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. Podcasts, Radio and Social Audio converging with big data to create engaging and authentic content for a new generation of listeners.
What is it that somebody with 10 years plus or minus in BBC radio, as a presenter and a producer knows that your average podcaster doesn't know. Firstly about audiences and engagement, what did that teach you in all that time that we can consider important to a podcast?
Ollie Guillou: Yeah, I think, what it taught me and I'll draw an immediate parallel to the podcasting space, as it seems to be like the majority of podcasts at the moment still following that head to head interview format. And I think that's a bit of a hang on from how people have experienced radio over the years. They've always heard their favorite presenters interviewing head-to-head with whoever they happen to have on that day. The problem, I think though, with the way that podcasting is gone and the reason why that head to head format perhaps is coming to an end a little bit is because actually radio presenters are so good at it because they first built up their personality for... you tune in for the presenter, not for the guest interview. They have this way of making themselves connect with the audience. You want to know more about them and find out about how their day's gone. You get a little bit of that banter in radio which I wouldn't necessarily say works as well in podcasting. And it's less about the guest interview and more about that personality. Whereas what's happened I think with podcasts a little bit too much is that people are looking for the next big guest to interview. And most of their episodes are very reliant on who they have on their show rather than who they are as people as individuals. So from episode to episode, you're putting the quality of your show in the hands of somebody else. Whereas what a radio station does is they use other people to add to the quality of the show, but really everything is focused around that one person, around the presenter. And I think personality driven programming needs to be a bigger part of the podcasting space because you want to fall in love with who you're listening to. You don't want to have to fall in love with each and every guest because there's going to be guests and probably more often than not that you don't like, or you're not interested in. And that shouldn't be the determining factor on whether or not you choose to tune into that podcast. The host should be gripping enough that you care enough about them to tune into whatever episode they have, whoever they're interviewing, whatever guest happens to appear there because you love that person so much. And so I think that's probably one of the biggest takeaways for me is that podcasting still has taken it's time to catch up with that understanding of how it can broaden on what radio already offers.
Graham Brown: On the nail there. Totally dig what you're saying. I say to clients when they're starting podcasts and friends that the audience was connected with the host. They may discover you because of the guest, but the host plays a pivotal role, don't they? Which is they're the bridge, they're the ones that make the conversation relevant, they're the ones that understands the audience and they're the ones that speak to the audience. The guest is effectively speaking to the host, but the host is speaking to the audience and asking the questions on behalf of the audience. And I think a lot of people shy away from that. Maybe Ollie it's because the personalities you've talked about in the world of radio are experienced and professionals. Yeah, here we are in podcasting with amateurs, starting that journey. Maybe over time professionals will emerge, but I think they 're shying away from that pivotal role that the audience connects with them. And like you say that using these proxies, which are the guests. And the net result of that is that they get audiences to their podcast, guests by guests, but they never translate to fans. They never translate to subscribers. Which is if you go back to the days of radio, that was everything. Getting people to come back to tomorrow or the next show. But in podcasting, we're as good as our last guest, aren't we?
Ollie Guillou: Yeah. And it's this lack of willingness to give too much of yourself on the podcast. I feel, rightly or wrongly, you have to open up and deliver quite a big chunk of who you are as a personality as well. And more and more I'm hearing people saying phrases like, oh, I don't want to be heard too much. I just want the guests to speak. I just want to ask some questions, but mostly less, let the guest speak. And I get that because you don't want to appear, like you're constantly trying to vie for attention. Like you're fighting the guest for attention in your own show. It really doesn't feel like enough anymore. And I think another issue you mentioned about the amateurs is that those radio stars, the people who are really good at it and really are engaging, they're being paid big figures on big national radio stations for a reason because they are few and far between. And there's this sort of illusion in podcasting because it's easily accessible that anybody can do it. And I don't necessarily think that is true. I don't think it is something that you can just buy a microphone, set up and off you go, you're going to be the next big podcaster. And it takes a special kind of person, or it takes a lot of training experience and working hard at it before you can become that person, the likes of radio one presenters or any commercial station you can think of they've got that wow factor because they've been training at it for years and years. And you don't just get that by doing a few interviews and hoping that your next guest is going to get you some listeners. They've had an opportunity to experiment in so many different ways as radio presenters, before they've gotten into those big positions where they have done reports out and about what they've done outside broadcasts. I did trips in the radio car, in the pouring rain, even when I did not want to do that. And that really set the scene for my growth as a presenter, because I not only presented shows, which are like magazine shows, but also news programming. And you tie all of those elements of your knowledge together to become a fully formed, fully fledged podcaster and presenter who can actually take on different elements rather than just focusing on one specific format and hoping that's going to be your way into kind of big listener figures. And I think as a radio presenter, but also I think 10 years coming up from the very bottom, I've learned that listeners don't just want to hear the same thing of everything, every single time they tune in. Occasionally you want something like a more colorful report, like a package. I think what the big companies are doing at the moment in podcasting, this sort of big production company seem to be leaning more towards that really narrative feature led programming rather than just the strict head-to-head interview, because they've seen the value in making it a craft, making something really special out of the content. And for me, radio has always been a mixture of those interviews with, if I say packages, I assume you probably know what I mean, but beautifully crafted soundscapes speaking to three or four different people, you've got vox pops, you've got the sounds of the environment that you're in, you've got the presenter explaining where they are, what they're seeing. Those things are really important because you're giving that visual experience to your listener. And I think the visual element of podcasting right now, it's still very much lacking and it's something that people just tend to forget.
Graham Brown: If you go to something like BBC sound as an example, that's an amazing recreation there effectively where they've created these sort of immersive for months. That's the visual part, even though it's an audio that they're painting pictures inside your mind, they're taking you places and they've got very strong anchors as well, very strong journalists or reporters when you were in the world. Radio, who in your mind was a, you know, an avatar that you looked up to, might've been BBC, you might've been commercial radio that you thought, wow, this person is really the kind of content that I want to turn to.
Ollie Guillou: It's going to seem funny, but it's not somebody who a load of people will have heard of. It was the presenter that I cut my teeth producing. And her name was Jenny Kendall Tobias. She's still presenting at BBC radio Guernsey where I started to this day. And she has this incredible way with people where she can sit in the same room as them for 20 minutes or 30 minutes, or even sometimes an hour. And you would never get bored or tired of the conversation. And she would just get them to say the most amazing heartfelt things often that they'd never said to anybody else, that they'd never admitted to anybody else. And yet here they were saying it live on radio. But then she was also a massive proponent of getting out there into the community, because with something like BBC local radio, it is community driven of course. So you've got to be a presence within the community to end up getting that attention from those people to be able to represent yourself as somebody who is important in their lives. And so she would be out there with her microphone, speaking to whoever she could find speaking to Joe Bloggs or the top politicians in the island. And she would leave me to do the fun production stuff on the packages. And she gave me a little bit of time on errors, which has also helped me. It helped me enjoy working for her a little bit more, but yeah, I think it's just that, she had an amazing ability to open up and give a lot of herself. I think sometimes that does come to a detriment. It is quite hard to give so much of yourself away in such a public space. And so I can see why people are hesitant to do it in podcasting, but I do think it just adds an extra bit of flavor that you don't get by sitting and taking the back seat in your podcast.
Graham Brown: It's a performance, isn't it. Even if you are a musician and you're playing live, you'd have to leave nothing on the table. You would have to give it everything. And then that's what the community the audience would pick up on, if you pull back. If somebody says to me in a podcast, oh, I'm not gonna tell you about this secret, or I'm not going to tell you about this story. Then it immediately turns people cold. That opening people up is magical and I love the way that you've put it as well in the sense that it's a two way street, isn't it? You have to lead, dare to be vulnerable, if you like. You have to be vulnerable for the audience and the guests to be vulnerable more importantly. If you want them to open up and talk about their failings and experiences and their journey, which is never a straight line, you have to do that as well. And you have to lead by example. It goes back to your point, isn't it? That people don't want to do that because maybe, 20 years of successful corporate career, you've got ahead by not doing that. That's a challenge.
Ollie Guillou: Yeah. And also, it does go to that community aspect. If you are that out and about meeting the potential listeners of your radio show, or maybe in this case podcast, you are immediately making yourself vulnerable because they get to see you, know you, you talk to them. And podcasting is difficult because obviously it's a global platform when you're putting out a podcast. So it's not as easy for you to meet in person all of the people who might be potential listeners in the future, but you don't often see this connection being built with your fan base in the same way as you do with radio stations. And it is difficult in an online sphere to do that because it's like a needle in the haystack, isn't it, finding people who will be interested in hearing what you have to say and then potentially tuning into your podcast. But I think to build up that trust from your audience, you do need an element of that and maybe the future needs a little bit of that audience engagement and it's not enough. I've got to say, it's not enough to say at the end of your podcast, audience engagement doesn't count. If you just say, please like us on Apple podcasts. There needs to be far more to it. There've been some really good examples of podcasts out there which have created massive Facebook communities. There's huge engagement for things like My Dad Wrote a Porno where the community has come together and they awaited with bated breath for the next episode. But that just doesn't happen enough. Um, I'll just,
Graham Brown: I'll just add it in there for those that don't know, My Dad Wrote a Porno, that's actually a podcast.
Ollie Guillou: Yeah. Yeah, my dad didn't write a porno. Someone's dad did though sadly. The thing is though I say all of this and I say the head to head interview is dead. I don't think it is completely dead. I think it just needs to be tackled a little bit differently. So I'll give you an example. I produced a podcast called Behind The Spine, and it's a show about narrative looking at the sort of different narrative of everyday life. The host does a head-to-head interview. But what I do with it is I do a lot of scripting and turn the episode into a book essentially. So there's three chapters within it. There's a prologue and there's an outro with writing lessons. And so I don't actually think it's about reinventing the wheel and you don't have to necessarily mimic what the likes of Gimlet media are doing or whoever the big production company is. You don't have to have a team of six doing immense levels of research to put out a good podcast, but you just have to make it a little bit unique. Do something which just breaks the mold a little, but doesn't reinvent the wheel so that you're not investing too much extra time in. And I know a lot of this comes down to time when it's amateur podcasts, but small tweaks to the standard format, I think can make all the difference.
Graham Brown: Yeah. It's coming from the angle of how do I engage the audience? As opposed to how do I create content? And you're absolutely right. The head to head interview is not like that for sure. It's just how it's done. I love what you're doing with that format. And I think that's something that people should listen to and explore. And just to see, you've got to hear lots of examples, haven't you, of what is possible. It may not work for you, but you need to have this sort of repertoire of options, a cookbook, if you like, of what could work for a podcast. I see interviews just as an example. We go back to radio, take Howard Stone, for example. I see someone like Howard Stone. He's got his haters and certainly his early days of radio were just terrible, but he had to fill the hours and he had to fill the air time. But as he got older and actually focused on interviews, he became really good. And I've seen you and you talk about opening up, it's done in a very different way. It's done in his style. It's a bit sort of frat style and you can imagine these days, it won't age very well, but as an interviewer, he's top of his game. And you compare that to say Larry King, who is like one of the master interviewers. I saw him do an interview with Morrisey, the musician from the Smith's. And Morrisey is a really awkward character and it was quite clear that Larry King didn't know who this guy was. So he asked them these very stock questions and I watched this very stale interview and I was surprised that these like contrast, if you go Howard Stone on him, what a difference that would make. Because Howard Stone would talk about his wife and his sort of failed sex life and display all that vulnerability? And yet Larry King is just reading a list of questions. I think a lot of people, with all due respect to Larry King, he was from a different era, but people are going into podcasting almost like Larry King style; ask good questions. Whereas that's fine, but there's no thought about what the audience wants out of that. And from the world of radio, the constant battle must be, what do my listeners want to hear from this guy? What do I want to ask him? And how do I engage them? So I just feel, you know what, there's a lot to learn here in this space from different styles. And I wonder if opening up is going to come naturally to a lot of these corporates like what do they do? You can't be... Howard Stone is a VP of some management consultancy. Where do they draw their inspiration from? How do you become more engaging without talking about your wife and your sex life to get that kind of vulnerability out there.
Ollie Guillou: Yeah. And then you think of interviews like Paxman, to do a Paxman now is a saying, that's what you want, isn't it. That's a few times in a lifetime, you're going to get interviewers like that. And so I do think at a certain point, it has to come back to the content a little bit. It can't rely purely on people trying to be who they're not, trying to be a massive radio personality in a podcasting space. VPs of companies, these CEOs who do want to share their information, there's got to come a time when they think there's gotta be a better way than by doing these interviews, these stale interviews where the questions are preplanned. And my favorite interviews that I ever did as a presenter were when the guest turned up at reception and said they were booked in, I couldn't for the life of me, remember booking them in. So I had to drag them into the studio and be like, oh, yes, sorry. Yeah, of course. No, of course. I remember just remind me what’s the names of your businesses. It's just people go in with too many questions, with too much of a preconceived idea about what the conversation is going to be and how it's going to pan out. And that really stifles them. I used to write three questions for my guests and I wouldn't ask any of them because what you want to do is have that natural response to everything they're saying. You want to be waiting at the end of each of their sentences, just like the listener would be thinking always in the back of your mind, how would the listener, what question would the listener want to ask right now? And because that's another issue I see with pre-planned questions, people going in with a list of 20, is that they're always just thinking about that next question they're going to ask. They're not thinking about what the guest is actually saying. Sometimes the guest ends up repeating themselves because the presenters have not been listening.
Graham Brown: And if you think about it in the context of radio Ollie that even those questions were submitted live and you would have the phone ins, I loved phone. Ins. They got used and abused to the full extent in the radio. But you can consider, for example, even in the world of sport, like talk sport, which actually has a zero game play game footage because of the rights issues. You can't have any kind of commentary from the actual sport itself, but you have people just talking. You go anywhere in the world and catch a taxi and they'll be listening to talk sport and people phoning in and giving their opinion about the new manager, the last game, the substitutions and so on. And yet that format is universal, whatever language. And I find that fascinating is that radio has evolved. And has that as a DNA. And yet here we are in podcasts. Like you say, the questions are really 'okay, submit your questions at the end', or even we see it in webinars, don't we here, we have the Q&A session at the end. To me, that seems very strange, doesn't that, is that a good radio presenter would take the questions all along and keep that conversation going. If it's relevant, let's ask the question now. I wonder what's missing. I wonder what we need to do to really bring that up to speed to make it fully engaging with the audience.
Ollie Guillou: Yeah. And you've got that issue where I think most podcasts are listened to only 80% through, and then people switch off for that last 20%. They can't be bothered to hear those announcements in the outro and that content that you're delivering them, the message that you want to get out there needs to be delivered early. Otherwise it's not going to be heard by most people. Driving audience engagement is hard because it's really difficult to figure out what question people are going to want to bite on? Because no one's going to respond to a generic call to action. They want something very specific that they care about, that they're going to spend the time writing in about. So you have to think whatever niche you're in, whatever guest you've got coming up, what does my audience care enough about that they're going to take a moment out of their day to speak to me about, and naturally that's where radio, because it knows its audience so well and has a real handle. It's funny to say, and it may be a bit embarrassing to say, but we knew that if we needed to get people to phone in at BBC local radio, we'd just ask them about dog poo and how annoying it was.
Graham Brown: You know what the trick is.
Ollie Guillou: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If you were like, oh, we haven't got a bit of engagement in the last few days. Let's talk about dog poo and that's about that, isn't it. It's about thinking a little bit more. I think it all comes back to thinking about your audience. I might sound like a broken record, but even in...
Graham Brown: How did you know that? Like, okay. So I have a podcast and just for argument's sake, it's about garden furniture. How do I know who my audience is? Where does that information come from? Where's the starting point? Do I start a podcast about garden furniture? Because I'm really into it or do I identify an audience and think what podcasts do they want?
Ollie Guillou: Yeah. A lot of people say identify your avatar, the exact person that you're trying to broadcast to. Whether or not that helps, I'm not sure, but you should probably start reaching out to the communities of people who care about garden furniture. Find the Facebook groups, talk to them about what they want to hear from a program rather than just assuming, you know what they want or assuming, because you're interested in something means they're going to be too. You can find the latest magazine, all about garden furniture and you could talk to, you know, a lot of these people at editors, journalists, they will spend a little five minutes on the phone with you and talk to you about what they do and what they're interested in. And sometimes they'll give you a little bit of an insight into their audience as well. It's not going to cost you anything and you just have to reach out. The worst that can happen is they say no. And then once you're reaching out to people on Facebook groups and other places like that, you're tapping into genuine passion for the subject. I think it's a mistake to just go into podcasting and in the hope that someone's just going to listen to your show and that you're just going to hit the nail on the head the first time round. And also, if you know already what you need to talk about when you're chasing your tail, when you're struggling for that guest and your next episode has to go up tomorrow, the panic won't set in quite as harsh and quite as harshly because you'll already have an idea about the topics and the kind of people that you should be approaching and the sorts of things you should be discussing. You're not going to be plucking an idea out of thin air.
Graham Brown: Yeah, it's interesting. I see a lot of people start, not being guilty of myself, starting a podcast and to some extent starting a podcast and not doing your research. You look at the survivors of that strategy and there's that sort of survivor bias, isn't it? That the ones that were successful are just lucky, effectively, and therefore that then doesn't validate the model that you can do that as well, especially now where it's getting harder to promote podcasts. If you were to go back three or five years, you could produce a podcast on garden furniture. And you would find an audience because there was a ready, made audience there on Spotify, on Apple. However, that's changed because Spotify and Apple are a lot more discerning with their traffic. They're not going to give it to every single Joe Schmoe who's got a podcast because they want to give it to the guys who are going to bring people back. So that's the guy that's publishing every day or the guy that's publishing content that people subscribe to. Now, that's going to create a problem because people, like you say, we would go back to music at the beginning. As an example, you said that everybody can publish a podcast now. And it's the same with music. I feel that everybody can play an instrument well, but it doesn't mean that they're going to be successful and that's fine because like people can play for intrinsic reasons, which is I enjoy playing. I just like making music. I enjoy gigging, like at my local pub. However, this sort of extrinsic motivations are like making it a success. And therefore, those guys I feel are going to be challenged. Because now you have this double whammy. On the one hand, there is a lot more competition. On the other hand, you can't employ these sorts of strategies that worked five years ago. You've got to get a lot smarter, which is you have to do your outreach stuff, which you're talking about [inaudible]. You would have to talk to communities. You're going to have to ask them what their pain points are. This is the dog poo stuff, right? What is it that really triggers them that they want addressed? And then, ask the questions that they want addressed. And this to me sounds like a lot more work and it's a lot harder now. And so more like starting a startup. You've got to validate the idea or otherwise you just have to get lucky and the numbers are quite low. So I'm wondering about where this is going. And your thoughts on where we're heading. Like you've mentioned already, the interview format. It's not going away and it's a great starting point. It's a great sort of step one [inaudible] podcasts. Do you think we're going to evolve into higher production values? Do you feel that there's going to be more emergence of this radio type stars, hosts in podcasts? What do you see as interesting, that's sort of the emerging trends from your vantage point?
Ollie Guillou: Yeah. So I think the biggest fallacy of podcasting is that it can be radio. And the thing with radio is that it is a place where you can just tune in, [inaudible]. You can not really ever be sure where you're going to get, but because of that, you understand that whatever content you get is going to be a bit random. You might get an interview with a gardener one day, an interview with an astronaut the next day and podcasting can't be like that. And actually it shouldn't be like that. That niche that you define needs to be tightly defined and kept too as well. Your audience needs to know what to expect from episode to episode. That's not what you get on the radio. And in fact, I think that's why we're probably going to see the eventual decline of radio, particularly in the UK, at least, over the next five to 10 years. I think local radio stations are going to start to disappear more and more. It's already started happening because people, you know, it's an on demand culture these days. People really want to hear whatever suits their mood right now. Just like music as well, on demand music, tuning into radio and getting any old seventies pop tune, isn't going to be enough for people. And it hasn't been enough for people for a long time now. If you want to listen to death metal that day, you're going to have to go on Spotify and listen to death metal. Because you're not going to get it, by tuning in to BBC radio too. So niches are going to more and more need to be tightly defined, but also those production values are going to have to get higher. Amateur podcasters are going to have to really train themselves in the way of creating soundscapes, proper sound design, and doing their research. It's potentially going to take a lot more time for them to put together that sort of dreaded idea that you've released less than once a week. It might have to be a necessity for amateur podcasts, even though I would always recommend once a week to gain that traction because we were seeing Netflix looking to enter the podcasting space. I think Facebook is even talking about it. And then you've already got the big players who are creating hugely successful podcasts with teams of 5, 6, 7, 8, whatever it is. There isn't going to be this breakout culture where the little man can certainly become the most famous podcaster. It hasn't been like that for a long time, but now more than ever, that is going away. I think people are going to have to think more specifically about the content and why it might be content that somebody can't get anywhere else. Now, what exactly are you giving the audience, which they aren't getting or how much research are you putting on that they can't be bothered to do? Because relying on having a big pop star name, like getting Michael Bublé on your podcast isn't really going to cut it when 5, 6, 7 other podcasters have done the exact same interview with Michael Bublé. Those production values will have to get higher. It may weed out some people, it may make it an impossible situation for some people, which is a shame because it is nice that podcasting has this incredible community around it. I discovered when I started podcasting that there are so many people out there willing to share ideas, tips, just this amazing friendly community, but will that disappear? Hopefully not. It may see a decline as people realize just what sort of effort you need to put in.
Graham Brown: Yeah. You're right, Ollie. Absolutely.
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