I talk to a lot of startup CEOs, and a lot of them who get acquired by big companies. I think its going to be good, and I want to put it in front of many people. Theres no asterisk on the answer back to him. Otherwise, Id be sitting up here saying, We are really working hard to get everybody on the iHeartRadio app. The business and the economics of podcasting today still sit with the creator and the publisher, because you own the pipe that you distribute your shows through. Sometimes they just shuffle it to create change. It has been fun, if nothing else. I want to come to exclusives and to consolidation. Will Ferrell was like, Please, please stop running so many ads.. In around 2008, I was the general manager of a company called HowStuffWorks.com, and we were acquired by Discovery Communications. Carolina Sums Up The Whole Podcast (The Ron Burgundy Podcast) Funny Or Die 3.5M subscribers Subscribe 288 Share 40K views 3 years ago Listen to the full episode here: https://ihr.fm/2WcbhiE. Absolutely. Carolina Barlow: Co-Host, Writer, and Producer. Anchorman's Ron Burgundy has netted himself two 12-episode seasons of a new show, The Ron Burgundy Podcast. I also think theres a new thrust in influencer marketing. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. This was a year ago, and so now hes like, Whatever, dude. You take the point. Hopefully the truth will be revealed during the first season of the newly announced The Ron Burgundy Podcast. Most of people acting strangely, politicking at work, or behaving badly is born out of insecurity. The Ron Burgundy Podcast will launch on the iHeartRadio Podcast Network in early 2019. If you love digital audio and you want real reach, there is no way to get real reach in digital audio. Big Money Players and iHeartPodcasts. Theyll overcomplicate in order to camouflage something they probably shouldnt have done. Co-produced with the Big Money Players Network, The Ron Burgundy Podcast was one of the top shows of the year - weighing in at No. We all are. Do you even talk to them, or are you just like, Screw it, take my RSS feed? Again, I hate to keep repeating it, but I dont see the problem Id be fixing. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox daily. But that maverick approach has included some controversial steps as well. Will Ferrell stars as his infamous Anchorman character "Ron Burgundy" in his very own comedic podcast. Are they yours if theyre subscribed in Spotify? We predicted it to some extent, we felt that it was coming in 2018 or 2019, but that certainly helped. Theres an engineering team that has maybe 100 people at the back end of all of our digital products. All of the distribution points that we distribute to today through RSS feeds are equal to us in terms of the money we make, because thats just how RSS feeds work. Its an audio medium. We make TikToks too, by the way. Hes like, How did you decide what youre going to do? I said, All I can tell you is, and this is where he rolls his eyes, is that the job I have, the industry I work in, didnt exist when I went to college. In this one, I couldnt identify the problem that it was solving, and therefore I think the industry tripped up on it. Every single question is about org charts. Im very interested in the derivative work potential of podcasts. There was this new-ish thing called podcasting, so we soundproofed some rooms and threw some people in those people being Josh and Chuck, who co-host Stuff You Should Know and several other shows. But hey, these reviews and opinions, I love your show but the live shows just arent as good as the old shows. How do you make sure they sustain? Are you feeling the pinch of the ad downturn? We're the Film Fanatics. I can test exclusive or windowed content there. We ran a 30-second ad for The Ron Burgundy Podcast on broadcast radio every single hour in 160 markets. What it allowed us to do, along with a lot of other stuff, was to talk more freely to the market about how well this segment was growing, specifically podcasting. Ron plans an interview with Alex Rodriguez, and takes his cooking skills to the next level with Jon & Vinny. A nice surprise: in each episode of SmartLess, one of the hosts reveals his mystery guest to the other two. In fact, you almost certainly kill true creativity when you hit that moment. I think the value of that creative playground to a creator, that is really free and really permissive, cannot be underestimated. Its another 60 percent this is the only reason I remember these numbers or more specifically, like 57 percent, of marketers currently spending in podcasting are going to be spending more next year, not less. A podcast from The Verge about big ideas and other problems. UK News Published: Mar 1, 2023. Oh, its right here. Its not mutually exclusive, first of all. All Rights Reserved, By submitting your email, you agree to our. I understand where we sit in the pecking order in terms of cume. [1] [2] [3] A podcast series, The Ron Burgundy Podcast, produced by Big Money Players and written by Jake Fogelnest, with Ferrell reprising his role alongside Carolina Barlow, aired for 57 episodes across four seasons on iHeartRadio from February 7, 2019 to August 19, 2021, with a fifth season in active development. To put it simply, we have a platform. Is that part of your business affairs team, just selling the IP out? While some podcasts will make amazing video channels, YouTube channels, Facebook video series, and amazing Netflix series, I worry that it feels like the requirement to sit at the adult table. When we launched The Ron Burgundy Podcast with Will Ferrell four years ago, we gave him a really big gross radio point push across broadcast radio. Bob Pittman can buy Stuff Media and say, You know what? It makes sense to me. The longer answer is, were in an odd economy. The day before, I was with Publicis. This changed everything for podcasting. Thats the only difference so far. If anything, were making that more of a focus and paying more attention to it in the last two or three months. Glass-walled conference rooms where they just come up with funnier promo codes? Theyre just trying to grow their audience while youre selling the ads. One hundred and twenty million a month? Everything will get better, faster, and easier if you parallel-path projects. When you pay for a subscription on most platforms, and you receive a podcast that somebody else is piping into that platform through an RSS feed, nothing has changed about it. We do this so no one ever feels like, I havent heard from iHeart in a month. A decent example of this is a program we have called NextUp. Do you care? Not great. I ask it of everybody. Google and YouTube are awesome. via Podcasts. Two really different examples. Are you programming across to the radio, saying, Were going to run ads for our podcast on the radio, and youre going to come listen to it? Do I think were mature enough to have all of the things that a big, respectable, grown-up-table business should have? Do you think the industry is mature enough to be like, Actually, what you all need is a business affairs group? Facebooks interest has grown and waned and grown a bit on podcasts. Is that something you think about as targeting? This one seems like its much more real, and you have a terrestrial radio business that is undergoing its own massive change. I dont see it in podcasting, and maybe thats why Im not super concerned. You have this relic now, that is a podcast limited series of what this language means to this guy and why he captured it in a podcast. We tend to think we have to do things sequentially. Is that still who youre pitching to, or are your publicists saying, All right, GM, Will Ferrell is going to read about electrification today? People trust podcast content more than they trust what they see on social media by like 60 percent more. Ill give you an example of a show. The. I have to say people are very excited to hear from you today. Credits: Host, Writer, and Executive Producer: Ron Burgundy Co-host, Writer and Producer: Carolina Barlow Producer: Nick Stumpf Talent Producer: Anna Hossnieh Writers: Andrew Steele and Jake Fogelnest Engineered, Mixed and Edited by Nick Stumpf Learn more about your ad-choi Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the world-famous Ron Burgundy Podcast! There are these formats that hit, the things you lead with, but then there is an enormous long tail of stuff. Maybe one day you will, but not today. Yes, we do that all the time. Was Great. Some of this is obvious. Thats where the VC money went. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. It has been a pitfall of digital media from day one. Aren't. Real. Does that worry you? Jun Group is a vendor that drives marketing for podcast companies that is targeting mostly gamers, whether those are gamers playing Subway Surfer or people who overindex for the metaverse. Broadcast radio is a highly formatted media type. They take our panel listening on the iHeart radio app, look at it by geo-territory and day part, and they tie it back to the shows that youre listening to on air. Charts. Will Ferrell was like, Please, please stop running so many ads, but it worked. Its always collaborative with their approval. This thread is archived Its worked for them for 10, 15 years. Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox daily. We tell stories through human conversation, more than anything else. It has been announced that the Anchorman character will next year release 12 episodes of something called The Ron Burgundy Podcast. Number two was this massive marketing machine. We are a mass-reach medium. By the way, 75 percent of that third is broadcast radio. StraightioLab is an intellectual podcast where smart comedians George Civeris and Sam Taggart unpack the rich, multi-colored tapestry of straight culture. If any of you are buying bus ads, please let me know, because Im dying to know how it works. That's it. You own the radio stations and you program them. Is this a thing you want to do? Ron and Carolina talk with Game of Thrones Peter Dinklage about his favorite poems. I feel like its still a thriving business. If you were to just run the audio on YouTube, and say theres a YouTube audience here, its probably a very different return based on how that ad model works. Were a very good partner with creators. i believe, an audio podcast mixed with a live audience, is a not a good mix. Each episode has a diff Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the world-famous Ron Burgundy Podcast! We are an obsessively, widely distributed content company. Are you on the side of having a wide distribution and using that to convert against whatever your other business is? Yes. Burgundy, who has a fountain of knowledge that spans literally every topic imaginable, has signed on for two 12-episode seasons, with the first episode of "The Ron Burgundy Podcast" making its . I dont see a reason. Is there any tension there at all? Its a great question, because Ive been on both sides of that. This is the org chart question now. We wanted access to that to shout really loudly about the stuff we were doing. Yeah. Credits:Ron Burgundy: Host, Writer, Executive ProducerCarolina Barlow: Co-Host, Writer, and Producer.Producers: Whitney Hodack, Jack OBrien, Miles Gray, and Nick StumpfExecutive Producer: Mike FarahConsulting Producer: Andrew SteeleAssociate Producer: Anna HossniehWriter: Jake FogelnestProduction Supervisor: Colin MacDougallThis episode was Engineered, Mixed and Edited by Ron and Carolina are joined by special guests, a random man and woman who happen to be in the elevator when they get stuck at the start of the recording. The Ron Burgundy Podcast Season One Trailer. Actor Will Ferrell said Thursday at the Podcast Movement conference in Los Angeles that he has begun live-taping performances he is doing in L.A. which will serve at the anchor of The Ron Burgundy Podcast 's forthcoming outing. Into the whole thing? If you have that framework when you walk into every meeting every creator meeting, every partner meeting, every competitor meeting it changes your whole outlook. Is that present for you? I think its the single thing I am most proud of at the iHeart Podcast Network. Who wants to be able to try stuff a lot, make a few mistakes, get it righter and righter, and then hit something big or two or three things. I think its high attentiveness at scale with partners that weve been able to maintain so far. If youre a marketer and you hear that third stat, youre like, Wow, a third of all the stuff that people take in is marketing. The tales he unfolds and his interview with a criminal psychologist are positively bone chilling. I wonder how much Im spending on audio marketing? That number is usually nine or 10 percent of their overall investment. I dont think theres a creator on the planet who is interested in literally decimating their audience size, even for the sake of a big check. You brought up SEO. We all get it by now, painfully. I talk to a lot of digital media CEOs and digital media types. 246 episodes totalling 170 hours, 51 minutes. The core fundamental, pretty consistent business model of podcasting is a rev share model. if these shows have a visual option available somewhere to watch, that'd be cool, i guess. Subscribe to our daily newsletter! I think our stats were something like never more than 1 percent, 2 percent, 2.5 percent of our downloads in any given month. Look, iHeart is an old company, its a radio company, and Bob Pittman built it in a very particular way. Its a great point and question. The last piece I will say is Bob Pittman, the CEO of iHeartMedia. Some of their podcasts include "The Ron Burgundy Podcast" and "Chelsea Handler: Life will be the Death of Me." The deal also allows teams to do their own podcasts that can be distributed . This show is also a podcast where we capture the file, distribute it as an on-demand thing, and then it drives upwards of 15 to 20 million downloads a month. But no, youre spot on. They had seven or eight podcasts that they were making. Show Monocle 24: The Foreign Desk, Ep Explainer 355: Ron DeSantis vs Disney World - 1 Mar 2023 We do all kinds of advertising models with Malcolm and his team. We ran a third-party research study two years ago with WARC. Eighty million Americans a week listen to podcasts. We havent even discussed the trust issues that are very real on social media. But to tell it in a reductive way, 20 years ago, when some folks were sitting around a table deciding how they were going to distribute all these great podcasts they were going to start making, they could have used several different technologies to do that. The NFL is very similar. Ron is joined by his ex-girlfriend Doris Kearns Goodwin. All of our attention is on audio now because of podcasting. There is very little competition, and theres very little, They do that and we do this. In fact, I think the only way we succeed, and the reason we have succeeded, is that it has been quite the opposite of that. For sure, we deserve and need it. You are going to describe them to us, we are going to put an ad in front of them, and its going to convert, and then maybe Apple will ruin everybodys business with ad tracking. Up or down on NFTs? We give a ton of in-show podcast promotion as well. Walk us through what that actually means. The iHeartPodcast Network is home to more than 800 iHeartPodcasts across a wide variety of genres, that span every category from business, sports, spirituality and technology to entertainment, family, comedy and true crime - and everything in between including leading podcasts such as "The Ron Burgundy Podcast," "Paper Ghosts . Where it tripped up is with these exclusive distribution models that made sense for streaming services, like Netflix, Hulu, and maybe Prime, because they were solving problems. They do it like an hour a day. As a creator or a publisher, I can plug my RSS feed into a distribution app if I so choose, and people subscribing to my RSS feed. What worries me a little bit is that we have this tendency on the internet, and since Ive been working in digital media overall, to have this belief sometimes that I think is false that everything really needs to be a video when it grows up. The last thing Id say is more of a human thing. Ron takes a stab at the most popular genre of his new chosen mediumthe True Crime podcast. It has 29, 30 podcasts under it, and it alone drives 15 to 20 million downloads a month. The Ron Burgundy Podcast. Yeah. Ron, a big fan of magic, gets to hear from the famed magician Justin Willman. That feels obvious to me. Even if ultimately it was frustrating to the creator network, usually when there was a huge shift in a business model, the newer platforms were fixing a problem. The reason we started this company was because I think he genuinely had a blast making The Ron Burgundy Podcast. Yeah, we did a great Decoder episode with Chris Dixon, the lead partner for that stuff at Andreessen Horowitz. I make content. I didnt know if it would work, but these shows started to pop one after the other because of the broadcast radio promotion that we were giving them. Fast, cheap, and good. If you can never get enough true crime Congratulations, youve found your people. They were really good storytellers; they could take anything from air conditioning to artificial intelligence and tell a story about a topic. Sure we are. In each episode, Georg.Show More Introducing: Season 3 of StraightioLab 02:55 | Sep 2nd More RECOMMEND 8) Peter McIndoe and Tim Heidecker There is always something new happening. Just SKIP them, also they complain about the live audience which I get but I doubt theyll change it. Which one of your children is the business affairs group? Notable Verge traitor Ashley Carman, who is in this room somewhere, wrote a great story at Bloomberg about Podtrac and how you might be inflating those numbers with mobile game downloads using the Jun Group. This is very unique. So we launched a company together. Will Ferrell has started a podcast as the character he played in the movie of the same name. Its a great question, because isnt everything direct response at the end of the day? Are you open to video? On iHeart Media. One San Diego legend joins another for the definitive interview with the San Diego Chicken. I just dont see it fixing anything thats broken. We had three or four people who were our formal official sales team at Stuff Media. Yes. Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verges Nilay Patel about big ideas and other problems. Episode One of "The Ron Burgundy Podcast" talks about one of the most popular genres of podcasts: True Crime. Those companies are also struggling. Everyone does it. It has brought in underrepresented creators like nothing else weve done. Youre saying, Oh, theres a seamless back and forth, but surely you must see, Oh, okay. Ive always thought about it. We also co-own a company with Will Ferrell. I dont predict what we might get. On the other side of the business, you own the distribution. Our marketing people are here, youre very good. Radio is a more ruthless industry than podcasts. Join Americas favorite Anchorman, continuing to delight audiences with the comical musings of Ron Burgundy and leave them wanting more! After finally learning what a podcast is, Ron Burgundy legendary news anchor and esteemed podcaster is back for season three of " The Ron Burgundy Podcast !" This iHeartRadio original podcast is sure to bring the laughs as everyone's favorite 70s news anchor continues to sharpen his podcasting skills. We were especially interested in, If we got gamers into our podcast network, could we then bring them into these live shows in iHeartLand? We dont use it anymore. These are marketers who are usually really good at this stuff like really good. A favorite episode from Season 1, now with a translator track telling us what was actually being said in Spanish. Everybody in this room has worked damn hard for the last 20 years to get to this point. You should start one. I know Im sort of recapping the obvious, but this was an inflection point in our whole industry, that you suddenly had big brands and sometimes big holdcos swooping in and wanting to invest in podcasting. We tend to think and work sequentially. That is technically a long tail show. In true Ron Burgundy fashion, these conversations have a tendency to go off the rails, and we find out things about people we never knew we wanted to know. Just before we started, I was looking at your website. Hes going to leave now. Our partners at Work x Work. Burgundy, who has a fountain of knowledge that spans literally every topic imaginable, has signed on for two 12-episode seasons, with the first episode of "The Ron Burgundy Podcast" making its debut on February 7 with subsequent episodes to post each Thursday. We do a bunch of partnerships with a lot of creators and a lot of distribution platforms. There is no moment where theyre surprised a month or two later that such-and-such advertiser has been underwriting their entire slate and they hate that brand, or something like that. The Ron Burgundy Podcast was distributed as a show on late Sunday night on broadcast radio too. It was a packed house and a great time. Im building up to it. Are you doing that? They chose a real simple version of it called Really Simple Syndication, RSS feeds. At iHeart, we felt that we wanted to unlock a lot of the value that we had as a company, and we wanted to make it more transparent to the investor community, to audiences, to researchers, and to analysts. And Im actually saying they should also buy broadcast radio, and Im not in the multi-platform group. Google wont give us the time of day. It sounds like you think you have some leverage over the platforms. This is a must-buy bucket of marketing. He had a similar trajectory to me; he came from MentalFloss.com 20 years ago. We spun it out as its own company, Stuff Media, and very shortly thereafter we realized we needed two or three things to grow a lot faster and get a lot bigger. I look at the companies that have the targeting capabilities. Its good content. Were starting to use words like cohorts instead of one-to-one targeting. Its confusing and its less effective. With podcasts, youre talking about promo codes at the ends of the ads, right? You would have a platform tax that has not yet been introduced into podcasting, and may never be introduced. Sometimes these restructures are a little bit fake. Nothings perfect, but its pretty close to perfect. "The iconic anchorman's podcast will be a scripted audio drama set in Ron Burgundy's world (which is sometimes in a glass case of emotion), and resurface the delightful personality that has . No. Ron and Carolina are terrorized by Gilly The Clown, who teaches us about death. Youve been more or less anti-subscription. We saw a shift from performance marketers or direct-response marketers into bigger brands thanks to ad tech evolving fast in podcasting. Credits:Ron Burgundy: Host, Writer, Executive ProducerCarolina Barlow: Co-Host, Writer, and Producer.Producers: Whitney Hodack, Jack OBrien, Miles Gray, and Nick StumpfExecutive Producer: Mike FarahConsulting Producer: Andrew SteeleAssociate Pro Ron and Carolina take part in a mind expanding interview and meditation session with guru Deepak Chopra. Standing back and watching how her and the Shondaland audio team work, it seems they want to use this medium to do two things so far. The allure backwards to radio is that you have true mass-reach audiences, which I think brings them back. Its actually a lot of different things. Whereas other big podcasting players like Spotify and Apple have tried to boost revenue through subscriptions or platform exclusivity, Conal shunned those approaches and said hes going for big audience reach, made possible in part by his ability to run ads and even shows on iHearts huge network of traditional radio stations. Weve talked with Ashley a lot about this. Ill end on this. Are you saying, Its actually billions of podcast impressions? Im like, They dont need to be if they dont want to be. Its not the kind of game that is usual in this industry. Ron and Carolina interview an actual, real live psychic after Ron gives listeners their horoscopes. I love you very much. What is your framework for making decisions? Morbid is a true crime, creepy history and all things spooky podcast hosted by an autopsy technician and a hairstylist. "SmartLess" with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett is a podcast that connects and unites people from all walks of life to learn about shared experiences through thoughtful dialogue and organic hilarity. Were like, Hey, you should buy podcasting. And everything in between. That comprises all of our social media assets, all of our websites, a huge streaming business, a lot of the innovative tech work we do like how we launched iHeartLand in Roblox and Fortnite and podcasting. I know. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. The Ron Burgundy Podcast Aug 4, 2022 Peter McIndoe and Tim Heidecker Ron meets with Peter McIndoe to discuss the fact that Birds. So he had a similar trajectory, and hes a wonderful guy. Well do standard, straight-up, quick-turn, host-read ads. The way to do that was to create two segments in our company.