Page 63 - Adnews Nov-Dec 2022

www.adnews.com.au | November-December2022 63
WORDS BY
ASHLEY REGAN
Feature
Podcasts:
Vanity or
business?
AdNews investigates why media people, agencies and groups have started a podcast. The motivation is to showcase industry players and their work, providing a platform for learning but also a place on centre stage for egos.
Australia has officially over- taken the US as the biggest podcast-listening nation in the world, according to The Infinite Dial 2022, a comprehensive study of digital media behaviour from Edison Research.
So while the podcast industry boomed during the COVID-19 lock- downs, digital audio listeners have continued to grow
by nearly 78% since pre-pandemic days.
With hybrid
work remaining dominant, industry podcasts are used as a way to con- nect our increasingly dispersed workforces - it’s certainly more digestible than a lengthy email from internal communications or a work- shop with three hours of travel time.
The number of people who lis- tened to a podcast in the last month has surged to an all-time high at 40%, up from 37% year on year. On average, podcast listen- ers tune into six to ten podcasts a week, with an average listening time of seven hours per week, up from five hours in 2021.
Inspiring the niche
Adam Ferrier, Thinkerbell founder and consumer psychologist, said the motivation to start his podcast Black T-Shirts with co-host Brent Smart, chief marketing officer at Telstra, was born from a really simple and quick conversation.
“It just felt like a really obvious cool thing to do,” Ferrier told AdNews, “We both realised we were in a position to speak to world-leading pro- ponents of creativity and explore how they did things.
“And creativity is such an ambiguous thing, right?
“We realised there was a gap where most people are either talking about hardcore digital, programmatic crap or marketing sciences.
“There’s not many people trying to explore something as unwieldy as creativity. So that got us excited about the opportunity.
“We also wanted to make sure the presentation of the whole podcast was creatively inspired, as well as talking about creativity itself.
“That's why it's called Black T-Shirts and why after every episode, the podcast concludes with the guest getting their creative philosophy printed on a black t-shirt.
“And while Black T-Shirts at the moment is a podcast, we’ve con- structed it so we can morph into other forms of content as well.
“I think the podcast has a little bit more self-interest than just being good for the industry.
“We've both always been fascinated by the industry and by creativity, we realised this was a really good opportunity to explore this power of creativity more and provide some practical tips coupled with inspiring stories.
“Hosting a podcast means you have to be interested, find interesting people, find out what those interesting people do and so on.
“By doing that whole process, you learn so much yourself, I reckon that is a strong motivator for people to start a podcast.
“But also I personally love listening to podcasts and I feel like I get a lot out of them.