069 - Steve Pratt: Podcasts - Your Brand's Unfair Advantage (VIDEO)
What makes a good podcast? How about a great podcast? In this episode, Emily and Steve discuss the best ways to create a valuable message to grow your podcast audience as well as how companies should be approaching podcasting as a new form of content marketing. They also discuss emerging opportunities with audio content and voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
Why do Facebook, Dell Technologies, Mozilla, Slack, Red Hat, NYT T Brand Studio, BMW, CBS, Charles Schwab, and more top brands come to Pacific Content when they want to create a branded podcast?
Steve Pratt is the Vice President and co-founder of Pacific Content, a company of 30 passionate podcast nerds that focuses exclusively on creating original podcasts with brands.
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Pacific Content joined Rogers Media in May 2019 and is one of Entrepreneur's 100 Brilliant Companies. Their shows have won Webby Awards, Digiday Branded Content Awards, MarCom Awards, and Shorty Awards.
What makes a good podcast? How about a great podcast? In this episode, Emily and Steve discuss the best ways to create a valuable message to grow your podcast audience as well as how companies should be approaching podcasting as a new form of content marketing. They also discuss emerging opportunities with audio content and voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
2:20: How Steve started working on branded content and more details on his background.
3:00: Sirius XM and the first podcast ever.
4:19: Getting bitten by the "podcast bug." Opportunities to generate exposure for new bands in Canada emerged through licensing agreements for podcasts.
4:35: The new wave of podcasting hits and with it the need for podcasters to think and act like media companies
5:37: Companies begin realizing a new medium to generate content to increase exposure, without overtly tying it to their brand. It doesn't sound like an ad.
Choiceology with Katy Milkman is an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It explores irrational decision making. The show was created by Pacific Content.
"They all understand that you have to put the audience first, and you have to have a lot of empathy for the people that you're creating this for. Anytime anybody makes a piece of content that is about themselves, it's an infomercial." - Steve Pratt
"If we make something that's about us, maybe people will listen once, and then they'll never come back." - Steve Pratt
7:22: Traditional advertising is becoming less and less effective due to the economic and global impacts of coronavirus. Advertising isn't always about showing off your brand and product; sometimes it's about just about creating something that adds value to the user's experience.
"This is a time for brands to serve instead of sell" - Steve Pratt
Loyalty and ROI
9:00: How do you play to the unique strengths of audio, and how do you measure your success in harnessing it?
11:10: Podcasting can reach people when screens aren't available
Podcasting hit a watershed moment in 2019 when, for the first time ever, over 50% of the U.S. adult population had listened to a podcast.
13:39: Everyone has a podcast, and the market is increasingly growing. Discovery and promotion can be a podcaster's biggest hurdle.
14:48: The same tips for growing your podcast can be applied as you're building a voice experience on Alexa or Google Assistant.
"This is all part of the concert of the marketing instruments; they play together." - Emily Binder
17:58: Word of mouth can grow ambassadors for your podcast or voice experience.
"You can't buy listens in podcasts, you have to earn them." - Steve Pratt
18:30: Goodpods is a platform for users to discover new podcasts and can help podcasters capitalize on the "word of mouth" marketing in a digital form. Goodpods is founded by JJ Ramberg, see our conversation with her here.
19:56: Establish patterns and comfort with users, and it will make them more drawn to new mediums. This will reduce friction to new technology and drive adoption.
"When we first had smartphones, you had to teach someone how to download an app and close an app...now, it has become second nature, and we can't live without it." - Emily Binder
23:05: This is the time to experiment with technology
24:53: Smart speakers are the training wheels of voice, but voice assistant is on so many more devices than just a smart speaker
"We had a 70% YOY increase in global shipments of smart speakers in 2019 over 2018. And voice in the car is actually the fastest growing and number 1 use case of voice." - Emily Binder
27:17: What has Google been doing in the podcast space?
Books and Podcasts Steve recommends:
Connect with Steve and Pacific Content:
Steve Pratt is Vice President and Co-Founder of Pacific Content, an award winning podcast studio
Follow @beetlemoment on Instagram:
055 - Why Don’t Women Negotiate Salary More? How to Speak Up - Amy Hoover
Nearly 70% of women accept the initial salary they’re offered. Why don’t more women ask for more money? In 2018, female full-time, year-round workers made only 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 18%. Negotiating for a higher salary during the offer phase is one key element in closing the wage gap.
According to a recent survey published by Glassdoor, "Women negotiated less than their male counterparts. 68% of women accepted the salary they were offered and did not negotiate, a 16-percentage point difference when compared to men (52%)."
- “Why Don’t Women Negotiate More?” by Carol Sankar, Forbes
Salary, compensation, and self-advocacy: this is important for our personal and collective futures, for our economy, and for job satisfaction. If women continue to earn less, we will never reach parity. But how big a role does salary negotiation play in the outcome that lands us at these tired wage gap statistics?
Amy Hoover
Talent Zoo is the leading site for advertising and marketing professionals
Considered an expert on hiring trends and staffing issues, for a dozen years Amy was an Executive Recruiter and then Managing Partner of Talent Zoo, the nation's premier search firm for the advertising and marketing industries. During that time she placed hundreds of professionals in new positions across North America, from Junior to C-Suite level.
Talent Zoo’s founder and CEO Rick Myers and Amy Hoover built the executive recruiting firm which began in 1998. It evolved into a digital job board and career ecosystem predating LinkedIn. For about two decades, talentzoo.com has been the top site for advertising, marketing, and digital professionals in an industry known for extreme competition. It’s still a fantastic place to hire quality candidates or find a marketing or ad job.
Strongbox West is Atlanta’s largest and longest running coworking space
Ten years ago Amy co-founded Strongbox West, Atlanta's largest independent coworking space and innovation hub, where she continues to manage the Talent Zoo job board and suite of marketing blogs.
Amy is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Adweek, Advertising Age, and many other notable publications.
Our Conversation
Amy shares hiring insights from the employer perspective which may surprise you, and could help you, your friend, or your colleague at their next negotiation. Whether or not hiring becomes more digital as AI sorts resumes and Alexa processes applications by voice, the art of the negotiation is still about human communication.
Topics:
Amy and her dog Coleman, who is internet famous. #ColemanTheDog. Follow @StrongboxWest on Instagram for more #DogsOfSBW
Why don’t women negotiate more?
Societal expectations for girls (be polite, demure, not greedy), which leads to labeling
Re: NY Times executive editor Jill Abramson:
“Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs.”
Negotiation is not taught in schools or at home enough
Uncomfortable conversations and how candidates can phrase salary-related requests for a win-win
New perspective: women’s intuition that negotiating may be in vain (Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning In - NBER) - “Women appear to positively select into negotiations and to know when to ask.”
Pro Tip: The hiring manager’s first offer is almost never their best offer
Women’s psychology: “They like me! They really like me!” (Sally Field - Oscar reference)
Millennials and work: the idea of “finding oneself”
Values around culture and flexibility or finding meaning in work - what about the money?
What should women do when they’re at the negotiating table?
Sally Field, 1985 Academy Awards - Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama - “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me.”
* 16% of women negotiate. This is according to Negotiating Women’s survey by Carol Frohlinger as cited by Monster. “Most women simply do not negotiate at all. Only 16 percent of respondents always negotiate compensation when a job offer is made or during performance evaluations.”
Get in Touch with Amy:
Twitter: @tzamy
012 - Get a Sponsor
Don’t worry about finding a mentor: get a sponsor if you want to advance your career.
Everyone talks about mentors. What we really need is sponsors. An advocate with social capital in an organization (sponsor) will advance your career more than a lunch buddy counselor (mentor).
There's nothing wrong with mentors - they can be great. But sponsors lead to promotions, raises, and leadership opportunities. And women need those things. #WageGap
- "Women are 54% less likely than men to have a sponsor.
- 70% of men and 68% of women who have a sponsor reported being satisfied with their career advancement.
- Women with sponsors are 27% more likely than their unsponsored female peers to ask for a raise and 22% more likely to ask for the stretch assignments that build their reputations as leaders."
-Stats from FastCompany
Find a sponsor. Be a sponsor. Recommend a sponsor. It can be a man or a woman. Let's help each other. Abundance mindset!
If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a woman you know, then leave me a review on Apple Podcasts (I'd really appreciate your feedback!). Tweet me @emilybinder and let me know what you plan to do about all this.
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