“Flogging a dead horse”. What’s the point in that?
Almost 20 years ago, I started a podcast company, alongside our successful audio post-production business The Audio Suite, and rather imaginatively called it Suite Talk.
It was 2005, and Apple had just announced it was integrating a podcast service into iTunes, and I absolutely knew that this was going to be big for the audio sector.
At that time, submitting a podcast and having it on the iTunes platform was a big deal – the RSS coding requirements for instance were intended to keep the hobbyist away, but it was no real issue for a company used to meeting Dolby’s exacting requirements for feature films.
Coined by journalist Ben Hammersley, the term ‘podcast’ was first seen in The Guardian in October 2004 and Google had 2,750 searches for the term on October 1st that year. This number doubled every few days, showing exponential growth in interest… One year later there were over 100,000,000 searches for ‘podcast’. It was “Word of The Year” by 2005, and I knew we’d caught the wave. We were steady on the board, and poised to surf its rise in popularity.
Except I couldn’t get traction.
The likely sectors we targeted, B2B and B2C, didn’t get its potential. Agencies pooh-poohed the notion as it was a format longer than 30 seconds. Sole traders and SMEs felt the time and money would be better spent elsewhere (or not at all).
My personal crusade continued, and at board meetings I would report back on how those global podcast numbers kept growing… But not for us. And the greater demand for our growing audio post-production business quickly outstripped the enthusiasm I tried to inject about my ‘second child’, Suite Talk.
Pragmatically, after a few years, we finally abandoned the Suite Talk project, and without doubt The Audio Suite benefitted from a more focused approach (although SuiteX, a diversification into Blue Tooth Marketing, was an area that we would explore later with arguably more financial success than podcasting).
So was Suite Talk a failure? Not at all financially. (I run a tight ship when it comes to cash, observing 2 golden rules: Number 1 – never lose money. Number 2 – refer to rule number 1.) But I was sad I couldn’t exploit a medium I came to love.
This year, revenue generated by podcasting in the US will be $4.2 billion, according to the big bean counters, PwC. In the UK, it’s worth £64 million.
Here’s today’s tip: with its inherent CRM implications, to my mind there’s still no better way of connecting directly to your audience, or establishing yourself as a trusted, authoritative voice in your sector.
So now, with my Audio Suite colleague Jason Nicholas, I co-write, produce and present our own podcast, ‘The Apple and Biscuit Show’. Our latest episode is with double Oscar winners Nina Hartstone and John Warhurst.
Our podcast series is here: www.soundproducer.com.au/podcasts
(I continue to practice what I preached – and I still have the T-shirt!)
