Graham Brown: Let's just jump straight in and let's talk about audio and sport. Let's put them all together. Let's do that. What is the unique connection between audio and sport?
Dylan Pugh: With sports, there's a lot of opinions. People are very opinionated and passionate about sports and audio just seems a very natural, authentic format for people to give off their opinions. And there's no rules. It's not like you have to stick to 20 minutes, you have to stick to an hour. You just talk naturally. Yes, you have a, no, not a script, but you have a talk track, but just let people talk and go off in multiple different tangents and go on for an hour and a half. There's no rules really. But it allows people's true opinions to come through. And I think that's been a huge value of audio from a sports perspective.
Graham Brown: When we think about talk radio, as an example. Wherever you are in the world, if you're in some taxi, somewhere in some town especially listening in the evening, it's going to be a phone-in, isn't it? And it's going to be a phone-in like somebody's going on about bitching about the manager. What is that appeal? Why do people love that so much? And it seems to be, I guess it's cheap programming as well, but the fact that it's so popular everywhere means it's actually not low value.
Dylan Pugh: Yeah but then now, rather than having the traditional phone-in, and that still obviously exists. But rather than having Dave from the pub calling up to voice his strong opinion, you're actually having well-respected ex players or even current players, largely ex players. You look at the rugby space, there's probably about 15 different podcasts that are largely the same. They're all got a couple of ex players as hosts, but they're all being very opinionated. Now as the listener, not only could you listen to some random person's opinion that you never heard of before, but actually you can hear the opinion of these ex players who you've grown up watching on TV. So yeah, that's been the huge value that, like you said, it's so easy to create. That there's a lot more opinions and more valued opinions out there.
Graham Brown: So it seems like we've moved from a situation where you had, in the old world of let's say radio and sport, that you would have Dave at the pub, taxi driver and effectively the editors, they would have their celebrity guests who would have been doing the circuits. They would be like ‘the regulars’. But there wouldn't be anything in between. But now there's this big mid market, which is people who really care, like you say, the ex pros and people who are involved in the game, but didn't have a platform to voice themselves, maybe. It seems like that seems to be an interesting market that was untapped before.
Dylan Pugh: Yeah, definitely. But I think the challenge now is that all this really interesting and amazing content exists. But the people that would love to hear it either don't know that it exists or aren't quite sure how to get it, or perhaps something that I think about a lot is that it's all too long form at the moment. I think what audio is missing is a YouTube equivalent. Doesn't have to be the exact same as YouTube. But for example, pretty much the world's TV content or largely the best bits of the TV content is chopped up into smaller little highlights and put on YouTube as a mass library to be able to search for pretty much anything you want to get. Now in audio that doesn't really exist. The good quality content, the 5 minute funny story from a 40 minute episode lives as a 5 minute story within that 40 minute episodes or the podcasters are creating things like audiograms or videos, but putting it on YouTube or on Instagram. So they exist in that, but I think audio needs something that's a lot more short form, teasers, highlights or snackables that sort of allows people to go down a rabbit hole and listen to 15 different clips in an hour without realizing it. You're thinking I'm not going to listen to a podcast for an hour, but before you know it, you're 40 minutes down and you've just gone from clip to clip, multiple different podcasts and listen to fairly contextually similar kind of content. But I think that's one thing that the audio world has really struggled in, that YouTube and TV go hand in hand, but audio just all lives in this long form library that no one knows exists.
Graham Brown: It's a discovery, isn't it? That is the massive problem. The way I tend to look at it is, you look at, for example, podcasts and social audio in the same way that we look at music and radio. So radio existed to solve the discovery problem of music, the property, right? So if you had, for example, a new artist that you were pushing, the fact that you knew the guy at the radio and could get airplay was significant for the success of that property. And the same way we have this problem now is that you have a podcast, your problem is how do I get airplay for it? And the equivalents of airplays, like you mentioned, people are doing the audiograms & things. But these are marginal in terms of what really makes the big hit. The big stuff lies in building this airplay community around your podcast. And I see people doing interesting things. Obviously, Clubhouse is one. LinkedIn live is another. Reddit is another one. Facebook has obviously played their hand at the audio space as well. People doing telegram groups. We have, like the Patreon subscribers as well for communities. All kinds of things going at a moment in the sports space as well. What do you think is working people, building communities around podcasts or are we not even there yet? Has it not already started?
Dylan Pugh: You've got things like a Locker Room, which is sort of the sports focus. This is also the sports equivalent of Clubhouse which Spotify have just acquired. But that was very small. So whether or not there's value in that, but even places like Clubhouse, there's a lot of sports-based rooms in there. I just think, going back to your analogy earlier about what you did for music and helping with discovery? Yes, obviously that is a massive thing, but also radio does wonders for the back catalog of the music worlds. Music is timeless, whereas in the podcast base and other forms of spoken word audio, it's all very now and forgotten about. It's all where you consume it now and it's forgotten about, but actually there's a load of really funny stories or interesting things that live in the back catalog of many places, but just doesn't have anywhere to be surfaced. This all just lives in the back catalog. Never to be seen again, unless someone specifically searches for it. So I think again, that's the difference between what radio does for music and YouTube does for TV. But audio or podcasts don't really have that as a space. With Clubhouse and all these things, it's all about the ‘now’. And it's good for discovery for now, but all this rich content that's existed for the last 5 years is just redundant next week. Pretty much. Yeah. So that's definitely something that I think someone somewhere needs to solve for.
Graham Brown: I think it will be Spotify. The way they're going, especially, they are edging towards an advertising play long-term. Their tie up with Facebook looks like that's the horse they're backing. Obviously the content monetization part, which was the micropayments really. I think they were hedging their bets against Apple there because Apple has iTunes. They've done micropayments for nearly 15 years. They know that very well. Spotify going down the advertising route to me then suggests that they then have to become Google of that space. They have to really solve the problem that you talked about. Like Google's problem is how do I serve up content for you and make you believe that my results are the best, the page quality stuff. So therefore Spotify needs to then serve up relevant content and dig into the back catalog. And how do you do that beyond the crappy descriptions that people provide in the podcast? You've got to start listening to these things.
Dylan Pugh: It is tough to do it manually. I'm sure there's some kind of tech and AI that exists or someone can think of something that can work this out. Spotify, I've started doing it manually for Joe Rogan. The big part of when they brought Joe Rogan onto the platform was creating these sorts of, chopping up the back catalog into 5 to 10 minute clips and putting them all together in playlists of similar different contexts. So, that's definitely the future. I actually thought there'd be doing a lot more of that. Obviously I don't work there anymore, but I was expecting a lot more of that, but maybe that's it. Maybe it's just such a manual job right now that it's just, they don't have the manpower to do that. I think they're beginning to do it. There's a YouTuber in the UK called Jaack Maate who's got a podcast called Happy Hour, who they brought on from YouTube has been a big success. And again, a lot of my discovery for that has been short form. I see these little clips that I'm interested in, and then low and behold, I listen to the full episode. So I know they're doing it, but it's all very manual and they don't have the manpower. So yeah, I'm sure that's something, Their goal is to be the Google of audio.
Graham Brown: Definitely. You talked about the Joe Rogan discovery process as well. YouTube's got that down. There's fans who make Joe Rogan clips. There's a number of channels, isn't there? There's the Joe Rogan channel. And then there's the fan derivatives, if you like. Some of it is parody and some of it is just three minutes when Joe Rogan says this and that's how you discover it. I think you discovered it first because it keeps coming up in your feed and then you think, what is this that keeps coming up. That doesn't exist in the podcast space. Does it?
Dylan Pugh: No. That's it. That's exactly what I'm talking about is some kind of way that if you're listening to something, even if it's an autoplay afterwards a three minute clip of something that's vaguely relevant to what you're talking about. Let's just say I'm listening to the Peter Crouch show and there's a funny story about Wayne Rooney and then automatically I get served another funny story related to Wayne Rooney from Football Ramble, for example, or a Jamie Carragher episode where he interviewed Wayne Rooney. I'm just talking, making stuff up here, but it's that you get stuck down a rabbit hole. You listened to that Joe Rogan clip that you listen to another one because it's so obvious and in your face
Graham Brown: to make that work on an automated level is going to be tough. You need the community to do it really. I think that's the key, isn't it? You need them to clip this stuff. In a way, I think, if you look at Spotify as an analogy that they've done, that they try to do with the playlist and it in a way it's contextualizing, isn't it. How do I solve that problem? How do I discover this stuff? And then you have your playlist of your lounge music for Tuesday afternoon, that kind of stuff and they would give you that based on other people's discovery and collation of that. I think there were some official places as well, and you can have the sponsored ones and so on, but 95% of it is community like Wikipedia. And you need that tool in audio such that, okay. That clip of Jamie Carragher and Wayne Rooney, that funny anecdote clip. Got it. Because there's no way you could do that with machine learning any kind of four level,
Dylan Pugh: And no matter how good the transcript is and AI is going to be very difficult, isn't it?
Graham Brown: Yeah. So I just wonder, here's the thing as well. When I think about the main platforms, a lot of, if you compare YouTube to Spotify and apple, Amazon, even audible that YouTube has comments. And if you look at the comments, it's often the first thing I look at when I look at a video, I look at the comments. I'm just curious why in audio we haven't gone down that route. Why is there no sort of social interaction around audio and these platforms?
Dylan Pugh: Yeah, that baffles me from a Spotify perspective. Why didn't we have that? On Apple, at least you have the reviews, which isn't necessarily the same as comments. We don't have the interaction, the same as comments, but at least you do get some form of feedback through the reviews. And I now know as a podcaster, the reviews are crucial, both as someone who wants to listen to a show. I look at the reviews, but also as someone who's created the shows, it's very important. That was a massive gap always felt at Spotify that we didn't have.
Graham Brown: Yeah. There you guys, somebody out there is probably trying to solve it now. Hopefully. Who in this space really inspires you? Who checks all these boxes, whether it's like, content or the way they promote or just the storytelling aspects of a podcast.
Dylan Pugh: I think I'm really getting into the high-end investigative journalism style podcasts, and I know that the U S have really dominated that space from a true crime perspective over the years. And I think the world is beginning to catch up now. And I think the BBC do a great job here in the UK of creating things like that and helping with the discovery And, we're beginning to see other companies following suit and you're creating those premium investigative journalism style content and marketing it. The difficulty specifically in this market is that if you have a big name, then it's quite easy to leverage that name to promote it. But if you don't have a big name, it's really hard. And that's the key challenge for many people is unless you have a very well-known name, they have a big social media following, then it's tough because you can do the same thing as there are, creating the headliners and audiograms and all that kind of stuff. But unfortunately, if you don't have an outlet to promote that, then it's very difficult to get people to notice it.
Graham Brown: What about in sport? You mentioned Peter Crouch, for example, that's a good example of a big name and the podcast. Is it possible as an amateur to compete with these guys or are people actually doing it?
Dylan Pugh: Yeah, I think that, there's been a few successes where people have broken through and almost built themselves up as a well-respected voice in that space. I think as the world has, or as the space has become a lot more cluttered, it's going to be a lot harder for independent creators to compete. Unfortunately, as much as I would love it to be different. I think these days for an independent to create a sports podcast and compete at the top, it would be very difficult.
Graham Brown: Is that where sports networks come in or podcast networks generally come in. Do you see these as playing more of a key role? Because these are a thing now that you've got clubbing together of resources effectively, they're almost like record labels or radio stations in the old days, right? Yeah. What do you think?
Dylan Pugh: I think obviously there's been a lot of consolidation and the podcast marketplace as a whole over the last couple of years. And I think that will continue over the next couple of years as well. And generally, I think it's a good thing. I think the more of the network approach with your headline, big stars at the top that can actually help to promote the small, independent creators within that is only a good thing. It's a good thing for brands. It's a good thing for independent creators. And also it's a good thing for listeners as well, because if you're listening to a podcast, and that belongs to a network within that podcast, you can get cross promoted for other similar podcasts that you would have never found otherwise anything. Oh, that sounds quite interesting. So yeah, I'm a big believer in the network approach. And I think obviously there will be more consolidation to come, I don't know, in what shape or form, but I think that can only be a good thing over the next couple of years.
Graham Brown: Yeah. If we go way back, the Bleacher report was one of the first in the U S right the sports network that got bought up. I remember I check my sources when they do all this and actually do post-production. It was not I can't remember anyway, but, that was like one of the first major sports networks that got bought up. Yeah. And
Dylan Pugh: Then obviously the Ringer. Spotify bought the Ringer. Then you've got companies like Barstool sports, which had a big sports podcast network out there. So there's a few, in the UK you had companies like Muddy Knees media who do The Totally Football Show with James Richardson, which is one of the most popular ones. They got bought out by the Athletic. So whether it's companies like the Athletic or trying to create things like that, but yeah, I'm sure you will get a lot of these companies. The challenge for many people in the UK is that the BBC is so dominant.
Graham Brown: Yeah. Yeah. Like you're competing with very high quality production and stars, celebrities, not very difficult to compete with. Yeah. A lot of people would come out to the BBC as well now into podcasts. So yeah, there's been a big shedding in the last two or three years alone.
Dylan Pugh: Yeah, absolutely. You get companies like the Crowd Network who have just started up. I don't know if you're familiar with those guys, but a few ex BBC members are doing some good things. So, even for them, with their expertise and resources, I'm sure they'll be finding it tough out there because it's tough to be launching podcasts these days, especially if you're chasing a big hit. But yeah, the more companies, like not necessarily the more companies like that, but the more. Wait that companies like that can get by accumulating lots of other smaller podcasts as the better.
Graham Brown: Yeah. We're going down that consolidation route, which is what you see in all media. publishing. Whether it's music, classic case or what's happened games as well, video games starting out from cottage industry, then that sort of consolidation until we had that, the big giants that EA who ran everything and we're seeing it now in podcasting, what that means is for the indie publishers, is that less and less, it means that they'll get less crumbs from the top table because these guys, these networks, will learn the rules of the game and they're consolidate their resources, pull these resources and use them to stay at the top and to win more traffic. And that means everybody else at the bottom. It's like the old days when people started getting into SEO and started understanding that you have to game this algorithm to stay at the top. And so they would pull their resources. Now you can't get into the page one results for anything useful as a keyword right? So that's, I think where we're going with this, it's going to be interesting like this. I think the way we're going is this purchase of networks. That's the model that's going to emerge. And it's just easy for people like Spotify and Apple to buy these people. Screw this. I'm going to just buy 10 million listeners in this niche. That's where we are going.
Dylan Pugh: Yeah. I still think there's obviously space for independence, but when you look at the podcast space, there's so many independents that they all can't live successfully. So I think consolidation whereby a lot of these independent creators can be a part of a larger network and actually help both sides of the party.
Graham Brown: Yeah and okay, very good. Is just a rounding off dylan, is there anything, I don't know if you're a contrarian, so, but if you are, is any thing that you see in the industry that other people don't see or things you think about the industry that people disagree with you on?
Dylan Pugh: The two biggest things for me right now are on the discoverability side. And I think we've pretty much covered that off, but also with the monetization side, I think. The revenue for podcasts is going up, which is good, obviously, and the numberless is going up, but unfortunately the number of podcasts being created has also increased disproportionately higher. So, the gap has widened, even though all the metrics are going up, which is good. I just think that from an ads perspective in the podcast space, we need to get away from the host street being so influential. I'm a big believer in the value of the whole street, by the way, I'm not downplaying the value of the whole street, but I think all the other factors that come with podcast advertising need to have a higher value attached to them. Just the engagement levels, the attention level. The contextual relevance of the advertiser you can get. And at the moment, there's two forms of advertising. There's the whole street and there's an ad spot and there's a massive gap between the value of them and also how tolerant the users are to both of them. Because generally I think most users like the whole street and they hate the on ad spots but I definitely think there's a middle ground and I just saw, I was interested. Yesterday, Spotify just announced there a research study that they've been running for a long time, whereby they're creating this middle ground of different companies call it different things, whether it's announcer reads or producer reads or, third-party voice actor reads, but essentially it's delivered in the style of a host read but it's not the actual host that's delivering the message. So it's not an ad spot with jingles and music and crazy loud radio stuff, but it's not the host delivering the message. It's an independent third-party professional voiceover, delivering a host read style message. But that is a lot more scalable because you don't have to rely on the host of each podcast to do that and it's scripted so there's no longer the back and forth between host and brand, Oh they didn't say this word correctly can you re-record and. It's just a lot more scalable, but also a lot more effective than the ad spots. So I think that's an area where I hope we'll see a lot of growth and I want a lot of brands to move away from the thinking of this being like an influencer marketing channel, whereby they're saying we want the host to be endorsing our products. Yeah, that is good. And there is a space for that, but that's not the be all and end all of the podcast industry. Still being able to communicate a message to a user that has chosen to listen is highly engaged is paying attention and if that message is contextually relevant to the content, there's a lot of value in that. Irrespective of if it's the host reading it or an independent third-party voice over. So that's something that I'm big on at the moment and really want to push
Graham Brown: give it a name. What's it called? That area? That mid ground
Dylan Pugh: high stuff. I lost track of what Spotify calls it these days because it changed names five times when I was there. I think they call it scripted voice talent. I don't think that's snappy enough. Yeah. People call it an announcer read. Some people call it producer reads, but yeah, I think that's the other thing with advertising as well as that, because it's a digital media. And more addressable data exists than does on TV and radio. People are applying the traditional digital metrics to it and treating it like the traditional digital medium, and then essentially using it like a performance medium, where it's not a performance medium at all. So, there's a disparity that just because the data is available, it doesn't mean that you have to use every single bit of it, just cause we don't know if someone's clicked on something or bought something. It doesn't mean that the ad wasn't effective. Whereas in radio and TV and outdoors, you don't have the ability to understand if people clicked on or did something anyway. They don't get deemed to be ineffective. So I think that's an area where one digital audio as a whole, especially podcasts need to find its narrative to prove as value to brands or,
Graham Brown: yeah, fascinating. It's going to be in the area of the engagement. They win hands down, don't they? It's going to be the more these guys can start pushing the narrative about, okay. 40% of listeners listen to. 34 plus minutes of the podcast, whatever it is, 75%, those kinds of metrics. That's when we start winning that debate, that is not about seeing it through the lens of the mediums that came before. And therefore, a derivative or a secondary version of that. That's like you've got that sort of Mindshare aspect. Which I think is pretty untapped.
Dylan Pugh: Yeah. Massively. Attention is a big buzzword in the industry at the moment the digital industry, and I think podcasts, win that hands down. And if you look at branded podcasts and branded content in general, it's the opposite of most other forms of digital media whereby as a brand, you're basically following this user around. You're serving, you're bombarding them with ads, following them around wherever they are hoping that they do something. Whereas with a branded podcast that user has opted in is actually that person chosen to listen to your content. It's the opposite of all of the forms of digital media. You haven't chased them. They're chosen to listen to this thing. There's huge value in that.
Graham Brown: It is quantifying isn't it?
Dylan Pugh: That's the difficulty. Yeah.
Graham Brown: Yeah. But at the higher levels, it needs less quantification. It needs that they get the idea, doesn't it? But when you're at the marketing manager level, the buyer level, they still need the numbers because they can't take the risks that their bosses can take. So I think that's where we are very interesting. I love the attention part as well. I think that's where it's going. This is the attention, That's the most valuable commodity today -attention. That's what wars are for over essentially the attention of people.
Dylan Pugh: And even like on the attention front, the fact that you've got your headphones on. What you're listening to. So technically if you've chosen to listen to podcasts, you're probably going to be listening to it. Not just the radio's on, in the background, you're probably intently listening, but also it's almost like a direct path into your brain. So even if you want to switch off and even if the mid-roll comes on and there's an ad message and you don't want to listen to it, can you be bothered to take your phone out of your pocket to skip? Yeah. Or whatever. Can you switch off and do something else? Yeah, but actually it's a direct path into your brain. It's very hard to not pay attention, even if you really don't want to. It's hard. That is a massive sort of narrative that the digital audio industry needs. I was working on a big piece of this when I was at Spotify, passionate about this place. But I think as an industry, as a whole, that needs to be a much stronger narrative, I think.
Graham Brown: Yeah. And it's definitely something I'm interested in. I spent my career working with telecoms companies and helping them understand the attention of young people. How do you get their attention? And it was all about earning at the time. This is when people started understanding earned media. So that's the narrative at the time, it's you have to earn attention, not buy it, which is how they'd done it for oh, just do a TV campaign. But now it's about how do you build community for young people? And then how do you engage them and win their attention that way. So, even going down to the neuropsychology of attention and studying how that works as well. So I think we're in a really interesting space because you think
Dylan Pugh: There's a company called Dentsu, which yeah, they've done a big study called the Attention Economy. And I'm not sure what stage they're at or what results have come out, but some of the work that they've done has been really interesting when you compare a video ad on Instagram, when people are scrolling through versus a TV ad versus an audio ad versus other forms of media. And I think the findings are quite interesting.
Graham Brown: That's a good one.. We're in the right place.
Dylan Pugh: Yeah, absolutely.
Graham Brown: Dylan. Wonderful, great speaking to you.