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238: AI-Generated Podcasts: The Future of Content Marketing? With Guest Ian Harris · Imperfect Marketing

• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, kendra Korman, and today I am joined by Ian Harris.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Ian has helped some of the largest companies on the planet define their product and technology strategy.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: He's built some amazing platforms along the way.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Having spent this time translating between tech and what real people talk about, he is here to help us unpack the meaning of technology change, especially around the areas of AI one of my favorite topics content creation another one of my favorite topics and the future of business.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Welcome, ian.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining me today.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Great to be here.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm super excited to be talking about AI, generation of podcasts and leveraging existing marketing material.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: The number one complaint that I get from people is I don't have time to do marketing right, I'm already doing this or I'm already doing that.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: I can't do any more, so why don't you talk to me about what you see the value of using podcasts for marketing?
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: This is a challenge we have at the moment for brands that want to get their message out there.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: You have a number of normal ways of getting to your customers.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Typically, you're well, what are you doing?
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: You're doing social media.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Okay, so you've got to do some social media these days.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: But the challenge with social media is that the more you get into it, the more you realize that you don't really control who you're actually talking to at any given time.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: You spend all this time creating this beautiful content.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: You put your heart and soul into it, and then you have to pay extra to reach certain people at certain times, and even then you don't really have control over what's around your content or how it's being perceived, or even really you know.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: Aside from a few few likes and things like that, it's really difficult to know what the kind of response is to it.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: So, but you still, you still want to have a social media presence.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Okay, so you've got a social media presence for your brand.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: What else you can do?
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: Well, you could do, and you could do, an e-newsletter.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: That's a great idea.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: So now at least you have a direct connection to your audience.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: They've subscribed.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: They've got some genuine interest in your brand or your message or your industry.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: So great, Now you're talking to them one-on-one and you can extend your message.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: You can have lots of different sections in your newsletter.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: You can put it out every day.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: If you want to do with what's happening in the industry, what's going on in that particular niche, okay, that's great.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: And because it's the internet and email, you can have voting or responses or you can get some sort of contact back from them to know what's going on.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: So that's a step in the right direction.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: But I don't know about you, but, kendra, I find it very difficult to be reading newsletters while I'm driving my car.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: I don't know, it seems to be not cool these days.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: I don't know why.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: So how are you going to reach people in a connected way that allows you to get in their ear?
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: Wait, hang on a sec.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: How about podcasts?
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: Okay, so podcasts are a great way of getting into people's heads, and they're a really beautiful way, because, as humans, I'm still surprised by podcasts.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: Even after all this time, after all these years of podcasts being around, they're still growing.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: There were 400 million people that listened to podcasts last year.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: Fantastic, so you've got a great audience.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: They tend to listen to some large portion of podcasts that they're into, so it's not like you've got them for 30 seconds or even a flash of a scroll up of a social media, even a newsletter.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: It's very easy to skim the content, so you're not really kind of getting attention on things you care about.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: But with a piece of audio, a piece of well-crafted, nice-sounding audio, people will sit there and happily listen.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: While they're commuting, they're in the car, they're on the train, they're following the washing, whatever they're doing, they can be taking in something that interests you, and if your brand or your industry is something that interests people, podcasting is a great way of getting in touch with them.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: Okay, that's great.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: Now so let's decide.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: Kendra, we're going to start this little business or this big business and we want to start a podcast.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: What do we do now?
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: Okay, well, I guess we need some microphones and some recording stuff and some audio editing things.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: Something like that Sounds good.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: You can find lots of tutorials in the internet.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: We actually at Pulse Podcast.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: We love encouraging people to get into podcasts, but what we find is that the challenge for podcasts, the affecting of them, is that you need to be relentless, and you know as well as anyone, that getting podcasts out is a task that needs to be done regularly.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: You need to be there continuously, and so new episodes, new content, new ideas, new audio.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: And so now we've committed to a podcast in our organization Great.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: So we're going to record a podcast.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: The first one's great and exciting and interesting and everyone's into it, and they're editing the content and they're giving opinions about what we should be talking about and who we should be talking with.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: And then we edit it and we choose all the music.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: We put some backgrounds Very exciting, very interesting, good fun.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: The first one or two podcasts great.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: And then the third one comes along and, yep, you've still got to do another podcast.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: And the fourth one, and you've got to keep going, and that's why the majority of podcasts never make it past 12 episodes.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: 12 is the kind of magic number, it seems, and most people kind of give up at that point, which is really sad, because the people that are interested in that industry or the thing that you're talking about, the particular niche that matters to you or your brand or your company, there's people out there that want to hear about it, that are interested in it, that are engaged in it.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: So okay.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: So what else can we do that are interested in it, that are engaged in it, so okay.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: So what else can we do?
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: So we've been producing podcasts for a long time and the challenge for our podcasts is that eventually you kind of you just kind of run out of steam and for a smaller organization or even bigger organizations, it actually takes a lot of time and energy and effort to put out a podcast.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know this every time you put out a podcast, you've got to research your guests or your content.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: If you're scripting your content, which is great for brand marketing, then you've got to actually write the content.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: Then you've got to actually get someone to approve it and edit it and then make sure it sounds good.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: Then you've got someone to record it.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: And if you're not a professional, you just want to have someone chatting, like me, fine.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: But if you want a professional voiceover artist, then you've got to hire someone to talk through it and record it.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: And you still got to edit the whole thing, which means that you've got to use an audio editing program to chop and edit things out and take all my sentences that don't make sense out and splice other things in, which is great, but it takes time.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: So what we found is that for most 30-minute podcasts, it can take between four to eight hours of time to actually get this thing out, and that's a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of money.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: Essentially, that is being put into something that maybe it only has a few listeners, maybe it has a few dozen listeners, a few hundred listeners, a few thousand listeners, and it's really hard to get that return on investment for that amount of effort for those number of listeners.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: Now, where we got to with what we're working on at Pulse Podcasts is that now with AI, we can start to create some amazing podcasts that actually take some of that effort out of that heavy lifting out of podcast creation.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: And so, whilst we still think that creating podcasts, essentially by hand, hand crafting them, is a beautiful way of reaching your audience, you can get a lot of that value.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: And we're talking about imperfect marketing.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: We're all doing our best to do the best marketing we can.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: How can we get most of that value Maybe not perfect, but maybe kind of most of that value, 80% of that value with 5%, 10% of the cost?
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: Would that be possible now with AI?
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: Well, that's what we've been experimenting with.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: So one of the things we like to do is to take a company or an organization's newsletter.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: Let's say they put out a newsletter once a week, right?
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: So you've already spent all this time crafting all this content, you've done all the content, you've done all the research, you've done all the writing, you've got the content ready and you're ready to hit go on your on your newsletter.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: What we can do now is take that newsletter and turn that into a podcast script.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: Okay, so we can use AI to do that, and we've we've experimented with lots of different engines and lots of different prompts and lots of different revisions to actually turn that into something interesting.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Because what you probably find is that the way we speak is very different to the way we actually write.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: As we write things, we use a very different tone, a very different message when we speak, we speak very differently, and so we need a script that is appropriate for a spoken word.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Okay, great, now we have a script and now, finally, we have some AI engines that allow us to turn text into voice that actually sound really decent, really great.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: It's a really great step, and that's the last part that we've been missing for a long time.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: We've been pretty good with actually creating the podcast scripts, and even doing that by hand is not too bad.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: But the actual voice generation side has been really out of reach up until now.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: Side has been really out of reach up until now and if you've listened to text-to-voice engines up until even about six months ago, they sounded kind of robotic and it's really funny how our intonation kind of goes up and down during a sentence and it's different from sentence to sentence.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: So we don't like to repeat the way we say things, even between sentences, and so even if you had a beautifully recorded voice and said the same thing in the same intonation one after another, it sounds uncanny.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: But now we've got some engines that actually sound very natural, okay, good.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: So now we've got a way of making the content, we've got a way of making these voices.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: Okay, if we can string that together and then automate that process, then we can go from having a newsletter to putting out a podcast Wait without any humans involved at all.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: Fantastic, okay, this is great.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: So that's what we've been experimenting with with Pulse Podcasts and it's been a fun little journey, sort of taking organizations on this experimentation of trying a new way of reaching their audience, first of all, with podcasts, and second, with the idea that you really can get something that sounds entirely actually quite credible Not perfect Not perfect, but humans aren't perfect anyway.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: So you know we all make mistakes, but AI engineers do make different types of mistakes but a really good value piece of content that you can get out without actually putting more energy and time and costs into your production of content, and so that's what I'm really excited to tell people about that.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: Now, with these ai engines, there really is some great things you can experiment with.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: You can get some great value, and being able to reach audiences in a new way with podcasts, I think, is a great way of testing how your audience responds to your brand and your industry and your niche and what that means to them.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: So I think it's a very interesting time to be alive in the world of AI, for sure, kendra.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I love AI and I love podcasts.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: This is really me.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: This is not an AI-generated version of me.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: And I'm pretty sure that that's really Ian.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Not an AI-generated version of him, okay, but I will.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: So I love AI.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Ai saves me a ton of time on my podcast production.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: My first podcast made it, I think, seven episodes before I threw in the towel.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: This one is going to be episode 200.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Let's see, I'm making it a lot longer 238.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Because we're recording in advance here.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: So you know, pretty, I almost fell before I got to episode 50 because I was tired of finding guests, and I will.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: You know, there are days where I'm like I have to do what love my podcast.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: I love podcasts.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: I love what I'm able to do with the content.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: It really having these conversations with you really like excites me, and things like that.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: So there's a lot of opportunity in podcasting and a lot of energy, but, yeah, I mean some days you're just like.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: You know I'm done, so I definitely get that.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: The one thing, though, that I do want to pick up, that I really liked when you were talking about what you're experimenting with, is that you're taking inputs like their newsletter, that they crafted, the work that they did.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: I think one of the really important things here is this is not AI making a podcast.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: This is AI creating and repurposing content that was created by that person, that company, whatever it happens to be.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, it's going to be blah right, it's just going to be like the same thing as everybody else's stuff.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: That input that you're crafting, that you're already creating, is just being repurposed in a different format, and I think that that's really important.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: I don't want anybody listening thinking that they can just go into chat, gpt or cloudai and have the right prompts and, you know, get the right scripts, without giving the right inputs you have to give that differentiating input and I think and again I'm a huge have to give that differentiating input and I think, and again I'm a huge AI saves me three plus hours a week or I shouldn't say week per episode, so six hours a week on my podcast alone, because I don't.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: You know, I'm bulk recording.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: This is the fifth recording I'm doing today in advance for these episodes and like that's a lot of recording, I'm not going to remember when I go to edit it in.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: You know, two to three weeks, what we even talked about, like I have to read.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: I would have to re-listen to it.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: Well, thanks to AI, I don't have to re-listen to it.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: I can just hit.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: I can just take a look at the transcript and have AI give me a summary and then infuse more of my personality into the show notes and the social media posts and everything else that goes with it.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: But it really does help and again, I think the key is starting with that content that you've already created.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: Exactly right, already created, exactly right.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: I think that's the key point that what AI is really great at is taking something that exists and changing the form.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: If you can do that with AI, then you're using it for the way it's.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: It's just very good at that transformation it's not very good at it's perfectly fine at making stuff up, but it's very bland.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: It's very what's.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: What it's much better at is having some great content to start with and saying, okay, now you've got a newsletter, now you've got this web content, you've got this blog.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: How can we turn that into a script again?
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: We're talking about how we speak differently and getting the message across and and having a kind of story arc that runs through it.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: It's great at that kind of thing.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: So if you can use it in the way it's works really well at, then you get a much, much, much better result.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: And we've experimented with all these different things.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: We've tried generating an entire podcast from scratch and you're absolutely right, you do generate words, but are they engaging?
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: Does it have a story to it?
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: It just doesn't have that sense of I don't know.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: I'm going to say humanity, but there's something about it that lacks that kind of creative spark, whereas if you already have the creation done, if you already put that time and your heart and soul into making that content already, then just transforming it is something that seems to be able to do and it kind of retains that essence of what it is.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: That was in that original content Great.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: So now you've got that core message, that core feeling that's captured in the content that you've bothered to create and you've merely turned it into another form.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: And now, with the ability to actually be able to voice that in a way that actually sounds natural, now you've got something that actually is very, very, very, very plausible, very, very listenable and quite engaging and actually can be quite funny.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: We've done some experimentation.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: We make a little podcast that comes out every morning in Sydney.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: We're in Sydney, australia, and we grab the weather, the transport, what's going on on the roads and what's going on on the trains, and we string together a little three-minute kind of radio podcast and we've infused that with a character.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: We've sort of built this character up that's.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: That's a comedic and funny and and kind of has a bit of a laugh and it's surprising.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: It actually captures that essence of that original content really well and it comes out with actually some surprising stuff.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: That's quite funny, it's quite engaging, um, and so that kind of has taught us that you can take, uh, some, some essence, some feeling, some sort of sense of that original content, transform it to something else and still get people to feel like they're engaging with a brand, with humans, with something that resonates with them when they listen to it.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: And that's what we find is that people will really genuinely listen longer when they're engaged in the content.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: It's not just about stringing sentences together, because AI can string sentences together, but there has to be some sort of sense of connectivity, of story, of sense of that original content coming through.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Again, we cannot emphasize enough to you guys listening do not just use it to create content.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Like again, it can repurpose content, it can do an ugly first draft, it can help you brainstorm, but do not make your content a commodity.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: You know it needs to have that personality, that brand voice, the stories, the expertise, the experiences.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: It has to reflect who you are and what you do, and that's, I think, really important and more important than I think a lot of people realize when they're phoning in the use of AI and just having it do their job for them.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: It's not there yet.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: You know, it really needs those quality inputs and that's where people that are doing the work are differentiating themselves right now, are differentiating themselves right now.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: So, speaking of AI generated podcasts, have you guys found any any issues or pushback on the content or the way it's going, or if any of the directories are pushing back on it?
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: No, not at all.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: It's.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: It's been accepted on all the directories all the way across the board.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: That really hasn't been the challenge for us.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: It's more.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: The learnings for us has been in terms of taking text that we write and turning it into speech is actually really hard.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: The generation of the actual podcast scripts is pretty good now, but we're still experimenting and working on transforming text into speech, because the way we say things, even if it's written down, is actually quite different, and so numbers, for example, are often a problem.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: We say $1 million, we say $999,000.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: We say $1.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: And the way we do plurals and things, it's not actually written out.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: So you've got to kind of understand the whole context of all that as well and numbers and percentages.
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: So we were doing some financial, some financial podcasts, and that taught us a lot about how you say numbers is not actually how it's written down, and so we had to teach it all those rules about interpreting, interpreting numbers and things like that and the other.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: The other challenge for us in australia we, uh, like most, most countries, we like to hear our own accents when we, when we listen, and so our challenge has been in finding good australian accents, to to speak, because a lot of the engines come out of america and a lot of the engines are, in fact, have american voices, which is great, uh, except when you uh, when you want to get rich local listeners, you really need a.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: You really need actually a canadian accent or a british accent or a British accent or a New Zealand accent.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: And so a lot of our work has actually been in trying to find accents that sound great, and often we want to do podcasts that have several different types of voices in it, so a man, a male and a female voice, for example.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: But it's really funny, some voices sound good together and some don't, and the thing is, when you've got two people in the room, they will kind of adjust how they speak to each other.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: They kind of hear each other speak and adjust how they sound.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: Ai, of course, doesn't do this.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: So you need to find the right voices, that kind of mix and match.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: You might have a really deep voice, a male voice, but a really high female voice, and they sound kind of odd together.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: So you kind of need something a bit more kind of a round and more rounded sort of female voice.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: So that kind of combination of voices as well, has been an interesting experiment.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: But again, as humans we are very imperfect in our speech, and part of that has been to introduce some of those imperfections in speech as well, because when we say things, you know we take pauses.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: You can hear me thinking as I'm stopping and starting my sentences.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: When using AI, you can just blather on, no problems, no stopping.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: So introducing pauses and things into the actual speech as well to make it feel like it's just taking a breath, taking a moment, taking a thoughtful kind of what does this mean?
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: And then I start talking that makes it sound much more natural when we're listening to it, and so that aspect of adding that sort of naturalness into speech has really helped as well.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: And now we're at the point where we've done enough research, enough of these rules, that we can take a script and we can voice it, and most of the times it sounds okay.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: We're still finding occasional things, but it's now much more natural than it was when we started the first bunch of podcasts we were doing.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: I think if we listened back now, I think we'd be horrified about how terrible these voices were.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: It sounds okay, but it's like oh geez, humans would not say things like that that's not just AI.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: That's not just AI.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know any podcaster that would go back to their beginning and say I was rocking it out the gate for number one.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: It takes a lot of practice, doesn't it?
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: It does.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: It definitely does so, all right.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: So you're talking about how we write and sound different and a little bit of the accents.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about the word choice.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: I know that, oh gosh, I was working with my writing coach and I think I wrote something like it's like that.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: It was like a cat in a room of rocking chairs and she had no idea what I was talking about and I'm like, well, yeah, because it's all worried that we're going to rock on to its tail, and she's like I've never heard that before and I'm like I've heard that a lot, it must be an American thing, and so because she's from Australia and so it was very interesting in terms of there's that like little things that we just don't even realize, those little nuances that make sense or don't make sense.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: I think like the spelling of certain words in the transcript and things like that.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: I think enroll um was one.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: In the us we spell it with two l's and I think you guys spell enroll with one that's right so we keep using.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: You spelled it wrong.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: She's like no you're doing it wrong.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, okay yeah, so how are you?
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: dealing with the differences in, I'll say is it colloquialisms, Is that what the right word is for it?
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: I think so.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's another aspect.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: We have to teach it the way we say phrases and the way we say things, the meaning of these things, because AI is trained on so much content, so much global content.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: It really does understand all the different nuances between those things.
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: But we do have to teach it the particular audience that it's trying to reach.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: If you're reaching an Australian audience, then Australian sayings are okay, but it doesn't make much sense when you translate that to America or other countries and I've lived in a few places and so I'm personally very aware of it, because I've heard some local phrase when living in London and I've moved somewhere else use the same phrase and everyone's looking at me like what are you talking about?
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: So I'm very conscious of how we speak and the phrases used and so, applying that as well, it's a very good point that you really do need to also adjust for your particular audience.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: We rarely are we really trying to reach a global audience.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: It would be nice, but generally speaking, you know we're trying to reach an audience that is in a particular area.
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: They like things a particular way, they feel heard when they're spoken to in a certain way.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: So it's incredibly effective to be able to use that kind of local wording, local accent, to reach audiences in their particular area for sure.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, and it's definitely a challenge.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: I give you guys a lot of credit for what you're doing.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: I moved around a lot growing up and when I was in the third grade I moved to Texas and the teacher kept telling people to put things up, put it up, put it up, put it up.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, oh my gosh, like I, I had lived in Chicago and New York at that point and so this was my first time, you know, in the South and I don't even know if Texas qualifies as the South, but of the United States but I had no idea what she meant and I was so scared she was going to tell me to put something up because I had no idea what she meant and I was so scared she was going to tell me to put something up because I had no idea what I'm supposed to do.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: And I'm like third grade, right, it means put it away for anybody that doesn't know that.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: But it was.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's just, it's very interesting.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: So I give you guys a lot of credit.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: You know, I have a list of words that I that I load into AI, that I tell it not to use.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: I load, or list of words that I say please use, especially when dealing with my brand and my brand voice, and I'm getting more and more specific in my prompts so that I get a better and better output.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: And so I and that's just in writing, not to mention, you know, in in stories, using colloquialisms and everything else.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: I do a lot of that in editing, so I give you guys a lot of credit for for what you're doing Now.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: Is this allowing for podcasting to become more cost effective for smaller businesses?
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's the key aspect of all this If you had the time and the money and the energy and the effort to put into having a handcrafted podcast out every week, then please, absolutely that is the right answer.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: And for brands that care about it very deeply, we work with them to set them up so they are running a podcast every week.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: They have all the expertise, they have all the people, they have all the time, they have all the money to do that.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: That is a fantastic thing.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: But what we really wanted to try and reach with AI, with brands, companies, people that just don't have that kind of budget or that time to be able to do that amount of effort into getting a podcast out, and so if we can take that and reduce it to, you know, five or 10% of that cost and time to deliver a podcast, then it's not about reducing costs for a larger brand.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: It's about taking something that is valuable but is now actually cost effective for a smaller company, for a smaller brand, to be able to reach or do lots of, lots of different little experiments on and do that at cost that would be completely prohibitive.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: Even even a year ago it just would not be possible.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: But now we can.
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: We can experiment with something that's five or ten percent of the cost of making a podcast in its entirety.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: But now, now you can go okay, I can reach my few hundred people that matter to me, my few thousand people that matter to me, and I can do that on a regular basis.
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: I can make sure it's out, I can get that relentlessness of the podcast being delivered all the time, and now I can experiment with that new medium of reaching people in that way and I think that's the key aspect of what we're trying to do is not just reduce costs of delivering a great podcast.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: It's just not possible to.
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: You just can't reduce something that's so beautifully handcrafted and do it with less money.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: But you can produce a very good quality, almost perfect result for considerably less money and experiment with something that you just wouldn't have the time and energy to do in another way.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Yep, and some days I question whether or not I've got the time and energy to do this.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: No, but it's good, and relentless is my favorite word when referring to podcasting.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: Yes, you've got to be relentless and keep going.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: And sometimes it does feel like a little bit of a battle.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: So thank you so much, Ian.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: This is really cool to hear about what you guys are working on and just listening to it and all the challenges and opportunities that you guys are creating.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: I think that's really impressive stuff.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: So before I let you go and before we wrap up, I have one question that I ask all my guests, and that is this show is called Imperfect Marketing, because marketing is anything but a perfect science.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned?
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: You know, I think I think, in terms of actually marketing what we're doing, we have experimented with a whole bunch of different things, and what we've found is that the most effective thing for us is talking to people and actually getting on podcasts and talking about what we're doing in podcasts.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: Because you're in that space about podcasts and, kendra, we're super excited to get on your podcast, because this is like this is the ultimate podcast for us.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: Marketing, imperfect marketing and podcasts the combination is just the perfect one, so we are, in fact, delighted to be here.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: In our marketing, we found that the normal ways of reaching people about podcasts don't seem to work very well for us.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: We've failed dismally at things like Google ads and even social media ads, because it's such a niche thing, it's such a very specific thing that people that are in marketing, that are thinking about podcasts, that are at that moment of time of experimenting with this new medium, finding them at that moment is really hard, and so that's for us.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: The big lesson in terms of trying to reach people is we've had to experiment with different things to try and find the right way of reaching people, and that's why we're excited about being on podcasts like Kendra's, where, if you're listening to this, you're interested in marketing.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: You know it's difficult, you know it's hard, you know that there's no magic or science to it.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: It's experimentation and it's relentlessness and it's trying lots of different things and it's knowing the right people and the right timing and all that stuff coming together.
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: So somehow it seems to work sometimes and for us, that kind of journey of marketing as well has been a really great learning experience for us and we found our thing now, which is great.
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: That's why we love talking about what we're doing.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: But that imperfection of marketing, I think, resonates very, very well with us as we try and find our way of getting our message out as well.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: That's great.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: Thanks for the compliments.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Appreciate it.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: But, yeah, no, I think when you're reaching people that find value in podcasts, odds are that they listen to podcasts.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: That's why I think one of the most effective ways to advertise a podcast is as an ad on another podcast.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: So because you don't have to tell people how to download it and you don't have to have them download the podcast app.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: They're already there, right.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: They already know what they're doing and they already understand the value.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: So very cool, very, very insightful for how you guys were able to understand and locate your audiences to where they're at.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: So very exciting.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: I think guesting on podcasts is a great way to grow your business and your audience.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: So, again, thank you so much for spending time with me today.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: We will have Ian's information in the show notes, also a way to connect with Pulse Podcasts and see a little bit more with what they're doing.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: And I'm going to hit Ian up to say, hey, if you can get me a link to the weather, one that you do as an example, that'd be really helpful too, and we'll stick that in the show notes too.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: So again, thank you all so much for tuning in.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Hopefully you learned something today and got to see a little bit of a peek into what might be our future with AI.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: And if you did learn something, it would really help us out if you would rate and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: Thanks again, and then until next time.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: Have a great rest of your day.