To be clear though, theres a whole lot of fluidity between these segments. Theyre all looking for internships. We also co-own a company with Will Ferrell. I wonder how much Im spending on audio marketing? That number is usually nine or 10 percent of their overall investment. I feel like I already know how it went. A guy did a show out of Alaska where he was one of 20 or 30 people who spoke a dying language. Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. The Ron Burgundy Podcast Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the world-famous Ron Burgundy Podcast! Are you converting off the radio? Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. Theres no ulterior motive or different goal. It didnt hurt that this explosion hit podcasting. 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. Oh, its right here. Five Stars. Theyre mine. I end on this team because its very important, we have our business affairs team. That feels obvious to me. I feel like an early version of the podcast industry was entirely built on host reads for direct-to-consumer brands. Police in Montgomery County, Maryland seized over 2,000 fentanyl pills during and after a traffic stop, the agency announced Friday. Movies. 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? The other is the digital audio group. You have sat out a bunch of stuff, you have sat out subscription, but I just want to sit with distribution for one more second. We make TikToks too, by the way. It has made conversations with creators really simple, because you can rest assured that at some point in the conversation they will ask, How are we going to distribute? Lets hang with Will Ferrell for a second. Im like, They dont need to be if they dont want to be. These are marketers who are usually really good at this stuff like really good. The truth is, audio all-up is a third of all the media we consume. Weve won in that sense in podcasting. The Ron Burgundy Podcast returns to continue to delight audiences with the comical musings of Ron Burgundy - and leave them wanting more! Those companies are also struggling. Ron sits down with Boris Johnson and gets into the restaurant business with Guy Fieri. 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. My point in answering this way is that he uses this company, to some extent, to find new comedic talent that is the long tail youre talking about. The Ron Burgundy Podcast. 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 Ma Ron and guest RuPaul countdown the top 10 women of all time. Everybody in this room has worked damn hard for the last 20 years to get to this point. Are they yours if theyre subscribed on YouTube? And yeah, a lot of it is Bob Pittman, and his partner, Rich Bressler, and our head of finance, Mike McGuinness. Absolutely. We will avoid, at almost every turn, simplicity. We all get it by now, painfully. This one seems like its much more real, and you have a terrestrial radio business that is undergoing its own massive change. We all did it. Ron explained: Youre saying we have to innovate and push back in it, but its still just promo codes. They apply, they get admitted, we build a bit of a podcast studio at their house, we teach them how to use the gear, we teach them how podcast marketing should work, and most importantly, we teach them what a business deal should look like in podcasting, so that they know walking into it. Ill go from the more obvious down to the less obvious. Ive always thought about it. NEW YORK - December 3, 2018 - The legendary newscaster Ron Burgundy and iHeartMedia, the No. iHeart has 1,300 salespeople in all 50 states across 160 or so markets as weve divided up the country. Do you worry that you dont have the same control? The Ron Burgundy Podcast on Apple Podcasts 68 episodes Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the world-famous Ron Burgundy Podcast! They had seven or eight podcasts that they were making. It can be a true crime limited series of eight to 10 episodes that are 30 minutes long, or it can be a stuff to blow your mind episode with just two guys talking for three hours. Yes. I only say this to you because thats how we do that sale. We obviously have a podcast team, run by the president of the iHeart Podcast Network, Will Pearson. Next week, Im with Universal McCann. The medium. The money from each of these pipes is not the same. Its not like, I spent 95 percent of our time on Will Ferrell. Its just like life. Its the suspense for the org chart question. A podcast from The Verge about big ideas and other problems. Fair enough. He has a certain energy and vision about him, where hes able to run large companies as if they were startups. Discovery bought our company because they were about to go public, and they wanted to have a really strong digital strategy. Host, Producer, and Writer on The Ron Burgundy Podcast, Host on True Romance with Carolina B, and Guest on The Daily Zeitgeist, Everything Iconic with Danny, and Behind the Bastards. They have this instinct to do good work, so they will try to over-perform and overcomplicate a task. Were going to build the podcast business by running Will Ferrell at you until youre sick of it, because we control that inventory and we control that distribution.. The counterexample there is obviously Joe Rogan at Spotify. Whereas if I were to decide to stop distributing or making content on my YouTube channel, my brand just goes away. Ron takes a stab at the most popular genre of his new chosen mediumthe True Crime podcast. I make content. I think most podcasters are bad at marketing. We had a good relationship with Roger Goodell and the league. Theyre killing it right now. Yes. Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the Ron Burgundy Podcast. Then on the other side, you have MrBeast, who literally gives away money to start a hamburger chain that will make him a billionaire. Co-produced by Funny Or Die, the 12-episode "The Ron Burgundy . So now its digitally infused, data-infused listening that they can target digitally. So I dont depend on it, but we have seen some traction there across 10, 12 shows getting optioned and its meaningful, with huge partners in Hollywood. On iHeart Media. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox daily. I dont have this concern in podcasting. Its also how we got here. Youre saying, Oh, theres a seamless back and forth, but surely you must see, Oh, okay. I feel like its still a thriving business. The easiest example for me is Charlamagne tha God hosting a show called The Breakfast Club out of Tribeca every morning. Anybody in the room, and most of us do work in podcasting, know that number is harder and harder to get every day. LOTS of podcasts have ads okay? 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. Its an audio medium. No. Carolina Barlow: Co-Host, Writer, and Producer. Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. I have a card here that says NFTs on it. It was a smart move on their part to buy a company like HowStuffWorks.com. Do you even talk to them, or are you just like, Screw it, take my RSS feed? Thats our conference for the podcast industry. I think the value of that creative playground to a creator, that is really free and really permissive, cannot be underestimated. It made perfect sense to me as a consumer 10 years ago or so when I subscribed to Netflix. We also have a digital marketing team, I forgot that in the org chart. Just SKIP them, also they complain about the live audience which I get but I doubt theyll change it. By the way, if you love digital audio, and we all do. I havent found a business model that proves it differently, so I think it behooves all of us to plug that pipe into as many distribution points as possible. Ron and Carolina are terrorized by Gilly The Clown, who teaches us about death. It has been fun, if nothing else. No Longer So. To put it simply, we have a platform. I dont have it candidly on a P&L anywhere. There has never been a moment in the company that we were sidelined or deprioritized. Its finally arrived. I think thats creator psychology, like, Actually, sometimes its more important for me to have a large listener pool than it is to have a big check. Some of the press recently has focused on that, and I think its smart. And everything in between. Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. Its a great point and question. It sounds like you have things figured out, that you have confidence in your business. A favorite episode from Season 1, now with a translator track telling us what was actually being said in Spanish. You launched a lot of new stuff. Podcasting is a mass-reach medium. Huge exclusives, Spotify got whatever out of it, we dont know how Joe Rogan feels about it. Ive learned about this a lot, and Ive talked about it a lot as Ive learned it. Subscribehere! Its good content. This is what the audience wants. Terrestrial radio distribution is a thing that were all very familiar with. There was no digital media when I went to college, let alone podcasting. So I said, All I can tell you is just have your aperture be wide open, man. But that maverick approach has included some controversial steps as well. [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. Show Monocle 24: The Foreign Desk, Ep Explainer 355: Ron DeSantis vs Disney World - 1 Mar 2023 If you can never get enough true crime Congratulations, youve found your people. Ron DeSantis with the nickname "DeSanctimonious" ahead of a likely battle for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. 246 episodes totalling 170 hours, 51 minutes. Sure we are. One hundred and twenty million a month? This is a split, right? Do you think that youve built a business that is resilient to that kind of platform shift, or is the answer just RSS feeds again? Everything, I promise you, is simpler than you think. 2023 Vox Media, LLC. We do all kinds of advertising models with Malcolm and his team. This one was definitely very real. We're not thrilled about it, but the show will launch on the iHeartPodcast Network in early 2019 featuring Burgundy himself. Crypto company Gemini is having some trouble with fraud. 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. Thats not really how it works. Yeah, we do too. Its really that simple. A million monthly downloads or more is a ton. I do. Its actually a lot of different things. A-Rod Interview / Cooking with Jon & Vinny. This is the only room where you can say that and people perk up. In Chicago, I sat in front of OMD. Weve actually noticed in the last two or three months that its a very timely question for us at our businesses, because I feel like weve moved off the direct response business too fast. Youre still getting the full ad load. The creator and the ad-serving publisher, in our case, are in total control. Yeah. We do talk to them. We are an obsessively, widely distributed content company. All I see is this constructiveness across these two segments. The idea that were going to run ads at scale and on broadcast, that were going to put the local news anchors on the side of buses, this is not this industry. Not great. Hollywood is a difficult, complicated industry, its nothing new to say that. Its not that being inside Discovery was bad, it was just different. I think thats it. Ill give you an example of a show. We try to organize them into slates that have EPs and producers on top of them. What is your framework for making decisions? I think theres a creative freedom to it that allures a lot of people, but it doesnt have the mass reach of broadcast radio yet. This thread is archived Its why we widely distribute. You should subscribe to it. Theyll overcomplicate in order to camouflage something they probably shouldnt have done. Its been cool. We take this for granted as creators, as publishers, and as networks. Thats where the VC money went. Do you care? The core fundamental, pretty consistent business model of podcasting is a rev share model. How do you make sure they get attention? The things youre describing dont always happen, right? 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 Tis the season of Spring, and that means time to talk about the one thing thats interesting year round: Christmas. Youre the CEO of iHeart Digital, which is a big company with a long history. Overall, it was a fun first show that was a little light thematically but should improve with different guests and crazy circumstances allowing Will Ferrell to play around in the style that made him famous." You could also say that you have a division that might be declining and a division that might be growing at a faster rate. He used his podcast as a way to capture that language and report on how a language dies off the face of the earth, never to come back. The Ron Burgundy Podcast | Podcast on Spotify Home Search Your Library Create Playlist Privacy Center Cookies Preview of Spotify Sign up to get unlimited songs and podcasts with occasional ads. We tend to think and work sequentially. One of these cards literally says, What is your org chart? That is my whole brand. 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. We need certain things to calm down and other things to end. Yeah. Okay, I guess we have some calls to make at the end of the day to the long tail. It is usually one continuum or even the same slate. We ran a 30-second ad for The Ron Burgundy Podcast on broadcast radio every single hour in 160 markets. He was a great guest, super game to answer the questions, especially in front of a live audience. Perhaps its because there is nothing broken in the distribution and monetization model today. I really just keep going back to this notion that its perfect the way it is. Hes going to start this journey now of trying to get into college. Producers: Whitney Hodack, Jack O'Brien, Miles Gray, and Nick Stumpf, Political History with Doris Kearns Goodwin. Go follow Decoder on TikTok, its great. Ill end on this. Are you saying, Its actually billions of podcast impressions? Aside from "True Romance", Carolina also co-hosts "The Ron Burgundy Podcast," with the on-screen Ron Burgundy himself, Will Ferrell. The. You mentioned that you had experimented with subscriptions. Radio is a more ruthless industry than podcasts. We have this mantra at the company that Any seller can sell anything any day of the week wherever they live and work, and that has rung pretty true. We realized that maybe our greatest asset was the people who worked there. In my opinion, I dont think we would be where we are as an industry otherwise. Its not that theyre bad people. ChatGPT will eat us all. He also co-owns a company with us called The Black Effect, that he 51 percent owns. Ill answer it this way. The math works out with subscription, but Im not sure how it works out with advertising. People trust podcast content more than they trust what they see on social media by like 60 percent more. Malcolm Gladwell has an existing slate of shows. That wasnt possible prior. 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. Barlow is a writer and producer on the show as well as. Join America's favorite . Because if youre launching new stuff, youve built the archive, you built the library. The BD team is livid. Youd be surprised actually, as much as it may sound nuts, the extent to which youre innovating by iterating many different reads, at many different lengths, and many different placements across a show. They were really good storytellers; they could take anything from air conditioning to artificial intelligence and tell a story about a topic. This has made podcasting different. Promote. The iHeartPodcasts app aside, this is an inherently decentralized medium with lots of different players, lots of different controls, and lots of different monetization schedules. When we launched a company like The Black Effect with Charlamagne, we had huge annual sponsors that were deeply ingrained in that company. Simply put, the whole podcast industry in one sense is just the most amazing, best storytelling group of influencers to hit media in a really long time, so we benefit from there being new attention on the influencer market. We have a few minutes left. The problem it was solving, the price point was undeniable, it made perfect sense to me. How did the NFT thing go? Yes, of course we are. I think if you were to sit down with any of these creators who are on broadcast radio, they would openly say it to you. I want to start at the beginning. In this one, I couldnt identify the problem that it was solving, and therefore I think the industry tripped up on it. Folks trusting social media less, influencers having less success on social media because of that, and therefore marketers being like, I dont know what to do with this. Episode One of "The Ron Burgundy Podcast" talks about one of the most popular genres of podcasts: True Crime. There are these formats that hit, the things you lead with, but then there is an enormous long tail of stuff. The Ron Burgundy Podcast will launch on the iHeartRadio Podcast Network in early 2019. Theyre not in charge, right? There were lots of things that moved what were initially experimental marketing dollars from those big brands and holdcos into permanent marketing dollars. They could have published them on YouTube. Its just a disconnect. I dont think this is wishful thinking. Its not the kind of game that is usual in this industry. About. The other day, we were talking with Angela Yee, who was a former co-host of The Breakfast Club and has started a new radio show on iHeart called Way Up. First of all, search engine optimization, period, is a version of what youre talking about. Just before we started, I was looking at your website. Im building up to it. It didnt go well for him either. A friend told it to me a year or two ago. A shockingly candid and raw autobiography from legendary anchorman, jazz flutist, and host of The Ron Burgundy Podcast, Ron Burgundy.From his humble beginnings in a desolate Iowa coal mining town, his years at Our Lady Queen of Chewbacca High School to his odds-defying climb to the dizzyin. I just dont know that we at the NFL are going to get this as right as you guys might, as fast, and we want to partner with somebody really big. Its a very similar model to Pushkin Industries. "This year, variegated and dark-foliage plants will have a moment as plant parents move towards that foliage combination," predicts Lindsay Pangborn, a plant expert with Bloomscape . If anything, were making that more of a focus and paying more attention to it in the last two or three months. Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. If you were to ask the n+1 digital marketer, Where is the best place to spend your dollar? Theyre still going to say, A Meta platform, or theyre still going to say, A Google platform. Theyre not going to tell you that you should buy billions of podcast impressions yet. Aren't. Real. Ron Burgundy: Host, Writer, Executive Producer. Ive just really struggled to understand why you would do that. It has 29, 30 podcasts under it, and it alone drives 15 to 20 million downloads a month. I can test exclusive or windowed content there. This was a year ago, and so now hes like, Whatever, dude. You take the point. Thats interesting. Theyre all like, Oh, thank God he said that. I dont pretend to know whats in their heads. But if you listen to this room over the course of the day, weve probably said podcasting is in its infancy 100 times on this stage and in the breakout rooms. I think its high attentiveness at scale with partners that weve been able to maintain so far. I can get all three, all the time. Will Ferrell stopped by almost all of the late-night TV shows to promote the second season of the Ron Burgundy Podcast, . Credits:Ron Burgundy: Host, Writer, Executive Producer, This episode was Engineered, Mixed and Edited by: Nick Stumpf. We wanted access to that to shout really loudly about the stuff we were doing. The standard Facebook line is, Okay, youre going to find your customer. But no, youre spot on. He had a similar trajectory to me; he came from MentalFloss.com 20 years ago. If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks then look no further. The NFL is very similar. Hes fantastic. I think the value of that creative playground to a creator, that is really free and really permissive, cannot be underestimated.. Every single question is about org charts. So he had a similar trajectory, and hes a wonderful guy. So far, that is all we know, which is a shame. Anchorman's Ron Burgundy has netted himself two 12-episode seasons of a new show, The Ron Burgundy Podcast. This is a must-buy bucket of marketing. Thats important, because I think they want to do the right thing by the medium. Thats actually a podcast we make together thats actually awesome. With podcasts, youre talking about promo codes at the ends of the ads, right? There was a moment on YouTube, around 2010 or something, where we all realized the same thing. Weve all seen this, so Im not saying anything privileged. Thats a super good question. In around 2008, I was the general manager of a company called HowStuffWorks.com, and we were acquired by Discovery Communications. His team makes some of the biggest podcasts around, with huge talent like Will Ferrell, Shonda Rhimes, and Charlamagne tha God, who youll hear Conal talk about quite a lot. 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. We do a bunch of partnerships with a lot of creators and a lot of distribution platforms. Thats driven most of our growth in podcasting over the last two, three, four years at the company. Our partnership with him is to monetize his shows better than he thinks he could himself, but to also co-produce a whole new slate of shows. Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. On this distribution I make this. Even Decoder is bad at marketing; this is as much marketing as weve ever done. Youve never bought downloads to run game ads? I feel like you have a very strong conviction, so I feel like I might know how youre going to answer this, but I do ask everybody this. Thats right. All of us do this, including myself. Weve earned this. Over the last 10 years, I think it has been a question of them figuring out what they are as a platform and what the next chapter for them should be, whether its the metaverse or just doubling down on making newsfeed better.