Steve Pratt: On Building Relationships via Branded Podcasts
The Co-Founder of Pacific Content shares Why Marketers should Think of Their Original Content as a “Gift” and explains the Special power of not talking about yourself.
“Listeners, or audiences, are getting more empowered to be able to skip things that they don't want, and being much choosier with what they do put their time and attention towards. That’s putting a bigger ask on marketing to be effective: to be able to get people's time you actually have to earn it.”
By E.B. Moss
Steve Pratt has two problems to address when he’s creating any branded podcast: how it will solve a client’s business issue and how it will appeal to mainstream listeners. In this conversation, the Vice President and Co-Founder of Pacific Content, which has produced shows for companies ranging from Rocket Mortgage and Ford Motor Company to Charles Schwab and Dell Technologies, explains how those goals are inextricably linked and how they inspire “creative bravery” among brands.
I got to know Pacific Content because I became a fan of a podcast called Trailblazers and didn’t realize at first that it was from Dell.
Yes, we've been doing that show for a long time. When Dell merged with EMC and turned into one company called Dell Technologies, there was a big brand refresh. Their goal was to let everybody know that this combined group of companies and services stood for helping companies get through digital transformation and figure out how to avoid being disrupted and to continue to learn the lessons of how to innovate and be successful in a digital era. So we got together with their team and put together this podcast, Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson. Every episode takes you through the history of a particular industry and how it's been disrupted with stories told from the people who were actually in there. It's a bit like a master class or an MBA in disruption and innovation, but it's a really fun show.
Let’s use that as the example of what good branded content is and how you define that for podcasting.
It's different for every client we work with because everybody shows up with a business problem they're looking to solve. The strategy part is figuring out the Venn Diagram overlap between the business goal and what people are going to love listening to.
In the case of Dell Technologies, it was a top-of-funnel brand exercise around associating the brand with this new idea of digital transformation. And podcasts have been amazingly effective doing this. But if you listen to Trailblazers, there's no Dell products and services in the podcast. They're a really brave forward-thinking marketing team. They know that if we keep telling amazing stories about disruption and innovation, people will know that they’re the company making that podcast. It’s in the packaging of the podcast, like how you know Game of Thrones comes from HBO. Over time, the more episodes that people listen to, the stronger the connection is and the more it demonstrates Dell’s expertise in a way that is really authentic: They care and they they're putting it out there and sharing smart information on the topic.
“Our approach is that the smartest marketers are going to be the ones who don’t think about themselves, and don’t think about talking exclusively about their own products and services, but who think about ‘how can we give a gift?’ that's where you make a show.”
Target’s Roundel or WalmartConnect aside, you've described Pacific Content as helping brands become media companies by creating marketing content. How?
We're seeing big opportunities for a lot of brands as the listeners, or audiences, are getting more empowered to be able to skip things that they don't want, and being much choosier with what they do put their time and attention towards. That’s putting a bigger ask on marketing to be effective: To be able to get people's time you actually have to earn it. You can't force an interruption as much as you used to, and you can't buy your way into it at the same level that you used to.
Our approach is that the smartest marketers are going to be the ones who don’t think about themselves, and don’t think about talking exclusively about their own products and services, but who think about “How can we give a gift or create a significant amount of value for the people that we want to have relationships with?” And that's where you make a show. You make a show that is designed as something that only that brand can make, that creates a gift of significant value to the audience. It’s thinking about the audience first instead of creating interruptions that people don't want but instead are grateful for the things that we've put out into their lives. That’s where a brand is a media company and it’s a concept we think makes a ton of sense from a brand-level marketing perspective
Is there any stigma to “branded content”?
When we first had the idea to “help brands become media companies” in audio—I think our first one launched in the spring of 2015 with Slack—our website just said, ‘We make branded podcasts.’ I think it helped popularize the term. Then a couple of years later, we actually kind of reversed course and changed the language to ‘Original Podcasts With Brands’ because there are connotations that audiences have around branded content that it's tricking people somehow, or it's always going to end in a product mention or a service plug or, or a promo code or something like that.
We didn't want to set that expectation that what we were offering was a thinly veiled infomercial because you're making a real show and it's a collaborative project that people listen to all the way through, and are pleasantly surprised that it is a fabulous show. So we've used this term called creative bravery and talk about it every single time with a new client in the kind of qualifying phases and then in the strategy phases and the program development. We ask: ‘How creatively brave are you willing to be as a brand in making a real show? And, is it so good that if you didn't work here or you weren't a customer, you would tell other people about it?’
“A really important part of our business actually is helping people to decide sometimes not to make a podcast at all. Are you going to make a great show that is worthy of people's time and attention? If not, you might want to consider a different strategy for audio.”
What are other reasons why a brand would want to make their own podcast?
Podcasting in particular is a really powerful medium, and with some really unique strengths. One of the biggest ones is the amount of engagement. With a great podcast, we can regularly get completion rates of 85, 95% through a 30-minute episode. If you're making a season of shows that gets people six times, with an average engagement of 25 minutes, I don't know where you can get that kind of time in any other platform.
And, if you want to talk about the things that you stand for, or you want to explore telling stories with your values, or if you want to help your audience understand complex topics, as a gift to them, it's hard to do that on Twitter or TikTok or Instagram because they're short attention span mediums. They're really good at some things, but for actually putting some meat on the bone, podcasting is a phenomenal medium to be able to really dig into some powerful storytelling or let people know who you are as a company and what you stand for.
When do you advise a brand to, even at the loss of perhaps a piece of business for Pacific Content, just place advertising in another podcast, versus go full on and make their own content?
A really important part of our business actually is helping people to decide sometimes not to make a podcast at all. There are a number of factors: Number one is, are you going to make a great show that is worthy of people's time and attention and that's differentiated in your market? And, do you have the resources and team behind you to do that? Are you willing to make the listener a big part of the strategy? If not, we might say we're not a great fit and you might want to consider a different strategy for audio.
The other big one we learned fairly early on at Pacific Content is, are you committed to marketing your show? And, do you have resources to market your show effectively?
When we put out Slack's podcast, it did really well. It was quirky and novel and it caught a lot of press and Slack marketed it very well. Then we made a couple of other shows that were really good also but did not have the same level of consumption. A big part of it was because the brands had not marketed them as effectively. So we've developed a very robust and deep nerdy expertise in audience development for brand podcasts. If you have a creatively brave show and you tell all the right people about it, you're going to be one of the happiest people on the planet marketing-wise.
You know, in some ways brands have a really unfair advantage compared to almost everybody else in podcasting. Like a lot of other digital media, everybody starts from zero. But the owned channels and the internal communication channels and the paid budgets that brands have, anybody in podcasting would love to have! Part of being a media company is marketing a show and letting people know that our show is coming, and building excitement about it and promoting it episode by episode. We’re always helping marketing departments learn how to market a show instead of a product or service.
“if you want to help your audience understand complex topics, it's hard to do that on Twitter or TikTok or Instagram. They're really good at some things. but for actually putting some meat on the bone, podcasting is a phenomenal medium.”
What do you tell them about how they should measure success, assuming proper marketing? What are the typical or non-traditional measurement tactics?
Being able to measure marketing effectiveness that’s driving actual listening of the show is also a huge part of the business. Of course, it depends on what the business reason is for making a podcast; every client might have different KPIs. But some of the big ones obviously are the number of downloads—or listens—of the show. Another is completion rates, like the engagement factor in how much time people are spending with the show, and actually measuring how the marketing is performing and delivering results. You know, there are amazing tools like Chartable that help measure attribution from one place to another in podcasting.
For example, we might help a client put Chartable on every link that they share about the show with a different tag on it, so you can see how LinkedIn or Twitter performs compared to an email newsletter, compared to an in-app placement or a front page of a website banner, and see what conversion rates those get and which ones turn into listeners. We might help them do a paid media buy of ads on other podcasts that are exactly the right type of match for subject matter and audience, and get a custom host read on a third-party podcast that also has a Chartable link in it where we can see this many people listened to the third-party podcast and went and downloaded our client’s show as a result of it. You get a real-time dashboard of how our marketing is performing, and we can be agile with that and adjust over the course of a season or season-to-season to just keep optimizing.
I think a lot of brands and agencies aren't aware that that level of measurement is possible, and podcasting, it's getting better and better all the time.
In speaking with Bart Roselli of Veritone One as well, which supports ad insertion, search, attribution and more, it seems like Pacific Content is very complementary as brand, or awareness, marketing?
Yes, and going back to your earlier question about when is making a podcast not the right thing: If somebody says, ‘We need ROI in the next quarter,’ or ‘I need to see a bump in sales or grow the pipeline in the next quarter,’ that's probably where we would suggest the performance marketing side of podcasting which has a ton of people and technologies like Veritone who can do a podcast ad campaign and pick exactly the right shows and do a fabulous job.
A branded podcast is more around changing people's relationships with the brand and what you stand for. And again, that's why we qualify what's the problem that the brand is coming into podcasting for and make sure that we give them a great experience, whether it's with Pacific Content or Veritone or anybody else in the market to solve the right problem with the right tool.
Pacific Content is very generous with its own content via its blog, and known for year-end predictions. As a guest on “radio futurologist” James Cridland’s Podland News going into 2021, you rightly predicted more consolidation with companies wanting ad and podcast tech along with content under one roof, like Amazon acquiring Wondery. What are your thoughts about that and for 2022?
Yes, and Amazon also bought Art19 as a hosting platform with ad technologies. I think they're building a live audio app as their take on the Clubhouse and Twitter spaces.
I think we've seen continued growth of Spotify as a home for audio period—that mix of music and podcasting. They've had significant gains and continued to sign exclusives and buy more companies in developing world-class audio solutions. SiriusXM has been doing the same thing with Stitcher, Pandora, Simplecast and AdsWizz, and are signing content deals. iHeart is another one. They've made a number of large purchases, kind of building this full stack. So, we’re seeing this consolidation into a few very large companies vying for dominance.
“Everybody shows up with a business problem they're looking to solve. The strategy part is figuring out the Venn Diagram overlap between the business goal and what people are going to love listening to.”
Are you seeing any other new forms of content and are you shortening your recommendation in terms of branded podcast length?
I wouldn’t say we’re changing our recommendation, but I’m bullish on this idea of a microcast that could be a one-minute type of episode that could be a multifaceted win for the right brand to solve the right problem by doing that. You can have a high volume of episodes that gives people what they want in kind of a snack size, but you could also buy inventory in other podcasts or digital streaming or radio to put that in an ad break and buy reach where some advertisers are still measuring reach as a primary goal.
As we think about all the different technology behind audio, there’s a lot of conversation around Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI), and the ability to put tracking markers in the shows and insert ads based on the demographics and things. You’re going to see more experimentation with DAI and content where people can use the technology that’s been designed for targeting ads but instead, for example, maybe there’s a national news set plus something dropped in that is just for your local market, and it’s seamless. Or a sports show that has the big picture and then, boom, here’s a chunk with just your local teams inserted in it.
The most fun thing is building the future of an industry and being able to actually participate in it and try out new ideas.
December 1, 2021
