Graham Brown: Welcome to The Age of Audio, 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 changemakers in the world of audio. That’s Podcasts, Radio and Social Audio converging with big data to create engaging and authentic content for a new generation of listeners.
Right. Now, let's get going. Let's jump straight in. I'm a big fan of the podcast that you do. You do some amazing work there. You do some very varied brand original podcasts. I love the formats that you use and you've taken the often very dry subjects and made them interesting. And they could have been done in very standard, boring interview formats. But even when you're doing interviews, they're kind of interesting. But the work has obviously been done behind the scenes. How have you approached your podcast differently to let's say just the average podcaster who sets out with a microphone? This is what I want to talk about.
Neil Cowling: Sure. Well, I mean, to be honest, thank you very much. It's kind of you to say so. It's been really rewarding in the sense that we made a definite play to be in the branded space and the branded space of podcasts in particular. One of my fears with that was that we were going to end up making quite dry podcasts and we get a lot of inquiries from corporates saying, “Can we have our marketing director speaking to the CEO for 45 minutes please?” And despite that being the starting place, normally it's not where they end up because our job is to try and persuade them to create something that doesn't just serve their purpose, but obviously serves the listener's purpose. So become something that the listener genuinely wants to come back and make an appointment to listen to. The wider question, though, about how we differentiate what we do from lots of other producers is that our background is in radio. So my background is in 20 years of working for the BBC. Many other of our, all of our producers come from a broadcast background of some description or other, and mostly that is either BBC or Global radio in the UK. And my attitude has always been that the rules of audio, of creating, engaging, fascinating, entertaining audio are not new. They've been around since, BBC radio has been around since 1922. It's not a new thing. And the rules of how to create something that's great to listen to have evolved over a hundred years. So when you're creating a great podcast and you want to create something that people genuinely say want to listen to the answer to that is not to rip all those rules up and say, this is a whole new medium that we're just going to place an iPhone in front of ourselves and talk and think that we're fascinating to listen to. The reference points are why is radio a successful medium that hasn't died despite TV and everything else? What makes a great radio show? Why would I stick listening to a great radio show? And it's simply talented presenters. People are interested to listen to well curated content, a well thought about content, pre-production that involves having a call with the guests beforehand to work out how interesting they're going to be, what the best things to talk about are and what the structure of that conversation is. And that comes from being a radio producer, even if you don't have a background in radio, just thinking about what the rules would be or researching what the rules would be if you were creating a radio show. And understanding those and say, not just turning on a microphone and thinking that because you're fun to listen to for your friends in the pub that thousands of other people are going to want to listen to you. They're going to want to listen to you because you've got something interesting to say, and you say it in an interesting way.
Graham Brown: So let's go back to that example. Okay. I'm the marketing director. I want to do a 45 minute dialogue with my CEO, which will be the CEO talking for 40 minutes and me 5 minutes of questions, if I'm lucky. And that's the starting position, because that's all I know. I'm a SAS platform. Let's just say a technology software company. Where is it that you want to get me to this and really push the envelope on what we can do with this. Like how do you start with that? And where is end result with that?
Neil Cowling: So the starting point is always who's the audience. So the starting point, no question - Who do you want to talk to? What do you want them to feel, think or do differently as a result of hearing the podcast? It doesn't really matter what you want to say to start with, we'll get to that. The point is who do you want to listen and why do you want them to listen? And what do you want them to do as a result? I freely admit that in the early days of podcasting, particularly when we got into the branded area, we made quite a lot of what you would frankly call vanity projects for people. So, podcasting is cool. We think we've got something interesting to say, or we need to have a podcast because everybody else has got a podcast, which is common and that’s not an illegitimate reason to do it. So we made quite a lot of those, but what we always found when we got to the end of series one was everyone looked at it and went well, that was fun. Nice for the CEO to have some time chatting, but what does that actually achieve? So perhaps slightly counter-intuitively you start the process by saying, how would you judge this to be a success at the end? That then informs what you do. So, frankly, if the end result is that you want to be seen as a thought leader where you want to build the profile of your CEO to be a thought leader, then actually the CEO talking might be a legitimate format in order to do that. And we make podcasts where the CEO talks. That's absolutely fine. But thinking about what they're going to say and why they're going to say it is the important thing to start with. And then actually, what we then refer to is just storytelling. And I know this is becoming a cliche in the podcast world really if podcasts are about stories and creating a podcast is about storytelling, but it's true. And therefore, where are the stories within your organization? The stories may well be not at the top level. Lots of organizations, and as you say, it might be a software company, it might be a shipping company, whatever, lots of the stories that are fascinating to people don't exist at the top level. They exist on the shop floor. They exist in the port that you operate in or the place where your customers are. And so taking your head out of the sand and looking for where those stories are and how you can tell them is the conversation that you need to have around what would make a great story. And it might be, I keep saying it, but you're a marketing manager and you might well have great contacts in that, but they’ll probably run out of stories quite quickly. And keeping the client being a critical friend is the role that we play. We work with organizations like Shell. So, a massive corporation with 80,000 employees, but they trust us to kind of go, “No, stop. This sounds like an advert, or it sounds like greenwashing or whatever Shell could be accused of.” They trust us to say, “Actually, do you know, this is a bit boring or this is a bit corporate and well, you're mentioning Shell too many times. We need to bring in a third party contributor or we need to interview someone who's got a better story to tell” And the good clients, the ones who stick with you are the ones who listen to that advice and then take it on.
Graham Brown: So, let's talk about some of the clients and how you did approach that and made the stories interesting. And I'm just going to pick some random ones from the wall behind you, because there’s this wonderful wall behind you at the moment. It's got all the different podcasts that they've worked on. So I'm going to pick three randomly, and then I want you to just kind of walk us through how you applied that sort of storytelling narrative to it. So The Beauty Podcast by Avon, Parliament Explained by the UK parliament and the People of Hitachi. Let's pick those three. So we've got The Beauty Podcast by Avon, Parliament Explained and The People of Hitachi. These are a wide range. How do you make those interesting?
Neil Cowling: Okay. Let's start with The Beauty Podcast. So The Beauty Podcast, Avon is, many people will know, a very long established beauty products company who sell largely through representatives through everyday people who sell their products on their behalf. And they're challenging the UK and it's not necessarily outside, but in the UK, they're seen as very old fashioned. They're seen as makeup for people who are perhaps on the older end of the age range. They're not seen as a particularly trendy brand. So they want to choose podcasts to try and address that image and also to get themselves into conversations that they otherwise wouldn't be involved with. So the first approach was quite talent led. We had been speaking to Sally Hughes. Sally Hughes is The Guardian's beauty columnist and really well-respected within the industry and someone that Avon had been wanting to work with for a long time. And Sally coincidentally had approached us wanting to do a podcast to some degree. And it's quite rare that that serendipity happens, but it did. So we brought those two people together. And what you've got in Sally is a really well-respected expert with a huge social following, which is obviously where a lot of the value comes from with a presenter like that and huge credibility and contacts within the industry. So we were able to, for instance, we created a podcast where each episode had a different topic in beauty and some of those were quite standard. So wedding beauty, for instance, how to do your wedding makeup? But Sally's contacts were so extraordinary that our guest for the wedding makeup episode was Hannah Martin who did Kate Middleton's wedding makeup for the biggest wedding that's happened in the last 30 years. So those sorts of contacts are really valuable. But we also went into areas and we sat down and did a format and challenged Avon to say, "Okay, what conversations are you not currently part of? And their diversity was really difficult. So, they were essentially aiming to an older, quite white middle-class audience and they wanted to break out of that. So we created episodes about trans beauty and episodes about how to deal with black hair and those sorts of things where again, Avon are not normally part of those conversations, but by inviting people in from, with those areas of expertise and being able to use Sally's social media presence, it created a buzz around it, and it reached an audience that Avon otherwise wouldn't have come across. So the process was quite straightforward in that there was a client who was really keen to experiment and say, push the boundaries of what they were talking about. We had a brilliant presenter who was willing to use her social platform to push it. The one thing that we would all say, everyone who's involved in that product, in that podcast is that it didn't really push products. The temptation is there for a brand to try selling loads of product off the back of it. The brand presence was quite subtle, perhaps too subtle in retrospect, but you don't feel like you're being bashed over the head with, ‘Hey, try this makeup. Try this lipstick.’ We featured products from other brands counter-intuitively but Avon were happy to do that as long as they were part of that wider conversation. That's Avon. Parliament Explained was one of our really early ones. And yeah, so the UK Parliament is distinct from the UK Government. So we're not creating a podcast about the Government of the time. We were creating a podcast where the truth is. I'm sure this is true in any democracy, particularly in this country, people aren't really aware of how democracy works. You understand the politics, but do you understand how to change the law? Do you understand how people become members of parliament? Do you understand how the House of Commons and the House of Lords work together? That's quite fascinating and it also plays into people's hunger for historical and political content. So yeah, we created something there that really went back to basics. This is what parliament does. This is what an MP does. This is how it works. This is if you wanted to change the law, this is how we did it. And we use case studies and we use case studies a lot in our podcast, because again, that's how to get from dry corporate conversation into storytelling. Using case studies enables you to say, to invite someone on in this case, he says, I managed to change the law about such and such. It took me a while, but this is how I did it. And I went to my MP and little me in my own little town, had a campaign, put a what's the word? When you have a... you get people to sign a...
Graham Brown: Petition?
Neil Cowling: Petition! That's the word. Thank you, Graham. So yeah, you put a petition together. You take it to your MP. I clearly didn't learn enough from the podcast that I should've done. And that's how you do it. And so we used a lot of case studies. Again, we used a relatively famous voice in [inaudible]. And in terms of sign-off, it's the one we always use as a yardstick because we had to get every word of that podcast signed off by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords before it went out as a podcast. So whenever anyone says to us, "Oh, I'm sorry, there's going to be quite an extended sign-off process. We say, "Do not worry. It's to tell you about the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Graham Brown: Those guys take years to pass bills. God knows [inaudible] the podcast.
Neil Cowling: Yeah, exactly. And we had the representatives of parliament sit behind us going through the notes and adjusting the script as it was recorded. And okay, so one more, Hitachi. We create something called the People of Hitachi, which is actually quite, given that Hitachi are an enormous company who build nuclear power stations and trains. The People of Hitachi is actually just a small internal piece, celebrating members of staff who've been successful and been inspiring. And it's hosted by an internal appliance, which is often a challenge, but Emily in this case is great, but you know, helping an internal member of staff to become a presenter is often something that we have to be careful with because there's lots of people there who are there who think they can present podcasts who may not actually be the most engaging people or are as engaging as they think they are. So we go through quite a heavy sort of training process with them, but Emily's great. Again, it's about case studies. So we get people from within Hitachi who have won ‘Employee of the Year’, ‘Employee of the Month’. We talk to them, in the interest of them inspiring other people within the organization. So yeah, it comes down to stories and sorry to sort of bang on about it, but that's what we do. We seek out where the stories are within an organization. We match those stories with the message that the organization wants to tell, and we try to influence the behavior of the listener as a result of getting the story.
Graham Brown: Yeah, I love it. It is a really good structure there. The stories, the case studies are examples by which we learn. And if you go back thousands of years, the religious texts are just case studies really. They call them parables, right. Effectively, this is what they are in the audio sense. I can tell you about how to do customer service, but rather than me telling you, let me tell you a story and let's bring in this person who is the living example of us, the case study right. And that's kind of how it works.
Neil Cowling: And sometimes those people are internal, they're from the client. Sometimes they're customers of the client and often that's the best way of doing it. Because you're having a customer extol the virtues of your organization is obviously fantastic. And sometimes their partners. So, you can bring in other organizations that you've worked with. If you avoid being territorial about your own podcast, you can bring in experts from other organizations that you've worked with, who can reflect on projects that you've done together. Firstly, it shows off your expertise. Secondly, it shows off your network. If you can bring in a really impressive set of third parties who you've worked with, who reflect on the work that you've done together and say how great it was and talk about the lessons learned then that doesn't just show off how great you are. It shows off how great your network is and the way that you work with other people, which often in a B2B context is what you're trying to achieve.
Graham Brown: Absolutely. Yeah.
Neil Cowling: [inaudible] in parables, by the way, rather than [inaudible] way of saying,
Graham Brown: There you go. Genius. You can take full advantage of it because you're the one who can put it into your model. And let me tell you about the power of [inaudible] I love this idea of the internal podcast as well. I've come across a few people doing these in more advanced markets. In the U.S. I've heard of examples. I've got a story on The Age of Audio about doing it for Taco Bell, which I thought was awesome. The guy is actually on the road, selling stuff in a field; sales guys, doing a podcast for them. I'm just thinking that there's a bit of an untapped market, isn't it? That these internal podcasts, if you think about, especially where we are now in 2021 with what's happened in the last 18 months, that real disconnect people are feeling, this is money that would have been thrown at off sites or town halls or there's awful training days that we had to endure, but now it's gonna be used in another, like a really positive way. What do you think about this market in terms of growth potential? What else do you think it could be?
Neil Cowling: Massive. To start with, interestingly, almost all the external-facing podcasts that we create very often the first audience, the low hanging fruit is the internal workforce. So we've got corporates who we work with, I mentioned Shell earlier 80,000 employees. If they're not getting their employees to listen to their own podcast to start with, then that's missed a trick. You've got a ready-made audience there who presumably would be at least half interested in listening to a podcast that their company has made. That's the first thing to do is not to dismiss your staff as an audience for whatever podcast you make. But yeah, there are lots of ways, obviously that organizations communicate with their employees, but the level of engagement that podcasts bring is so unique against blogs, against videos, against as you say, staff calls, et cetera. It's crazy not to take advantage of that. So yeah, we make quite a number of internal podcasts for people and the consumption rates that you get from the staff are completely out of kilter with the number of people who might read an email from the CEO. Yes, you might read the first half of it and then move on. But one of the beauties of podcasting, particularly, and thinking about this sort of pre or post COVID world where you've got a half an hour, at least commute in any direction. One of the ways that people use podcasts a lot is to say, "Okay, I've got 20 minutes of dead time on the tube where I can improve myself or I can absorb some information that I wouldn't otherwise take in" and actually saying, "Okay, do you know what? On this commute, I'm going to listen to what our CEO has got to say, because it's interesting". It's a use of as I said otherwise dead time. So it's a really nice way of harnessing that internal network and coaching corporate information or internal information in an interesting way. We are about to start work with a government department who are doing exactly this. So they have a fortnightly meeting within their team. And normally it's just them on a zoom call, which is again fine. But what they're doing is putting it into a podcast. So that again, firstly, it's curated. You've got the beauty of being able to edit it before people see it, and people can just consume it in their own time. And again you stick it for about 20 minutes maximum because people aren't going to listen for any more than that, but you can create something that people are enthusiastic about listening to on their way home. It has some personality to it. All the rules apply that we've talked about earlier, think about it in advance, plan what you're going to say. Don't just sit down and say any old crap into a microphone and then have this sort of self-awareness to edit so that you're taking some of the boring stuff out. You're not coming across as the kind of David Brent character who's just trying to speak to the fans out there within the organization. Create something that's useful that has some character and yeah, it is an untapped market. It's a market that I think people are becoming more and more savvy to and lockdown, like lots of other things within podcasting, has accelerated that a bit because you're not able to get together in a room you're not able to have, as you say, this cringe-worthy away days that you would normally have. So let's put that budget on…
Graham Brown: Happy days.
Neil Cowling: Yeah. Yeah. I went on a balloon modeling internal work, which is… I won’t say what organization
Graham Brown: I can imagine. Just the cringe level for that.
Neil Cowling: I mean, it was fun. It was great, but you know, I'm not sure what it achieves.
Graham Brown: [inaudible] lean back and fall into the type of things. Okay, one question for you. I know you're a guy who has very quite well-defined architectures for thinking about podcasts and that reflects very well in the amazing clients that you've got. You've really delivered the quality of the work as well. I'm wondering if you're a contrarian in the sense that you see something in podcasting that others don't. Or do you have an opinion on podcasting, which most people disagree with, the world tends to disagree with you on?
Neil Cowling: I think it can perhaps be perceived as snobbery, but I really do believe that broadcast values, using people who have come through the ranks of broadcast media has a real value in podcasting rather than the idea that you can just pick up a microphone or buy a microphone for 500 quid and anyone can do it. I often say, one of the pluses of podcasting is that anyone can do it. One of the massive negatives of podcasting is that anyone can do it. There are so many terrible podcasts out there unless, let's not mince words. There are terrible podcasts created by all sorts of people, created by people in their bedrooms, created by organizations who can't be bothered to pay the money to get it done properly. We still have organizations who come to us and say, "We'd like a podcast, please. Can you do it for around a hundred pounds per episode?" To which the answer is no. It will be crap. You might as well just go off and do that yourself. And there you go.
Graham Brown: That company, whoever they are [inaudible]
Neil Cowling: There are people out there, I'm sure, who are offering.
Graham Brown: Just pay the money,
Neil Cowling: Pay the money to get it done properly. It means that the recording will be of high quality, not just off some crappy zoom connection. It means that someone will have carried out some thinking before the research takes place. We carry out research calls with pretty much every contributor who comes on our podcast. And I say that is to establish what those people are going to be good at talking about and what is going to make some interesting content. It also acts as a rehearsal for those contributors before they come onto your podcast. So yeah, I don’t know whether it's a contrarian attitude at all. I'd like it to be a mainstream attitude, but pay the money to get it done by people who know what they're talking about and people who will be a partner to you in creating good quality work. What you'll get otherwise is a short-lived podcast that nobody listens to that you then can't justify whatever investment, even if it's just investment in time, it will have been a waste of both time and money. So, you need to pay 1000 pounds an episode or more in order to pay good people, a good daily rate to produce a good podcast who can then advise you on how to promote it well. Who can advise you on your KPIs on whether it's worked or not, who can give you that feedback, who can be an honest partner to say no, what you've just recorded is boring and therefore we ought to edit 10 minutes out. It might be shorter than you wanted, but it will therefore be a better listen. And please don't employ a producer who calls himself a podcast producer, but charges you next to nothing. Because as I say, they'll be rubbish. I love the podcast community. I've got loads of...
Graham Brown: But?
Neil Cowling: Okay I'll get to the but. So I like the podcast community. And actually, I like the community of people who make podcasts, frankly, more than the people I used to work within the community who make radio.
Graham Brown: I want names. I’m kidding.
Neil Cowling: Well, I'll tell you the reason for that. No, you're wrecking me now, but I'll go with it. So the reason for that is in the world of broadcast radio there's a limited number of slots. There's a limited amount of work and you're all fighting over the same work. And therefore it's really difficult to break into and it tends to be monopolized by the people who can take the commissioner out for a drink at the right time and can have sort of chummy conversations with the people who hold the pots of money. So all of that is massively frustrating for those of us who spent any time trying to break into that space. You're pitching to broadcast corporations who have quite a narrow view of what they want to create, and also slots within radio stations that are designed for a specific demographic of people. And therefore they tend to commission the same sorts of ideas. So the podcasting community, there's almost an unlimited amount of room out there for people. Anyone can make a podcast. There's an almost unlimited number of organizations you could work for, who are willing to sponsor podcasts or create podcasts. So all of that is great. And I do genuinely love lots of the people who create podcasts. The thing that, as you've already sensed, winds me up the most is people who want to commission a podcast, but aren't willing to pay for the money that buys them quality production. And therefore, it's actually meant not as a way of slagging off people who've tried to pay peanuts in the past. It's more a piece of advice that if you're going to do podcasting, do it properly for God's sake. Employ people who know what they're doing, get a partner, because almost every organization that we worked for, starts by saying we've never made a podcast before. Of course they haven't. High quality podcasting has only been around at scale for about five years. So of course, most people haven't made a podcast before. That doesn't mean that it's easy. And it doesn't mean that making a podcast is easy. Making any odd podcast, yes, that's easy. Making a good podcast that works is bloody difficult. And actually most of the effort, most of the time and the money and the value comes before you've opened the microphone. The value and what you're paying someone like us for is the research, the preparation, the thinking about, the formats, the selection of the presenter, the saying no to people, the dismissing of the presenter who won't be the right person, who won't bring you the value. It's the hard work of spending that time saying, what are the objectives and how are we going to achieve them. So all of that is what you pay someone like us, good money for. When we come to open the microphone and actually do the recording and the editing, that's the easy bit. If you train yourself on Adobe Audition for a week, you'll know how to do that. That's not where the value is. And therefore, if we have clients who think we are expensive or too expensive and spend the majority of their time trying to beat us down. They're not the right client for us. We have sort of resigned clients and handed jobs back because we don't think that they have the right attitude to working with us. The people we love working with are the people who understand the value that we bring and want to create a podcast that reflects the amount of work that's gone into. There you go. You sent me off
Graham Brown: Love it.
Graham Brown: You've been listening to The 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 - theageofaudio.com