Graham Brown: Welcome to the age of audio of my name's Graham brown from the award-winning podcast agency Pikkal & Co. The age of audio is a series of conversations with thought leaders and change makers in the world of audio that's podcast, radio, and social audio converging with big data to create engaging and authentic content for a new generation of listeners.
Ron welcome spent a while since we spoke last. A couple of years.
Ron Baetiong: Man it's been a while I haven't seen you in a couple of years and a lot has happened since then. And again, thank you very much for inspiring me with that road caster that I saw.
Graham Brown: We love that, right? That was the beginning of the tech journey but a lot's happening for you. You've raised a successful round. You've grown. Are you growing your team? And obviously we've had this very strange year. Last year maybe we can start there, I mean Philippines. Obviously it's a market, which absorbs a lot from the outside world because it's English speaking as well. So, you get a lot of media influence from the US so it's quick to pick up on technology as a young market as well. If we were to look at the last year, it's 2020 as a year COVID hit the Philippines hard. What did that mean for podcasting there?
Ron Baetiong: So podcasting really had hit that inflection point last year when lockdown started to happen, just that was a knee-jerk reaction of our government. And just to provide context, when you first met around 2019, I didn't even have a network that I will show you how to podcast right. And when I started my own podcast called The Hustleshare, I was again trying to give us a spotlight to the local Filipino startup entrepreneurs, because I've always felt that we were underserved on the stories that were being put out there right. Because we have no unicorns, we don't have big exits yet compared to our neighbors. So I said, Hey, you haven't, you have to put these stories out there because through that you inspire more entrepreneurs to do it. And in that process, I also saw that there was a big gap, or there's a big room to fill in the space of podcasting because at the start of 2019, around March or April, Only 20% of the top 200 podcasts in the Philippines who are Filipino, maybe 80% were foreign made. And there's a lot of consumption happening, like why? And the surprising thing is probably that there are common problems across the world. First one, the quality of audio is buried differently. So many, some of them again, the gold standard is how you sound, how the US podcast sounds. But their shows are even ranking. That sounds like they're in the bathroom. So it sounded so agile. It's like, how can we solve that? Number two, people didn't know how to monetize, like how come they don't know it because again, two things. They don't know their data. And then how to interpret that data and number three is they don't know how to cross- promote and grow their shows. So I said, maybe this is an opportunity where we can create a vehicle that supports as many shows as possible to help them sustain their shows and they don't podfade. Right. Cause there's a study now, recently that, there's over a million shows that are restless and 10 episodes in right and then they just die. So how do you create that sustainability and allow them to really create a decent living out of this? One piece at a time. That's why we created the podcast network Asia. And when we started it around 2019 it was gaining attraction, but when the lockdowns happened, before the lockdown, what we were doing was we were the one pitching shows, and then the lockdown happened. The inflection point happened, and everybody started creating content and they needed a vehicle because they didn't know how to do it. So naturally they gravitated towards us. So when the lockdown happened, there were only around 20 podcasts we're supporting. And then at the end of I asked her to speak right now, when we're recording this, we already have 115 shows. So it just grew like crazy. I didn't even know. Yeah, we did that. Yeah.
Graham Brown: So when somebody comes to you and now the people are pitching you for shows. What is the attraction of a network to a show host? Is it the promotion? Is it the advertising revenues? What is the deal for them?
Ron Baetiong: So the way we always explain it, there's four pillars of how we try to provide value into the podcasting ecosystem as my desk network agents.
So the first one is obviously cross promotion. I mean a co-production we don't own the show. We own none of the 115 shows that we have in the network, we've co-produce it and we work on revenue share alone. We become partners and we provide everything and we invest everything in order for them to create shows for the long-term. Right. So that's it because you already solved the problem of the quality being bad. We send them microphones, we give them access to our studio, we assign them producers. We now have around 12 producers when we started without we're just two right through to really go hand in hand and handhold a podcaster that whole thing to create their content. Now, we always say that our podcast network is not for everybody. It's like Noah's Ark because in order for us to support a show, we need to be able to ROI on it. We want to monetize that show because if we don't monetize that show will also sink the whole boat. So we can't afford to do that. So before, when we start it out, your podcast should have at least 200 listeners per episode, because at that time you're in the 50th percentile of all bought jazz in the world already. Now we raised the bar to at least 500 listeners per app, because we noticed that at 200 listeners per app, we still can't monetize it quite well. At 500 listeners, per app you were half a CPM already. You're almost there. That's a pulse to what we're doing. Second thing is cross-promotion by creating a network that the cross promotes all, each other shows within our institution or organization. We've seen that our show's grown exponentially at a pace of 25% new listeners per month across the board. Wow, that's all organic third obviously is creating a technology that allows you to really gauge a podcast stream. And that's why we created pod metrics. So that allows us to really see data on mass. And using that data, that's also what you use to monetize. Now, again, you mentioned it earlier that there's some multiple streams of income in a podcaster, so you can't just force it through advertising because if you're just only going to use advertising, only the top 5% of podcasts will get monetized. There's a lot more that is good content that just doesn't have that ability to monetize. So the other way that we unlocked that Western affiliate marketing. Last quarter, during the pandemic we drove $70,000 worth of sales to Lazada. And that's when we realized like, holy crap, what did we just unlock? Oh my God, podcasts are amazing in terms of persuasion and conversion, which you don't get in other digital media at the moment. And that's because we're able to really drill down on a certain topic in a value proposition.
Graham Brown: How's It actually happening to the orchestra and the mechanics. If I'm a podcast host, How am I actually marketing these products?
Ron Baetiong: So there's ways to do it. And what we do is we try to remove the skill gap by providing them spiels to get that done. So, as a podcaster all you need to do is to sign up by podmetrics, integrate your data source, whether it's anchor, chartable or if you have YouTube, or Facebook library, get that done. And then you apply for the affiliate marketing campaign that you want to do. Then we give you a link or a promo code. And that's what you plug during your show, whether that would give you complete Liberty on where are you going to put it, whether it's a mid roll, post roll, and some people even go double down and post about it and their social media stuff and then they, the call to action is to click on the link as they purchase something in the Lazada. And whatever that person does at Lazada as long as they went through the link, they get a commission out of that.
Graham Brown: What kinds of things sell well on podcasts?
Ron Baetiong: It's funny because it varies depending on the podcast that promotes it. So there are shows that are barely at 200 listeners per app, but they have a very high-end listenership. You've seen Dyson vacuum cleaners, things over a thousand to $2,000 in one basket or say one cart, right. And there are shows that have more listenership, but lesser market value and they tend to be in, so you go for volume in those types of shows right. So it's very interesting, but it really resonates to the type of audience that the show attracts.
Graham Brown: Yes it's fascinating. I haven't really seen affiliate marketing done on mass in a network with podcasts before I've seen it done individually. You can see people promoting products on an individual basis. Maybe they've got it for ClickBank or some other source yet using a podcast network for that end, usually people do that in other markets for the purpose of bulk inventory for advertising. And yet, you're applying it to affiliate marketing. Why do you think that's worked for you? Is it just because nobody's tried it or is it because it's uniquely adapted to the Philippines or What do you think? ?
Ron Baetiong: So I think there's two components. The first one is the way we've designed the company is that we're really acting like a partner in the podcasts there. So before we even throw them a link or whatnot, we really, we have a very integral team that does community work. When we say community work, it's really taking care of what it is the podcaster needs to drill down to the value prop, because if they don't understand the value proposition that it does for their user, they won't do it. So you have to sell it in house first and then sell them again. We don't own none of these shows, so we really have to make the money and it has to be natural to them that they want to endorse it to their listeners. And by doing that, you have a human touch that allows them to really understand what's in it for their listener and then the tech is just the automation part of it right? So there is a human relationship component that allows within the network and also within the user supplied metrics that tells them why they need to do this and how easy it is to get it done. So still a lot of heavy lifting upfront. But when you see it with strength in numbers, my goodness, it's monumental.
Graham Brown: Fascinating. What then does that do for you in terms of that talent identification, like you say, you will take on new shows that you know you can monetize, so you must have a good eye for what works. Obviously you've mentioned, for example, 200 to 500 episodes per episode. Now you've raised the bar on that, but there must be a lot more to it than that you can identify what kind of podcast and importantly, the host is going to work in your network. What are the telltale signs you look for in talent when they walk through the door?
Ron Baetiong: So, the main metric we look for is cloud right prior cloud and domain expertise. And they're already tell-tale signs, like what he said that shows that. So, number one, Are you a domain expert of what the hell you're trying to do? Because sometimes it's a mismatch, some people would jump to us and say, ``Hey, I want to do a show about motoring? And nobody knows you for motoring. So again, that's already a mismatch, so it has to be a domain expertise where people respect you for it. Number two, Do you have a ready audience? Right? A lot of people like all Hey yeah, I'm an expert, but do people know you for this? Right. And whatnot where is your go-to audience? Getting a LinkedIn, Facebook, clubhouse doesn't matter if there isn't a ready audience is going to be hard because you're building an audience from scratch. And number three, the intangibles is basically the hustle. How persistent are you going to be, or are just going to be here because everybody else is now podcasting, or you persisted that, Hey, this might be a long drag, but you're going to have to plow it through with us. And if you committed, we see that commitment is there and you consistently churn out content week on week when we see typically in a span of 1, 2, 3 months, they're already charting.
Graham Brown: What do you think is the formula for success for these hosts? If you will get to go back to 2019, when you were starting out, you probably had an idea of what that was. And yet now with a hundred plus hosts through the door more, you've seen ones that you thought would have been successful in one, and then the ones you maybe were less sure about that really surprised you. What did you now know about the formula for success that you had and teach other people?
Ron Baetiong: Sure it's eerie because it's very similar to how the startup game is. Right. And number one, it's grit, right? Are you here to be cute? Are you here to be popular? Because if you want to be popular overnight, then you have to go to TikTok, Instagram, or whatever, where you can be an overnight success, but in podcasts, it's hard to wing it because it's all about substance and education at the forefront. You can't just, throw random, stupid content out there. And this is an intellectual medium. So you have to be gritty in a way to always refuel your tank, to put content that's valuable with your target audience. Number two is being able to really communicate well and I hate to say it, but there is a mighty skill gap in podcasting. I've seen people that are domain experts, but have challenges in terms of communicating how they want to do it, and that's where they really dropped the ball. And for us, that's really where you match the right show format to do it. So like for example, a masters of scale, Master of the scale the host isn't really the best communicator out there, especially if it's a semi narrative show. But they compensate for it by putting really amazing sound effects, similar to how diarize does it and how I built this as well. Now it encapsulates a whole new experience for the listener to get that done despite the skill gap. I'm not saying that it's terrible, but you know, or you've heard more natural people are naturally gifted to converse naturally to narrate something, but you bridge that with the right show format and then it becomes a hit.
Graham Brown: Yeah. I wonder about the first point, the grip, how much that underpinned success. We all know that's like the minimum to become successful as a startup founder and how important that is for making anything long-term success. The flip side of that is there are plenty of people out there who are plowing away at an endeavor, which is going nowhere and refuse to give up because somebody is telling them, never give up and, let that alone is not enough. You think about startups like how many people are going out of the game simply because they don't want to give up and let you know that they haven't validated the idea, they haven't talked to enough people. How does that come into play with the analogy with podcasts: you need to identify an audience, an avatar, and a need out there first, or how do you talk about partnering with people? How much of the education do you do for your hosts?
Ron Baetiong: That's where the community team comes in. And again, for every podcast, we go through what we do is what we don't condescend to them and say, Hey, your content is shit. Your content is bad or whatnot. What we do is we dissect it through something that's neutral, which is data. And again, going back to startups, we have a podcast market. Right. So when we say a podcast market fit for us, we always ask this million dollar question then pretty sure you always ask, get asked this to say this, is my podcast good? What do you think about my podcasts? And there's no right and wrong answer to do that, or answer that. But there's one common metric that people always forget to measure if your podcast is good, and if you're really resonating with their target market and for us, it's all about retention.
Graham Brown: Hmm,
Ron Baetiong: Show retention. Are you retaining all of how many of your listeners that are you retaining from zero zero all the way to the end? And if you can retain at least more than 50% of your listeners by the 75% mark, that means you have podcast market fit. All you need to do is scale that, but I've seen a lot of people try to churn out content, but within the first two to five minutes, they're already lost 80% of their listeners. That means there's something fundamentally wrong with your show. Now, if you see based on that mark, then you have to ask yourself, is it my audio? I mean, is it the way that I narrate? Is it my guest? Is it the way I talk? Is it my format? Then you can now start experimenting and pivoting on your podcasts rather than plowing through and again, expecting something different to work where, what's just going to do this, create more of what you already see. So for us, it's all about the metrics and that's what we always say. We go through our pod metrics dashboard as well, and we dissect that, not just with our content creator, but we'll also with the producer that we assign and also the marketing team that we assign for that show. So it becomes a team effort.
Graham Brown: Yeah, it's on the nail totally. We use a similar strategy with our clients that the data has to be the starting point of understanding that something's broken otherwise it's an opinion. And in many ways you can, for example, if you are running a restaurant, you can get people through the door because you've got the sea view. Right. But, that's where the coaches turn up with all the tourists in it, but to get them to come back, you have to have good food and good service, and that is keeping them coming back. A good restaurant can fill tables Wednesday afternoon when everybody else is empty, anybody can fill a restaurant Friday night, Saturday night. But that sort of compounding of growth over time, you only need a small percentage to compound up every episode. And yet I think people, it seems like I don't know how it is with your network and in the Philippines in particular, it seems that a lot of people are still grasping for this idea that you can build a podcast with guests. And to me it's okay, that's kind of table-stakes that gets you into podcasting, right? You've got to have interesting guests. But to grow the guests, to grow the podcast, you need to be an interesting host, you need to engage, you need to keep people coming back and on Wednesday, Wednesday afternoon equivalents. That's missing how you see people evolve in that sort of mindset, because man speaks to man about man's interview and then man shares it with man's network. That's a bit old school now and I think we're trying to get away from that and build consistent narratives and build a reason to come back.
Ron Baetiong: All right. And what we always say, and again, this is personal to me because my format is the interview format right. And that the danger with doing an interview format is that you're always as if your health is only as good as your last test, because you can be the constant in there, you can ask the same question, deliver it the same way. But the danger of interview podcasts is that again, people only go to your show because of who you interview. So you always have to turn up a very interesting or top level thing. And if you dip in that you'll see the numbers dip as well. Now, if you come up with shows and this is what I've seen with podcasts, that, that really grow exponentially, they develop an audience, not because of who they guess, but because of how they again, give that experience to that listener. And they find that magic formula or again,podcast market fit that allows them to resonate and even persuade people to do it. So I'll give you an example of how they do this, so they don't stop at the podcast level. I've seen several shows at BNA that even created their own Facebook group. And let their listeners converse and dissect everything that they said during the episode, share memes, or do whatever and, sometimes they even fight in the groups and have healthy discussions. To dissect a certain topic and that's where that monthly recurring followers or monthly recurring revenue or whatever that may come in, because that also translates with the people that really support them in Patrion and whatnot. These are the people that really choose to stick around and invest time to do the podcasts that they like.
Graham Brown: That's pretty interesting if you would go to the world of radio, for example, a local radio, which is always fighting to survive back in the day that they would invest a lot of time in community, they would be out there amongst the community, they would be having their phone ins or that mailbag. I mean, this is the old school analog social media, right? That's how they did it. And yet, that they knew that to be relevant, to connect, they needed to be part of the community. And yet now we're in this world of podcasting. It seems that these tactics, which you talk of Ron, are what everybody should be doing in some way. It's having that community built around the podcast to allow that because otherwise without that, you wouldn't be, firstly, you won't know who your audiences are very well. And secondly, you wont to make them part of that journey and that's missing. I see a lot of people, if we were on the radio right now, we would have phone names. We would have the mailbag, we would be out there at the events and so on. And yet it seems that a lot of podcasts seem to forget that it is important. Maybe people just don't know yet. Maybe people don't know that's necessary and they'll have to learn. But what you're doing in building those communities with the hosts and showing them what's possible, that's the way forward. I wonder how you do that in the world of business, where you have corporates involved. I can understand if it's a smaller business, but how do you pitch that to a corporates?
Ron Baetiong: So the corporate, the branded podcasts, it's all about again, making the narrative, not revolve around the brand. Right. It's very similar, but you made it, make it revolve around the community they're trying to serve order, they're trying to help. Right? So for example, we have a branded podcast called Wyeth Paren Team, obviously it's for Wyatt. And the challenge of Wyeth was they cannot sell milk to parents with kids under 40 years old, apparently there's some milk cord. I'd never understand, I don't have kids yet. So the story that they wanted it to revolve around was parenting. There's a big overlap, obviously, because they're not talking about parenting and of course the subliminal upsells there are to buy their milk. But if you talk, you build a community about that, let all these parents talk about smart brand things or whatever that may be then you own the storage. You own the community and you become the voice of that community. And then a conversation starter and it will always trickle down with the brand.
Graham Brown: That's great I love it. What do you think about podcasting or what do you believe about podcasting that the world tends to disagree with you on? And that will come to the forum in the next two years.
Ron Baetiong: Two things. I think we're just in the middle of crossing the chasm from getting all these early adapters into becoming a prop, a mass market medium. And in order for us to cross that chasm, this is where a lot of people disagree with me. Podcasting is a business because it's hard to sustain long-term content like this, without being incentivized to keep doing what you're doing with it, right. And our job, at least in P and A and through our product metrics is to find the right mix of monetary incentives that we can give to the content creators that they are incentivized naturally to support them, to keep doing that content. So they don't podfade so that they can allocate a little bit of resources, get paid a little bit, or if they want a little bit more and again, depending on their metric. So when it becomes a business, then you will see after that we'll properly cross the chasm. And you've seen what's happened with YouTube. Right. YouTube exploded because all of a sudden everybody makes money. And when there's a proper positive monetary reinforcement in there, the rest will come. So I think we're just right at the start and we're crossing that chasm. And the way we crossed that chasm into the next phase is monetization and turning this to a business
Graham Brown: By definition that will then reward those who learn the rules of the game overtime right? And obviously the consolidation of assets like you have in the network favors those who are part of the network by default. That also means that those who want it will be penalized. I mean, as with YouTube, isn't it's harder now to get views as it is on let's take Google as an analogy right. There was a time some years ago when you could create a website hustle for six months and get onto the first page with your keywords, right. That's gone that you now have to buy websites with existing traffic and I'm going to say that's going to happen again in the podcast, right. In the sense that if it is crossing the chasm and it is becoming a business, therefore those that have the results will game it. As you would naturally you would invest in promotion, you would invest in knowledge and distribution and so on. So that, if we let's think forward, what is going to look like in a couple of years, we're going to have a world where of course production values will increase in some form, like crappy audio, won't be as ubiquitous as it is now, and the same point is it's going to be harder for people to make a business out of it. Because they'll be guys who have knowledge. So that's going to be interesting. I mean, there's got a lot more people podcasting, but a vast majority of them are going to get nothing because of the numbers.
Ron Baetiong: This is also where I disagree because it's not zero sum. If you're talking about advertising guests only the top five, 3% will get that. But if you're talking about middle tier podcasts or a barely again with a podcast at 200 listeners spur and I'll double down on what Tim Ferriss said, right? He said a thousand true fans pay X amount, but in podcasting you can even lower it down to what the Patrion guy said that maybe all you need is 100 true fans paying you a higher amount to keep your show going. It doesn't have to be monetarily like, millions of dollars. It's enough to incentivize you to keep doing what you're doing so you don't podfade. Right? And I think that's where it is. These shows have a feeling of being, having the ability of a level playing field versus where it stopped heavy. Yes, advertising would always be top heavy, unfortunately, but there are other ways to monetize your shows through subscriptions, through affiliate marketing, which we're all going to have in pod metrics anyway, that levels the playing field for everybody else.
Graham Brown: Everybody can find a hundred true fans in theory. That just requires a little bit of work and caring about something enough, isn't it? That you care about something that other people are passionate about and a hundred people. The beauty is [inaudible] as well, right? That makes it a, you're joining the dots between people who care about stuff regardless, really of nationality or even language in some cases. Right. So it's interesting how that's going to evolve over time when you're just in the last question, when you think about how that plays out with Spotify and Apple, what do you think, because these guys are obviously going to start doubling down on their models as well. So Spotify obviously is introducing what's called paid advertising now you can run for 250 bucks, you can run an ad campaign on Spotify, right. And then, there's a lot of talk about Apple offering micro-payments because you think iTunes is a gate as a mechanism to take small payments. Right. So it shouldn't be too difficult then to subscribe to content through iTunes, apple podcasts. Right. What are your thoughts on those two players in terms of how that's going to play out over time? Do you have any convictions on that?
Ron Baetiong: In Asia, they got the name. The name of the game is always hyper localization, right? Yes. You can have an app to consume it. So Spotify is doing an amazing job with Apple because again it is always there. But if you really want to help podcasters earn money, you have to give them two things: number one, control over how they can monetize their show. Number two is how they can monetize their show and the easiest way possible. And in Asia, more is better, right? Like for example, all these wallets, the grab wallet, Go-Jek wallet, whatever it's omni-channel all the time. Because even if you want to force a Spotify payment and more so an Apple payment, a lot of people are still unbanked in developing countries in Southeast Asia. Singapore is an outlier because Singapore is our epicenter of prosperity, but in the other countries, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, there's still a lot of FinTech play that needs to be played in order for that monetization to happen. Yes, the consumption machine is already there, but in order to get real money coming in, you need to diversify. So that's where I think that we'll head into,
You've been listening toThe Age Of Audio with me, Graham Brown from the award-winning podcast agency Pikkal & Co. To get access to all the audio conversations and book content for The Age Of Audio, go to www.theageofaudio.com. One more time. The age of audio.com .