Audio and Video Podcasting Advancements: Changing Landscape of Storytelling with Matty Staudt Ep. 606

Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I have an exciting episode for you today. I have my guest here, Maddie Stout. I like the beer. I love it. Maddie, are you there? Are we good? Do we have good bandwidth? We are great. Awesome. I love that opening, by the way. Well, thank you. Thank you. I'm definitely nervous now that I have such a podcasting expert and aficionado in the industry. I can't wait to talk a little bit about your background. Thank you so much for being on. Before we jump into it, I wanted to read a quick review. There's a lot going on in SEO these days. The last, let's say, 36 months have been more changes than in the last 10, 15 years. The reviews are very fickle. We had a review from a client that we were rebranding, and then basically before the site launched or when the site switched over, the review disappeared because it was tied to the old site. Everything's very tied into it, but I have a review from UniSigns. It's one of our clients. They build signs in the Houston, Texas, Katy area. This is from Moses. It said, Matt and his team at EWR were selected among several companies to do the digital rebranding of our sign shop. Our main focus was the new design for our website. Since day one, the experience has been incredible. They were very responsive. We had a deadline, and they were able to deliver before the deadline. We are extremely happy with the results. I strongly recommend EWR. Thank you for that review, Moses. If anybody likes this podcast, wouldn't mind leaving a review on one of the platforms, actually Yelp. I'm trying to get some more reviews there, so appreciate it. Maddie, thank you so much for being here all the way from California, virtually. The center and hub of culture and what's happening out there. I would love for you to just introduce yourself a little bit,

because you have a really impressive resume. Thanks, Matt. I started off as a radio kid. When I was 16, I started as a DJ in a little small town in West Virginia. Put myself through college, working in the evolving form of alternative radio, so got to break a lot of cool bands in the 90s and be a part of that. I then moved into talk radio, where I was an executive producer for a syndicated show called the G. Gordon Liddy Show out of D.C., and then I was up in New York and did a morning show at WNEW. Back in the FM talk days with Opie and Anthony, moved to San Francisco, was very successful there with a morning show as well. Then about 17 years ago, I got the entrepreneurial bug, and there was this new company called Stitcher Starting. There were three guys, and they tried to explain it to me once. I walked out of the room, and I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Podcasts, I don't get it. Went back, talked to the CEO again, Noah Shannuck, and he really opened up my eyes. I saw that podcasting was where I needed to be, because that's where my kind of radio was going. I came from the old school talk radio days where we lived our lives on the radio. We all did the Howard Stern method, which was, if you talk about something in the building, it's going to be on the air, so just keep your mouth shut or just know it's going to be on the air. That was going away. Radio was just getting tight and tight and tight. Went to Stitcher. I was on the startup team there. I was there for three years before leaving to make my own way with my first production company. I worked with Kevin Smith. Then I started a production program for podcasting 15 years ago at the Academy of Art University and have been teaching podcasting. Eventually, I went back, got my master's degree in

marketing, and I decided to go back to radio after being asked a million times. I went to iHeart as a digital program director, but asked if I could really concentrate on podcasting. They let me have my go at one market and created the podcast network there. Then a few months later, I was the first VP of podcast programming at iHeart. By the time I left, I was overseeing about 1,600 shows. Then I left to start my company, Jamstreet Media. We do everything—branded, podcast, marketing. I do a lot of consulting, currently a lot of stuff in the AI space. We also have a network as well. I've worked and launched over 400 shows at this point, and I can't count how many episodes. There are thousands and thousands of episodes, so I'm an old broom, as they say. The new brooms sweep good, but the old brooms, they know where the dirt is at, as my Nigerian friend told me once. I would tell you that podcasting, thought leadership, storytelling has been interwoven into search engine optimization, as well as a search marketing strategy, social media marketing strategy. Podcasting is just premium, long-form content. I do a lot over with OGGN, Oil & Gas Global Network, actually got OTC this week. I can tell you a lot of the major brands, and you've worked with some fantastic brands. Thank you for sharing your background. I've been super impressed to watch your work since I've heard you speak at PodFest, and we've stayed in touch. I wanted just to share your wealth of knowledge with my audience. Podcasting is something that a lot of brands, or even personal brands or actual brands, are getting involved with these days. There's a lot of budget for experimental marketing. People are looking for thought leadership. They're trying to spend money differently in advertising, because while the mass media advertising is just not working as effectively, I would love for you to just kind of give a little bit of a back story of how you've seen the evolution of podcasting.

I think a lot of people don't know that. A lot of people are just tacticians. They're trying to solve a problem, hey, I want to run ads on this podcast, but I think it's better to understand how it developed, the culture of it, what the goals of it are, that sort of thing. Well, just to talk about the evolution first, when we launched Stitcher, almost every show was super long, and they were all about Mac computers, because the only people listening to podcasts were Apple people. The first company that really got it was NPR, and they were our first deal, as far as content goes, and then content being delivered. For 10 years, it was really hard to make any money in podcasting, but the one way we did make money was through using call-to-action ads, and those worked really well. People started to see, oh, wow, podcasting, advertising, works better than anything. It works better than radio or anything, because there's a connection there. When we build podcasts, we think about three things, empathy, education, and entertainment. So it's got to sound great, you've got to teach somebody something, and at the end of the day, if they're not feeling a connection to you and the content, it's not going to work. But as that evolved, we started to see more advertising coming into podcasts, more brands started to come into podcasts. I did my first branded podcast for Cisco in 2009, so branded podcasts have been around for a while. The evolution has come through the technology, and that's always the way it is, as things get easier. Phones got easier, cars got easier to connect, so more podcasting. It used to be you could throw up a podcast, just write a quick description. You'd see a lot of podcasters put episode 25 as their title and things like that. And then a lot of us who were getting into SEO and marketing really started to nail down on those things. So now when I talk to podcasters, SEO is just as important

as your content when I tell them. When you post, you have to have a good description, good show notes, and a title that works. You never put numbers in, episode numbers in, anything like that. That is a waste of SEO. It's the one thing that when I work with creators who are trying to get a few more downloads and find new people, usually when I have them go back and redo their SEO for their shows, you'll see a bump. I mean, that's the whole point. Because people find podcasts through Google now, and they don't mean to. They're like, I'm looking for SEO. Oh, there's a podcast about SEO, I'll go listen to that. Boom, that's how you get them. It's a lot, though, when you think about you've got a creative person, a creative mind and producer, then they have to put on a marketing hat. It's why I tell all my students, you better take marketing classes as well as production classes because you're going to have to know how to do this stuff. I agree with you, and I certainly can speak in that corner of how important it is to see more people. But man, these algorithms are getting good. If you tell a good story and you're putting something out there, it will find its audience. It really will. On a lot of these social platforms, when you're posting shorts, like TikTok, for example, you go live on TikTok, and it actually shows it to more and more people. Other platforms, it shows it to your audience, and again, if you're not spending money, it shrinks it down. But I think that there's a lot of brands that want to advertise on podcasting, and I'm seeing kind of this intersection with, say, art and individuals where you want to associate branding, like, I don't know, you drank Coca-Cola or whatever, and Coca-Cola matches with this brand, and then they tell a story about, I don't know, missing your mom, and then you're like, oh, I want to drink Coca-Cola for breakfast

because I miss my mom. You know what I mean? There's kind of this association with branding that's really out there, but I think a lot of advertisers are saying, hey, this podcast, this person that's talking about, okay, fishing or sports or whatever, I want to be associated with that person, that network, and have them help sell into the brand, so it's like product placement or read-in or something like that. Certainly sponsoring podcasts, so like on Oil & Gas, every one of our podcasts on the OGGN network is sponsored by somebody that wants to reach that market, that wants to guide that content story, but they kind of say, here's kind of where we would like to take the national conversation, and then they let the host take it wherever, and the host is building their own audience and has maybe their own objective, so there's a lot of different components to this, and even there's some people that just want to, like, hey, I have advertising dollars, and I want to hit people that watch these sort of things, right? So there's different layers of engagement, and I think we're probably can go down two different paths here of, like, creating the content as a content creator, so I think there's a lot of people listening that are trying to build their own personal brand or they're working for a company, and it's like, how do I build the programming to do that? And then there's other people out there that are saying, hey, I have advertising dollars I want to spend, and I want to reach this audience. I don't know, maybe you could talk about those two, you can tackle any one of them first. Yeah, so as a content creator, the days of me being an audio snob and, like, listen, podcasts are audio. If you don't like to listen to audio, then you don't get to consume a podcast. That is false. We have to give our content to just how people consume it. Some people like shorts, some people like

TikTok, some people like written blog posts, so especially when we work with a brand, we make sure that we create elements in the podcast that can be taken, short segments, things like that, that can be taken and reused for all of those platforms. So if you're a brand or you're working on your own personal branding, that's kind of easy. I mean, not easy. It's a lot more work. It's a lot of work to put all that together and to keep feeding the machine. As you know, YouTube is a machine you've got to keep feeding. But a podcast is a great form to then take as the seed content to then go in all those different directions. It's the top of the funnel. It's the top of the funnel and then everything comes out from that, articles, all those things out of one podcast. Now as somebody who's sponsoring or advertising, the big misconnect that's happening in our industry right now is that the bigger companies, a lot of people, they're just selling the audio because that's what they know how to sell. They're not looking at it holistically. When I have a podcast and I build up a YouTube audience, a social media audience, that's the same community. They're just consuming it differently, but they all have the same values. They're all the same target audience. I'm always pushing for brands to think about not just buying the podcast audio, but actually thinking about that audience. Is that a good audience for me? I use this example. Even though I play tennis and I think pickleball is a game for older people and they should get off our courts, I use this example anyway. I have a pickleball podcast and I do pickleball content on all the platforms, but I've only got like a few thousand listeners or followers or whatever. That's super valuable still to somebody that makes pickleball balls or pickleball rack. You know what's interesting, though. That's the key. You could take that audience and you could say, well, who typically pays

tennis or pickleball? We're looking at a certain age demographic, right? Also, if they have time to play that and they're into that, they probably have a certain level of disposable income. They're probably a certain place in corporate America, right? If you were maybe targeting executives in some industry when you're building out the target persona, pickleball might really heavily fall into that. Then now that's a brand association that you could make with your core values of your company. Look at Patagonia or something like that. They knew who their target audience was, even though it was a big target audience. If you're B2B, maybe it's a smaller audience, maybe there's a segment. I know that in Houston, there are segments of people at certain clubs that play a ton of tennis. If you're trying to reach a certain type of person, that's what a lot of that club has. There's different ways to audience target, I guess. Yeah. When we build podcasts for brands, they're always about a value. I'll just give you an example. Ford was getting ready to introduce the F-150 electric. They're really making a push into electric. The podcast we created and did for Ford was called City Talks. It was all about the cities of the future. It had nothing to do with Ford cars, electric cars, or anything. It was just talking about, hey, this is where we're going with certain things to show that Ford is innovative, to show that Ford is thinking forward. That was their goal, to reach people who might think about a Ford, but not know that Ford is so invested into the environment and into the future of automobiles. The podcast was created for that. I think that's where a lot of brands go wrong. They create podcasts that are advertisements. They're just trying to sell you something. At the end of the day, that's got to be a soft sell. You've got to make sure that you're putting it into a message that is something that somebody will want to consume and not feel

like they're being given a message. It's subtle. Anybody that's watching this, and most people do listen on iTunes, so everybody is still mostly audio, but for anybody that's watching while he was talking, just like Ford was talking about the wave of the future, I actually have a client that's a fishing, like sunglass company actually that's going after the fishing market, and we've started a fishing podcast. I'm doing a little bit of product placement right now. If you're watching, I got sunglasses and a hat, a swag that they sent me, but product placement too is through that association of that host, if they like it. That's where spokespersons come from. Behind me, you got all the mascots of the cereal companies. They're trying to build some type of, I guess, association with that person or that group or that community to be part of that. Then the key is that the problem with podcasting in general is that there is this feeling that it's just a podcast, get two mics, throw people on, they'll talk, we'll throw it up there, people will listen. Man, you got to understand, this is a very, very, very hard world to break through content-wise. Your show's got to sound great, and it's got to sound great in that first minute. You've really got to set the stage in the first minute, let people know, and it's not something you learn overnight. Matt, I'm sure if you listen to your shows that you did when you started and listen to them now, you probably cringe and you're like, oh, that was not good. Other people did too. They would leave messages like, really, our audio was bad? That's everybody though. The key, if you're a brand starting something, and I'm not just selling this because this is part of what I do for a living, is really to have people that know what they're doing work with you to start so that you have a good concept. When we do shows, we start with the persona, who's the listener, and then

we build the show around that, and then we look at what else are they listening to, all the things that we think about before we even name the show or put anything together. That's all done. That's the most important part. And then it's like, what does this person want? How do we fit into their lives? What kind of content can we deliver to them that they're not going to get from something else? And that's when we start building the show out and start thinking about segments, and then start thinking about, okay, how are we packaging all of this to go to the other platforms? That's all done. And then it's a lot of working with a CEO, CMO, somebody who wants to host a show. They've never done this before. They're not going to be good if they don't have training, and they get some training, and understand. I give them boot camp, and they work with me for a little bit before I let them tackle their first episode. Well, you know, one of the big things that I find really critically important is there's a lot of companies, and there's a lot of freelancers, and there's a lot of people out there that are very, very good tacticians on social media. They know how to do different things. They know how to push stuff out there. They know how to get visibility, put some money behind it. They know how to use platforms. They know what to do, but they don't always, right? So I'll give you an example. We'll go back to Ford Motor Company or Coca-Cola. They only need tacticians unless they're changing the strategy, right? They needed you. They needed a strategist because they were going after a new market. When you have a go-to-market strategy, you need a true strategy. Or Coca-Cola, they don't need a new strategy. Or Budweiser, these brands, if they know who their target market is, and they're just hitting that target market, and they're kind of raising that brand awareness, there's not a lot

you need to do. There's a lot of different people that have great tactics to get that visibility out there and get that message out there. But what podcasts are phenomenal about, and also even with podcasts like programming where you can segment. We're going to do a series on this. We're going to do a series on that. You can then say, hey, I want to go after this new target market with a different angle, with a different direction. Their customer journey might be a little bit different, and I can message that differently. That's the strategy. I think that really when you're thinking about big brands or small brands, and you're trying to think about the strategy, I've had a lot of recently on this podcast, like the last interview was a guy that just did go-to-market companies where you get funded. Branding and the name, he was like, the name is so, so important, and that's what opens the investors into the possibilities. He said, if for, say, three years, you're flatline on your growth, he could say, you need to change your entire strategy, maybe even rebrand the company, which I had to think about it. I was a little taken aback by it initially, and then I was like, makes a lot of sense. If you're not happy with that growth, and you're leveling it out, maybe there's something with your brand position, and one of the easiest ways to change the brand position might be to change the name. You could still keep the name and change the brand position, but you're going to lose some people, and then you're hopefully going to gain more people over here, but a podcast is a great way to tell that story and position it in different ways to different people. I think that thinking about all that stuff before you watch the podcast, I think people just want to get into it. Let's get out there. I know the data says, hey, you got to get to seven podcasts or nine podcasts or whatever it

is. Let's just go. I think that the measure twice, cut once kind of mentality is really, I'm seeing effective across the board. It's so just important to not just be pushing content out there to push content out there, but everything you do should tie back to your brand with a specific message, and it's trying to do something specifically. Doesn't make sense? Yeah. No, and even if the brand is you, and the brand is your podcast. I tell my students, your podcast is a startup. Any podcast I work on, we do a full deck before we get started in laying out the segments, laying out the target audience, laying out the competition, laying out potential advertisers, all of those things. I use this example a lot. When I worked in radio, one of the shows I did was Alice Radio in San Francisco. It was a show for middle-aged women who lived in Marin County, upper income, all that stuff. But it was a Howard Stern-esque show. It was all of us talking and sharing things. So there would be material, and I kept a picture of Kate from Kate Plus 8, because I looked at Kate. Kate was my ideal listener, but Kate was a woman who lived in Marin and drove a Volvo station wagon and had two kids and soccer. I used that as a reference all the time. I'd look up and go, man, I really want to talk about this on the show. I'm like, man, Kate would hate this content, can't do it. And I think most podcasters, they don't even think about that. They're just like, oh, I like this, and I like that, and that's great. If you want to do a podcast for yourself, that's fine. Enjoy it. You'll enjoy it, but the listener might not. You've got to think about them in everything that you do, and that's also the same thing with anything. When you're putting out a product, is this going to work for somebody? You would never put out a product and go,

oh, I'm going to add this because I like it and I just think it'll look great. You run things through some focus groups and things like that first. What do you think, if someone's advertising, there's certainly platforms where you can just run ads on a sports podcast or hunting podcast or small business podcast or business or personal development, whatever. There's different categories, and you're running pre-rolls or post-rolls. Yeah, they're just getting put in and they're pre-produced, yeah. I personally hate that interruption marketing, and I feel like the younger generation, like my kids, if there's ever an interruption ad anywhere, they absolutely hate it. I think incorporating the brands, like I've seen a lot of toys on YouTube videos and stuff like that, they're doing toy openings or they're doing toy things in the ad, so it's like product placement, and that just draws my kids to it. I just think also to add to this, just to see what you say, but I feel like influencers that have podcasts or podcasters are influencers that have an audience are such an underutilized market from a marketing standpoint. You can build any target segment or touch any target segment. You can find probably five to 10 smaller podcasts. Even after COVID, there was a big spike in podcasts. You could find people talking about this content, and usually if they're listening to it, they're avid listeners in the topic or that individual, and that recommendation is quite powerful. It goes back to the early days of podcasting. Why did podcasting start to take off and get successful? Because podcasters learned to integrate their ads into the content. That was it. That's how a code word for a mattress worked. I'm talking about the mattress. Also, it's an engagement to the listener like, hey, I know you love me and you love the show. These people are giving us money, so please support them. It's why there was a study done a few years ago, and it was like 90% of podcast listeners have acted on an ad

that they've heard on a podcast. That's an outrageous number. When we start putting in all these programmatic ads, and here's the problem, a lot of the companies just don't care what kind of ads go in. A company like Megaphone, for example, they put in podcast ads, so everything sounds like a podcast ad. They have great return on their ads, and they pay the highest premiums because you're getting these great ads. A lot of the other ones will just take radio ads and throw them in, and that is so disruptive to the listener. It doesn't need to be done. You can redo a radio ad using a tool like Wondercraft or something into a podcast ad in two seconds. There's no reason to do that, but again, this is how we make money. The other problem with programmatic ads, too, is that when you're buying like that, you're buying numbers. You don't always know if those numbers are correct. I'm just going to be straight. There are tools that will pump up numbers. I've seen that in geofencing, and people buy ads from different areas. There's some real problems, I think, with impressions, right? It's hard, though, to take the time to actually go look at a podcast and say that this is their audience, and then go take a look at their socials and see if they're as active and as big as they say they are. I can tell you I have a million downloads, but if you go look at my socials and I have like two people that comment on everything, I probably don't have a million people who are interested in my show. Just doing that homework helps out a lot, and then investing in the podcast, again, all of it. Just saying, hey, I'm going to invest in you as a creator because you're reaching everybody I want to reach. I want them to know about my product or my service, and dump the money there instead of dribble-drabbling on podcasts you don't even know what they sound like. Okay,

so if you were an individual or a company that wanted to do some ad—sorry about that. My kid ran in, slip and fell, and hit his face. Apologize, everyone. Okay, so where was my train of thought? My train of thought was if you were a brand or a person and you wanted to—you're trying to decide between, should I start a podcast, right? I want to tap this channel, or I want to advertise, what are the things that you need to be thinking about with one thing or the other? Well, I mean, if you're going to sponsor, really looking at what their community is. How many people were they reaching, not just with a podcast, but on social, on YouTube? Also if they've got a website, checking those numbers, seeing how those things are doing, and listening. Listen to the show. See if it fits. A lot of people don't even take that time, and it's kind of nuts to think you would spend money on a show and never have listened to it, but it happens all the time. For sponsoring, that's a big thing. Really making sure this is a show or something that is going to bring value to you. For advertising, it's the same thing. If you can find specific shows—and look outside of the top 5%. They get all the money. Let me be honest with you. A lot of these big shows with celebrities and stuff, they have high rankings and things, but behind the scenes, they're pumping those numbers up to keep their CPMs up. That's just a fact. The lower shows that are only doing, let's say, 20, or 30, or 50,000 downloads a month, look at those shows, because they probably have a more devoted audience, and it's real audience. It's not being pumped up by a company to keep their celebrities happy and their CPMs up. People just aren't doing that. They're just handing the money off. When the agencies get it, where do they go? They go to the big shows, because they want to

tell you, you're on this show and that show. I don't think you get the value that you would get off of spending the same amount of money on better shows that are smaller. I think that that is a mirror insight into what's happening with the social media platforms, or Google Ads and Facebook get all the money. I think some of these other platforms have great audiences and great advertising platforms that you can spend money on as well. I think also, I've seen a lot of value of taking something where you're creating value and actually sharing it on those platforms and putting money behind it. I think what you're saying is you need to do the work. You can't just throw money at something and hope that you're going to have the success and you're going to build this new channel. Also with podcasting, you get what you put in it. How engaged are you if you're a sponsor? Do you want to get people on their show? Some of these hosts will work with you to do different things. What kind of content do you want to talk about? What are you doing pre-show, post-show? You were talking to me prior to jumping on here live that there's a bunch of great tools out there to even tap people's audiences that are guests and to cross-pollinate audiences. As well as there's a lot of AI stuff that you can do to repurpose or create the shorts that maybe in the past might have been really expensive and only the big brands could do it, but now smaller companies can compete. Yeah. I mean, there's some great tools. A friend of mine has a company called Lychee, and they do TikToks out of your podcast. You send them the podcast, they create three TikToks that are algorithm-friendly, SEO-friendly, and they use a combination of AI and people. I think that's always the key with AI. I use AI a lot, and a lot of folks in the industry are scared of it. I use it a

lot for writing, but I don't use it. I use it as a tool to get me started, and then I work on the thing myself. I always think we got to always check that a little bit, but there's almost too many things coming out. There's a reason we created this company, Poddle.co, so that people can leave reviews for all these podcast services. There's 600 that we have in our database. That's how many people are trying to help people or trying to make money off of podcasters through different services and promotion tools. That's a good marketplace right there. Yeah. We actually have a freelance marketplace on there as well for people who are really serious about finding good producers. But the whole point that I built that was that there's so many out there, and you can take a million people's advice, but a lot of the times, the people who are giving advice aren't really good at podcasting, aren't skilled at it. Most of these folks who have podcasts and about podcasting and marketing and marketing your podcast have never done a podcast or they've just done the podcast that they've done. If you're a podcaster and you're looking for production advice, talk to producers. Talk to people who make content for a living. If you want marketing advice, talk to marketing folks. Get marketing advice from them. But people immediately go to marketing and they don't think about their content enough. It's backwards. You want to get your content up to a place where your retention level is above 60% and then think about promoting the show. Most people don't even check the retention levels. It's really easy to do. You can check them on Spotify. That's the biggest, most important number out of all the numbers you look at is your retention rate. If the retention rate's high, you know you're doing a good show. You know it's worth promoting. Storytelling is really the heart of podcasting and certainly when you're building a brand or you're doing marketing for a brand, understanding those

core values and podcasting is long form content to be able to tell that story. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your views on what storytelling is and how it's done really effectively. Maybe even some examples that brands have done from a storytelling standpoint because I think a lot of people are looking at all these tactics and all these analytics and all these different things that you can do surrounding, like you're talking about, the amplify the messaging or to reach more people and people forget, well, who are you trying to reach and what are you trying to say and how do you do that effectively? Certainly I think technology, having the right mics, having the right cameras, having the right lighting, the post production, which I could maybe use a little bit of help on, but I would tell you all that stuff's important, but the most important thing and the reason that everybody's listening is you're trying to grab their attention and give them some kind of value with the thousands and thousands of messages being hit on them every day, every hour. Maybe talk a little bit about what that needs to look like from a storytelling standpoint, from a brand standpoint. Sure. So a couple of different kinds of storytelling. When you do an interview, it's storytelling. Before I do any interview, I put together a story arc. I have questions, but the questions get used or not used, it really depends on the conversation, but I know the arc. I know where we want to go. We had a little conversation before this. So the things we're going to talk about, okay, so here's the arc of the conversation. Now for brands, one of the things they miss a lot is who's delivering it and who's delivering it and who's carrying the story arc. I'll give you a great example. I worked with a brand called Ameren. You've probably never heard of Ameren. Ameren's a pharmaceutical company, but they make pretty much any heart health medicine you've ever, anybody

takes. That's where they're at. So they want to do a podcast about heart health for men over the age of 45, and they want to have two doctors talking. And I said, no, I said, here's who needs to deliver this. And I told him, somebody that is those guys that people that age will relate to, like, and want to listen to. And we hired Ron Jaworski, former NFL quarterback, analyst, really nice guy, super nice guy, has had heart problems, really is into the topic. And having him as the host and then the doctors with the content, that was beautiful. It worked out really, the podcast was great. People really liked it. Ron's just fun to listen to. But again, it's lining up the right storyteller to bring in the people, to bring in the lump of the story. And then the other kind of podcast that we'd like to make that you're not seeing as much, they're a little more expensive, is actual storytelling podcasts. So like a This American Life kind of podcast. So the Federal Reserve Bank, we did one for them called Zip Code Economies. And every episode, the host would go to a town, and they would talk to them about their economy and about what was going on with the economy and how things were going in just that one small town. And it was a beautiful, it's a great podcast. It's up on there still, if you ever want to listen to it. But that was a way to tell a story of the economy without it being boring. It was like, no, we're getting real people talking, putting this into a nice storytelling format. But at the end of the day, people who are good at this are good storytellers. And a lot of people that are good storytellers, I like to brag, I think growing up in the South, we're especially good at it. It's part of our heritage. I was actually talking to a podcaster from Africa the other day, and I said, thank you, because

the whole storytelling tradition from the South really came from Africa and spread through the South through slaves. And not a lot of people were born with good storytelling skills. But I'll take three guys I grew up with who have never been in front of a microphone. If I put them in front of a microphone, you'd be entertained as hell, and they would just tell you a story about going downtown and buying eggs. What do you think the components of a good storyteller or a good story are? They have a goal. I always use this format, and this is a format we use in Recovery. It's what it was like, what happened, and what things are like now. That's a nice, easy format to think about when you have a guest on. The other thing is, you do this well, which is you're not just asking me questions. You're thinking while I'm answering, and you're reacting to what I've said, and have a question that actually is not just like, let me ask the next question. And you hear so many podcasters do that. Somebody gives an answer, and you're like, there's no follow-up, because all they're doing is thinking about their next question. So good storytellers, when it comes to being an interview host, give something back of themselves. I've told this story a million times, and I'll just tell it one more time. I call it the Tom Cruise story. First time I got to interview Tom Cruise, it was a radio interview, and we were told just to talk about Mission Impossible, nothing else. I knew that Tom had just bought a brand new motorcycle, and he loves motorcycles. My co-host, no name, loves motorcycles. So the first thing we asked Tom was about his new motorcycle, and you could hear that dude relax. You could hear him just go, and then he talks about the motorcycle, and then we got to the other stuff that we had to talk about. And then at the end of the interview, we heard him, because

we was with the mic on, him saying, I like those guys a lot. I'll go back anytime. It was that first question, because it was about, we like this. We know you like this. Let's talk about this together, instead of, hi, Tom, welcome. Tell me about the new movie. You're not getting any kind of – you've got to build that trust with the guest too at first and get in there, but giving part of yourself is a big part of the storytelling. Awesome. Well, Maddy, you have a lot of things going on, right? And there's really cool things that every time I talk to you, you share new and exciting things in the podcasting realm and the advertising space as related to podcasting. Can you tell me maybe the best, the tools, the projects you're working on, how to get in touch with you, how you want people to find you, maybe any podcast you're on besides mine that – I don't know, just how do people get in touch with you? LinkedIn is the best way. Just hit me up on LinkedIn. I share a lot on LinkedIn as far as content goes. Part of my job as one of the board of directors for the Podcast Academy is to help further the podcasting world in any way that I can. I give my time up pretty freely to people when they need help. If you're a brand and you're looking to do a brand of podcast, reach out to Matt, Jamstreet Media, and Matt. We're working together to create podcasts for brands and then have the marketing end done too, which is great. And then I've got Poddle, which I just mentioned, poddle.co. If you're a podcaster, please go up, sign up. It's free. Leave reviews, especially if you used a company and they weren't great. Honestly, we're looking forward to those because I think that needs to be said. But if you like something, make sure that you leave a review. And then if you're a freelancer, you can sign up and

get work through there. And I have something else coming up, but it's not done yet. So I really can't talk about it, but it's on the horizon. But I love making shows and I love working with folks like Matt to make shows with companies as well. So yeah, there you go. The last thing I'll end on is that thank you for being here. But you made me think, I work with the Boy Scouts of America to help kind of rebrand some things. I'm an Eagle Scout and been talking to them about starting up. They have a podcast, but I think there's some growth opportunities there. But I actually applied to put in a new merit badge, Matty, for podcasting. I think there should be a new merit badge. Oh, I think that's really good. You know, I do a lot of pod, you know, I try to donate my time to, this summer I'm going to be teaching a high school class at the Academy of Art University. If you're in the SF Bay Area, it's free to put your kid in it. Because kids have stories to tell and podcasting is a great way for them to learn how not just to tell stories, but to communicate and to articulate and to, which they don't learn on this. You know, like you got to talk to people to learn how to articulate and talk. So I think that's a great badge, man. I hope they do that. I really, really hope that that goes through. Well, thank you. Thanks everyone for listening. Matty is a great contact. You can just reach out to me. I can connect to you. It's worked with huge brands down to small companies. You know, I've done a lot of personal branding stuff. I think it's a really good kind of joint venture that we're working on, Matty, excited about all this stuff. So thank you all for listening. Thanks for being here. Until the next time, bye bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai