire or talking to somebody when you're deep in like a story and a history and twists and turns. If you tried to force that into a YouTube video, it would take three years, but an audio you could capture before it's gone and put out quickly, and people can still follow in their head along the way. That is a podcast.

That's the audio documentary. So when I'm making something and I go, my mission is to get people into sound through podcasting alone. I have such a narrow, narrow, tiny window to squeeze that into. The King's castle was never going to expand.

Whilst looking through the tiny window of its RSS feed and old airwaves. Future profitability of the Kingdom depends on Prince podcasting, opening the portcullis and venturing abroad. Social media doesn't exist anymore. It became the media.

When social media became the media prince. Podcasting. Regency became the vast new realm itself, no longer competing against a handful of royal ministers and other gatekeepers, the six sonic laws prepared the Prince with a compass to travel the lands safely and effectively. The audio monarchy has changed vastly over the last hundred plus years.

King radio is no longer limited to 2 or 3 channels. It is both linear and live. There are infinite forms of audio to consume and a constantly increasing list of platforms to consume them on. However, the sonic laws still apply.

Law number one. Attention law number two trust law number three memory law number four proximity law number five monetization and an unending law. Number six covenant still rule the land. The regions that adhere continue to dominate as the Kingdom continues to expand.

We always think that what we're doing is the newest thing. The time when we went from no light to light bulbs, light bulbs hadn't been such a transformational thing. When we think of the internet, we think of, oh, we're so advanced, like the people who lived through those moments of non radio going to radio being broadcast and had to feel like such a new experience. The first sonic law is attention and earning attention fast, and this is actually something that I think podcasting can learn better from radio, because I think podcasting is not quite gotten that lesson yet.

You know, it's the attention economy. They are being pulled in a million different directions. They're not just listening to podcasts, they're watching Netflix. They're scrolling on their phone, on Instagram, on TikTok.

Those are all places that they're consuming content, and they may be done by the time they're finished with all those other activities, and they just want silence. So we are competing with that. While the Regents are learning, investing and growing, King Radio is struggling to keep up the challenge for advertisers today. Again, as if you are a national brand, you have fewer and fewer outlets to reach, fewer and fewer audiences, and you have to try to figure out how to tailor your brand among all these kinds of niche, specialized programs and audiences.

Despite the smaller groups of larger audiences, those audiences know that advertising remains an expected part of the kingdom. We just naturally assume it's there to entertain us or inform us. We might, but of course, a little bit on broadcast radio these days, because the number of commercials are just too pervasive. But generally we know it's a part of the gig.

However, for getting law number six, the covenant is dangerous. Ministers, visitors and troubadours alike. Anyone not mindful of the ad load balance is doing themselves and their listeners a huge disservice. AD load inflation really comes down to how often advertising exist.

It's a careful balance that very often is overrun as the different generations come to embrace broadcast radio and radio stations. They have an expectation that there will be advertising that's heard on it. The question is, how much of it is it? Advertisers need to be more targeted and focused on these niche and nuanced audiences to get their messages out in a clear and effective way?

It's much riskier in a lot of ways, because it's so much more complex in terms of how to get your message out there, what kind of content you want to be associated with, what kind of personalities you want your brand to be associated with? As the Grand Vizier began investing in the troubadours, King Radio went another route, risking law number two trust. Today, in the era of fragmentation, the very foundation of advertising is under siege. The question now in my mind, as an historian of advertising, is whether or not brand image advertising is going to survive this period of fragmentation and the difficulty of achieving audience attention.

If radio is king and a podcast is a prince and the audio streaming is a prince, those princes are gaining share of air and share a voice very, very quickly. And an audio medium or the radio industry really needs to say we have new forms of competition. We really must limit the amount of advertising we're going to have and offer a better equation of entertainment to advertising, if it's going to continue to exist. Over the last hundred years of the audio monarchy, we have seen and heard a lot.

But who owns the time now? There may be King Radio and Prince Podcasting, but the Emperor of all is the audience. The audience. The audio consumer, the end user.

The audience owns everything. Not only selecting the content, but selecting when, where, and how to consume that content. Our content consumption is no longer limited to life and linear records. For instance, cassette tapes, DVDs, audio streaming subscriptions, music subscriptions from Apple and Pandora, Spotify.

The audio monarchy has grown wide, with different ways to consume content on a vast amount of stages and platforms. But law number five monetization still remains key. If people did not give their attention to it, it would not exist because it does not make the company's money. Advertisers now have a million options as to how they reach their consumers, but then they also have a million ways to fail.

Creators also need advertisers because without advertisers, there are no creations. We need to make sure that this is sustainable so that listeners can continue to consume this content so that creators can get paid so that they can continue to make it. Monetization is an absolute must, both for sponsors and for for the people that make the podcasts. Law number four.

Proximity is more important now than it ever has been before. Gone are the days of proclamations from city centers. Today, the audio monarchy must meet the people where they are. You cannot control a relationship with the audience.

You cannot herd them like sheep. If you try to guide them in one direction or another, you're simply going to lose them. If I want to keep making my show, I need to be able to evolve with what the consumers want. Every producer, every host, needs to ask themselves, am I doing what I need to do in order to sort of obey that covenant?

The individual creators right now are very strong because they really do know their audience as well. For the first time in the last 20 years, the audio consumer really now is in control. The audio monarchy has shifted and evolved over the last 100 plus years. However, no matter how diverse and vast the regions and the kingdom become, King Radio's original rules and methods still ring true.

The earliest form of storytelling was one person telling another story to either another person or another group of people. All these technologies via radio, be it podcasting, they're all just different ways to do what we've always done since the beginning of human communication is talk to each other. So what does the next hundred years hold for the audio monarchy, and how does the Royal court cultivate the very best kingdom possible? Zoom out.

What is that story that you're trying to tell? What format is that best in? Start there. I think some people are just still approaching the format, like it's two people sitting at a microphone.

And in that binary way of thinking, just put that in video. And now we have video. You just still need to keep zooming out. What makes this even more compelling?

For me, it's all about my eyes taking a break. Not even intentionally. I just love to fill my ears with knowledge or entertainment while I'm washing the dishes, walking between meetings all the above and more. With most of podcasting, it's right in your ears and you're hearing them in the middle of your head.

It's like showing up and hanging out with a friend every day. I think the entity that wins, whether that's an advertiser or a publisher content creator, is going to be the one that understands the movements of that heard in that moment the best, and never stops trying to follow that herd and try to figure out where they're going and why they're going there. We really need to abide by these sonic laws, all of them, because ultimately we are trying our best to make this a sustainable industry.

I think the only things that are going to be successful are where you make the lane, you build the lane, you don't wait for somebody else and then go, oh, they proved it. So now I need to go do that. If you believe in what you're talking about and you believe in your mission, you know, go build that lane. And to ensure that lane stands the test of time, we must look to the King's mastery of law.

Number three, memory. Putting the dots together and me being a sound designer and going, I can use sound to be romantic about sound, and I can use heart and soul to be the glue and the emotion to make sure that all of that information and edutainment sticks. King radio is still really, really good at some things, and I think podcasting is also good at those things. Radio initially sold soap and sold it very, very well, and now with podcasts we sell mattresses and meal plans and we sell that really, really well.

The core strengths of radio that you can sell a product without showing it have never changed. To secure the kingdom's future, Prince podcasting must continue to deliver content that grabs attention, tells the truth, creates memory, maintains proximity, fines, profitability, all while honoring the covenant. We may not yet know what the ideal monarchy will be in the future, but we do know that King Radio is what made today's message possible. And now, a word from our sponsor.

Thank you so much, Gina Isom, for creating this very special episode of AD Infinitum. Sound has always carried power that branding isn't just what we say, but what we signal, and that audio and treated with intention earns something rarer than attention. Trust this is the kind of thinking that makes better ads. Before you ever write a line of copy, the kind that sharpens judgment, raises taste, sets standards.

Huge thanks to Gina Isom for bringing this piece to life, and expanding the conversation in a way that honors the medium. And a special thank you to all our guests as well. If you're a chief audio officer, a creative leader, or anyone responsible for how a brand shows up in sound, this is one to sit with. Maybe even replay.

Definitely to share with someone else. As always, thank you for paying attention to ad infinitum. And remember, have fun making the ads work. I hope you're enjoying the show!

Be sure to subscribe to the Sound and Marketing monthly newsletter for episode releases. Sonic branding, resources, news, and new swag. Big thanks to Stu Red Wine at Oxford Road for letting me rerun this one, and for calling on me to write some more super fun content. Links to the AD Infinitum episode and podcast will be provided in the show notes.

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