Carel: 0:01

It's been said, by those who know apparently, that content and commerce are two sides of the same coin. Why? Because it's inevitable. Advertising plays a crucial role in making what we either watch or listen to possible, But a podcast can't be 30 or 60 minutes of infomercial because that would be boring. So how do you strike a balance? How do you make what you put out worth listening to? Well, Jen Moss, co founder and chief creative officer of JAR Audio, and Sam Seguin, who's technical director, tell us what to do and how to do it in this episode of AV123, an audiovisual show brought to you by Voice123, the first and most trusted global voice over network. I'm Carel your host, and I'd love you to eavesdrop on our conversation. Jen Moss is first up in the hot seat. Your bio tells me that you traveled a fair distance in the content creation, audio, and audio advertising business, which means that you're a very good person to answer this question. What do you see as the biggest trends in audio and audio advertising right now?

Jen: 1:21

Ooh, my attitude towards advertising is that I hate it in podcasting. The way I approach it with, with my company JAR is that we tend not to focus on advertising. Actually, we tend to focus on content that is produced by brands. So you could look upon it as a form of kind of abstract advertising in that by doing it, the brands come to be recognized by the audience as forward thinking, progressive, intelligent, conversationally facilitating all kinds of interesting content, you know, so they, they, they receive this kind of halo effect. By doing a podcast that is tailored for a particular audience in a particular tone that's going to make the brand look good. That being said, I think there are some very clever podcast advertising trends that the native advertising For example, and the way we have host read ads that are that are often like one podcast talking about another podcast or you know, sometimes a product or something like that, but done in a very personalized way through the voice of the host who you as the listener have developed a relationship with so I think there are some ways of doing it that are like harm reduction, but it's still not my favorite thing to do and I generally counsel people to make the right podcast for the right audience and let that speak for you.

Carel: 2:54

Because you say in your bio that you love helping clients tell authentic stories that matter to them and their audiences. Now, how do you set about determining exactly what kind of authentic stories to tell audiences, and then how to tell them?

Jen: 3:07

That's such a great question and so what we normally do, when we work with brands and we also work with nonprofits and organizations, sometimes individuals is we figure out why they want to make a podcast in the first place. Like what is the lack that they're feeling? Where is the kind of area of communication that they feel they need to do better in our step into is there a group of people that they're trying to reach that they feel like maybe their brand is perceived as too old and they want to reach a younger group of people or vice versa. Maybe, you know, their core target customer is, you know, someone who is like, you know, my age or older, right? And so just figuring out like, what is the reason behind the making of the podcast from a business perspective for the for the brand or organization? So we start there and then we think about that target audience and we think well what kind of thing do they listen to? What other shows are they listening to what's in the podcast neighborhood? That they are already checking out and what's important to them. What kinds of problems might they have that a podcast could help them address whether that's they're looking for entertainment to ease their minds after a long day at work or whether they're looking for information to help them make a better decision about something. It could be product related, but it typically is not. It's typically a bigger question that we will kind of go after. For example, we have a show that looks at the art of internal communication and because there are many people that work in the space of internal communication, so an internal comms company called Staff Base came to us, said we want to make a podcast, but we want it to be something that people who are the types of people that would work for us or with us would be interested in and that's a tricky one because not everybody wants to listen to a podcast that's about work affter work, right? So you actually have to think what is a podcast that people like this might listen to let's say in the bar after work. What might they talk about in the bar after work? What what kind of subjects are going to be interesting to them? So we actually made a show that was all about sort of the bugbears and the problems and the the typical frustration points that people who work in internal communications face and that show ended up being very funny. We looked at all kinds of issues to do with bad bosses and poor communication ridiculous expectations that you might run up against if you work in internal communications sort of thing And more broadly that show also had to reach a wider audience in order to grow, so it ended up being sort of more broadly about the art of communication in general, so it would appeal to anyone that had an interest in any aspect of communication.

Carel: 6:04

Would it be fair to say, do you think, with your reference to saying that you hate advertising, which I'm sure you speak on behalf of most people, most people hate advertising, but has podcasting changed the advertising landscape, would you say?

Jen: 6:20

I think so. I think it's funny, actually. So I come from a background of public radio, and I was digging in the archives of the CBC radio station a number of years ago, and I came across an old show which was by a woman called Kate Aitken. She was the first Female on national radio in Canada, she had a home X show, of course, and that show was sponsored by Ogilvy flower. So even public radio has has advertising in its DNA. There's always been obviously a relationship between commerce and content. This is nothing new. So commerce and art is another way to look at that. I mean, you can ask Michelangelo about that. It's not a new, not a new issue. So, so I think that we've almost, podcasting has almost returned to some interesting roots. Of sort of having shows sponsored by particular brands and things like that. That being said there's so many wonderful wonderful independent podcasts and I hope personally that we never ever ever lose that. And you know, one of the things i'm arguing for in Canada right now is more sort of granting opportunities for independent podcasters so that we can continue to make content that is not touched by brand interests and not touched by brand concerns. So I, yes, to answer your question, I think podcasting has had an interesting influence on advertising in the sense that podcast audiences will accept less polished, more authentic spoken word ads than you might typically hear on TV or on the radio, right? So it's like the format is a bit different, and I think that the number one way that people discover podcasts is word of mouth, but the number two way is through other podcasts.

Carel: 8:11

With regard to storytelling in particular, from a creative production point of view. What sort of strategies do you use to ensure that your storytelling is both compelling and effective?

Jen: 8:23

Yeah, so my background is in audio documentary storytelling, and I was trained by some very talented people at CC, so I learned too early to think about pacing, to think about voice, to think about the balance of sound and words in the story, and I think one of the things that we have noticed in looking at the consumption data of our different types of shows that we make, so we make all kinds of shows, we make interview based shows, we make narrative driven shows, we make documentary style shows, fiction shows, all of the above. When we do the narrative style, and this is a well written narrator guiding you through a series of scenes or clips of interviews, sort of woven through where you have a direct communication with the audience, somebody, the narrator, is talking directly to the audience that direct connection is you hear people talk about the intimacy of audio. That's where it comes from. It comes from the feeling of one person talking to one person whispering in their ears, you know, it's quite intimate. And so we really try hard to preserve that even if we're doing an interview show we'll have moments in that show where the host directly talks to the audience. It's like, I always say to Sam, it's like, they're the silent guest at the dinner party and you can't ignore them. You have to pass the audience the potatoes every now and then that they're good.

Sam: 9:57

Yeah, I want to add on to this, which I think is, this is like one of the largest uphill battles we face is you have to convince the brands to be brave as well because they don't want to do anything that's risky. You'll be more well rewarded by the listeners and listenership in general. If your brand is willing to go outside of its comfort zones, people don't want to listen to an hour long advertisement. Well, then you have to find a way to talk to them like people rather than try and find ways to slip in some sort of branding or slip in some advertisements like this isn't an hour long sales pitch. It has to be something else. So in order to tell compelling stories, brands have to trust us to, to make that happen because sometimes we've seen the opposite where we come up with some great creative vision and it turns out to be maybe a little too much of a stretch for the client and they ask us to pair it back a bit. So that's almost a whole other conversation to be had.

Carel: 10:55

Interestingly, let me put this question to both of you. There's a hell of a lot of audiovisual clutter out there and most media channels are pretty saturated. So how do you know what you're putting out is engaging as opposed to intrusive to an audience?

Sam: 11:12

Like consumption rates and things like that. Yeah. Like usually there's a lot of analytics that we get our hands on and we can see, and this helps us make creative decisions, which is say we've made a 30 minute show and we see that people are consuming it to about 50%. We're losing people at that stage. Why what's happening in the episode that at the halfway point, people are jumping ship. So it tells a bit of a larger story that if people are listening to 90%, then we're on the right track. And actually I'd say that's quite successful in the grand scheme of things. Our, we did a show, a fiction show, Handsome Molly that has 110 percent consumption rate, which tells us listeners are not only listening once, but they're going back and they're re listening. And I think those metrics help guide us as storytellers and audio creators. As to are we telling a successful story because people are dropping off at at a short amount of time in I don't know. Jen, is there any other things you kind of see?

Jen: 12:07

I think that's a great point. I mean that question. How do you know if what you're doing is good versus intrusive or good versus terrible is the question that plagues all artists. You don't really know. You hope, and then you look at the data for confirmation. But I think that we also do a fair amount of competitive analysis, market research, looking at audience tastes and things like that before we put a show into a particular pool. We also learn, you know, Gen Z which is, these are broad generalizations, but there's a lot of data now that shows that Gen Z discovers content through short form, social media, think TikTok , right, but it will point them to do a deeper dive into a topic that they're interested in. So if we're making a podcast for Gen Z , what we might do is create a social media campaign to go along with that in a space that they know and understand so that there's like a little bit of a breadcrumb trail to the podcast, right? So, so those are some of the ways that we ensure that what we're going to do hits the mark, but you know, it's an art. It's not a science. So, so when, so we watch and we learn and you know, I, I'm always telling clients a podcast is an organic entity. It's going to evolve over time. If you're paying attention, you're going to tweak it. You're going to make changes. You're going to talk to your audience. You know, you're going to ask them questions. You're going to tweet at them. You're going to, you know, do whatever you can to connect with them and learn, learn from the reviews, learn from their consumption habits, behavior patterns, like Sam mentioned. All of those things are are ways that we kind of monitor the success of our shows.

Carel: 13:51

Let me stop you here for a second and aim this question at our listeners quickly. Are you an audio producer? Did you know Voice123 has an AV resource center where you can learn everything from how to hire a voice actor to creating video game characters? No? Well, all you need to do is visit www. voice123. com forward slash blog. Sam, as technical director at JAR, from a technical point of view, how important is good audio? Where do you draw the line? I mean, Jen mentioned earlier that, you know, people are prepared to accept less than stellar audio, but as a sound engineer, you probably have a standard below which you will not go.

Sam: 14:35

That definitely exists.

Carel: 14:37

All right. Where, where, where is that?

Sam: 14:39

I think it's, it's incredibly important. It's usually the easiest telltale sign where I've heard so many podcasts that have the most amazing, clean, refreshing theme song that jumps into audio that sounds like this. And you're like, okay, well, the budget is not being spent in certain places. I think yeah. It, it is usually the first line item that people try and cut is gear for guests. And at a, at a minimum, like, no, you're doing an audio medium. You need to have good microphones. So no mic is, is, is never preferred. Like just your laptop mic is sometimes what we walk into. But as far as where we draw the line, it's hard to say without like showing examples. Like more often than not, I'd be surprised when someone has a set of earbud mics with a little mic clipped on with a wire into their computer, how good we can make that sound and that's almost become a special talent at JAR is say we're doing a call with you, we can only get you tomorrow. We don't have time to send you a mic. You're going to be in an airport. We've gotten very good at making that work because.

Carel: 15:46

How do you get good at it?

Sam: 15:47

Yeah. A lot of practice. I mean, that's, I think, I think COVID kind of forced us to do a lot more remote podcasting because now we can do this from across the world, which is amazing, but it does mean more often than not, you're getting the person at home who maybe doesn't have any setup or doesn't have time to be sent gear to do that recording. And that forced me and our team to become very specialized at fixing that bad audio in post.. I always say whenever talking to new freelancers who come across my desk who want to apply for work that I'm not impressed when they send me something that is recorded on a good mic in a decent space because that's easy to make sound good. I'm more impressed when they can show me something that was recorded in a tin can and they make it sound like it was recorded in the studio. Like that's what I look for. In audio editors, because that tells me a lot about your experience and how you can think about editing and post to make those almost unusable experiences and interviews usable for a show where the listener isn't going to be like, huh, why does it sound so bad?

Carel: 16:51

Interestingly, you know, I've got, I've got to say that as a, as a voice actor myself, I often get asked by people who want to get into podcasting. What sort of microphone they should get, and it's a very difficult question because it's like asking someone how long is a piece of string, but are there microphones that you favor that you would recommend to somebody listening who would like to get into podcasting?

Sam: 17:15

Sure released a USB version of the SM7 and it's miraculous. I think there's a certain public radio podcast voice. We all hear in our heads when we listen to a show. It's that like close proximity effect. It's very round on the low end and that mic delivers that and is fairly affordable. I'd say if someone's looking to get into it and they don't want to get a whole bunch of external gear and get good sound, that's the quickest way. Yeah. That's again, a personal preference, but this goes back to you asking about what we do and where's the, the bottom line with guests is oftentimes, I, I maybe have to send you gear and you have no computer wherewithal. You don't know how to plug something in. I need to send you something that's foolproof. That you just plug in and play. So it becomes a bit of a, I would like to send people really nice gear, but if they don't know how to plug it in 15 minutes before recording session, it's wasted on them. So it's a constant struggle of what's foolproof, what's going to arrive in time, what's going to sound good in post. So it's always fluctuating to go back to it. Something like the SM7 is pretty well a classic as far as my ears are concerned, that is affordable and, and foolproof.

Jen: 18:30

Maybe I'm just in a contrarian mood today because I told you I hate advertising. I also love bad sound because I think it's a great storytelling tool if it's handled correctly. So, for example, if you have Kind of messy sound recorded on someone's iPhone while they're being chased by a grizzly bear Which we literally have done that is audio gold, right? That is audio gold and the fact that it sounds a bit messy. So when does the sound need to be clean and unencumbered and when does it make sense for it to be a little rougher and rawer and give us a good, this is where the narrative piece comes in, you know, bad sound is a, is an authenticity tool. It's a way of making people believe that something was authentically recorded by like Joe Smith who is running the Boston Marathon.

Sam: 19:23

There's a YouTube creator. I watch and he had a great discussion about this where he bought a lav mic. He works in a workshop and he was using the lav mic and then the next episode decided not to use the lav mic and he was discussing how the pristine audio in that space via YouTube did not feel right. It felt too isolated. It felt like he was in a studio and he's like I quickly learned It's it's kind of a weird abstraction. To have perfect audio say in this workshop space where we should hear other things happening and I agree Jen It's almost like if i'm doing a streeter I don't want it to be cleaned up so much that it sounds like it was done in a studio. We need to contextualize the space in which it was done. And actually, that might be another point, which is, I do find there's a line where people go to fix bad audio, and they take it too far. And now I'm hearing all the processing, I'm hearing it being destroyed, where it's like, yes, maybe you removed some of the room noise, but now the audio is just sounds robotic and lifeless. There's kind of like a, a medium point where you, you balance it out where it's like, it's not in a studio, but it's not unlistenable. And that's just what we have to deal with.

Carel: 20:29

Here's a question for both of you that the audio business as a whole is in a constant state of flux and obviously podcasting and storytelling are evolving. Now, if both of you pretended to be futurists, where is it going?

Jen: 20:44

Well, there's a lot of excitement right now around AI and the, the, how long does it take before we mentioned AI in every conversation, Sam? There is a lot of excitement around the, the potential of those tools. And we certainly play around with them in different ways at JAR in different stages of the kind of content development journey, AI can be quite useful in terms of sound. I'll let Sam talk about how we use it and how we don't use it. But I can talk about how we use it in in sort of the creative content production. So it's helpful for research, although you have to fact check it because it's often wrong. It's helpful for episode descriptions, although you have to rewrite them because it's often boring so things like this you know, like if you don't understand how to curate it and how to work with it It's not necessarily going to make things better. And in fact, it's going to create a sea of mediocre content such as the likes of which we've never seen right? I think what's going to become my prediction if if you want a crystal ball prediction is authentic content truly authentic content that feels and is human is personal and intimate and respects the pact of audio that you make with a listener that that kind of content is actually going to become more sought after and more important and people are going to go to sources of truth that they know to be human generated. Because they can't, otherwise it's just the internet talking to the internet and they can't be bothered to, to wade through all of that.

Carel: 22:21

It's a wonderful, wonderful way of putting it actually, Jen, saying that it's an audio pact between you and your listener. That's very, very, very lovely way of putting it.

Sam: 22:29

So I wanted to actually ask, are you thinking, you're, are you talking about the production side? Are you talking about the storytelling side or the listener side of podcast?

Carel: 22:35

A combination. A

Sam: 22:36

combination of all of the above. I, I do think that, I dunno if you use TikTok, TikTok's incredible. And it's become a, a very authentic town hall. Like if you're not authentic, you will sink. And if you are, you'll float. I do think audio will go even more in that route. Which is in the same ways that people are a little bit apprehensive, listening to a branded podcast because it's from a brand. I do think you are seeing more mediocre sounding things become successful because it's incredibly authentic. And I do see that becoming the norm with at least entertainment. Podcasts where it almost doesn't matter that it's polished.

Jen: 23:15

Let me just clarify what you mean. Bad audio. Yeah. Bad audio is actually a sign of like, okay, we can trust this content.

Sam: 23:21

It's authentic. Yeah. I see things like that happening. But how long has the storytelling medium been a thing? Like this, I always describe to friends when I'm telling them about my job, who maybe aren't into podcasts, like it's really just on demand AM radio. How long has am radio been around? How long has this medium of just telling stories been around? I think people might try and make future predictions about how the industry is going to evolve, but at its core, it's always going to be the same. It's going to be people telling interesting stories and if we can convince them, maybe adding some fun sounds and going deeper than just a conversation. Production wise, I think Jen is right. We'll probably see more tools. Like my fantasy land is, you know, maybe there's something that cuts down all the filler words in my shows. Well, there's a lot of people who have software that do it. None of them do it well. So I'm not using it. That might even become a content thing we're seeing. Internally, we have software when we do these hour long meetings, it will send us point notes about what we talked about, and it's really accurate. I'm sure AI at some point will be able to flag in an hour long interview, 30 minutes of highlights that it thinks we should include in the episode. So that might save us time there, but it will always come back to me, chopping audio, or a producer striking lines that don't work. Yeah, I think it's it's always going to be human centric no matter what and I just think how and where we consume it will probably change a bit just like podcasting changed radio.

Jen: 24:45

Totally I mean, I I always come back to this wonderful quote from Jad Abrumrad from from Radiolab one of the founders of Radiolab who said that podcasting Is rooted in the human voice and there is just nothing more compelling like there's just something about the human voice. So to me audio storytelling in some form or another. We might call it something different, I don't know, you know I don't care what we call it. The point is it's humans talking to humans and there's so much that we hear within the instrument of the human voice that that is so moving to people and and that sense of connection which we learned during Covid just how important that actually is will will not cease to be important So I'm really confident about the future of audio storytelling in particular and of course video podcasting is a thing because video is a thing. And YouTube is a place where a lot of people are, so therefore there's a lot of interest in putting podcasts onto YouTube and then exploring what does it mean to turn the cameras on behind the scenes of a podcast and things like that. So we're also exploring that and I think it's interesting, but I am. personally, much more compelled by the sound of a podcast and the portability of a podcast. And those are all attributes that I don't see going away.

Sam: 26:11

Wouldn't it be comical if podcasts went full, full circle that it's a live podcasting becomes a thing and you have to tune in live to catch your favorite podcast and we're just right back to radio again?

Carel: 26:21

Yeah, it's, it's, it's ironic. You know, I asked, I've, I've asked that question whether podcasting is going to replace traditional radio.

Jen: 26:30

Well, podcasting is sort of, I think radio stations are interested in it because it's cheap to acquire the content and it's cheap to put it on the air and it's good content. But there's something about an entire nation of people listening to the CBC all hearing a story about horse chestnuts at the same time that is very grounding and compelling. Do you know what I mean? It's like, Every Canadian that listens to that station at that time heard that story and was either moved or disgusted or, you know, intrigued by it. Right. And so that kind of social connection that you get from the timed the timed nature of radio, the fact that all message goes out to everyone at the same time. There is something potent in that that I don't think podcasting replaces.

Carel: 27:17

Jen Moss, Sam Seguin of JAR Audio, thank you so much for joining us on AV123. It's been enlightening chatting with you. And to all of you listening to the show, remember, if you ever need a voice acting maestro to bring your AV projects to life head over to voice123. com It's free to use, so you can hire voice actors for any project. Or you can get our Managed Services to manage your project from A to Z. We'll be back with another show soon, so keep watching this space.