Dan and Giles have worked on the AMP Accords for Oxford Road — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
Dan Granger is CEO of Oxford Road; Giles Martin is SVP of Strategy and Measurement at Oxford Road.
Dan Granger: I’ve given my whole career to podcasting. It’s got so much potential and possibility, but I think we’re holding ourselves back and doing something that I don’t think anybody that pursues any commercial interest should ever be doing - which is: frustrating our customers. We do not make it easy to do business in this field.
It’s time that we take ourselves seriously and we create some legitimate standards that make it a little bit easier for all of us to do our jobs. There are a lot of people that are approaching this in a lot of different ways and are interested in this. But I thought we had an opportunity to maybe bring people together in a new way, and try to see if we could take a run at this thing.
James Cridland: The document that you released this week, let’s start with the definition of a podcast. Why was the definition of a podcast important, Dan?
DG: There’s a few reasons. I think we needed something that reflects the present day definition, but really it matters in a commercial sense. It doesn’t matter if you’re a consumer. A podcast is whatever you want it to be. I don’t have a dog in that fight, and I don’t think any of us do.
For those of us that are in the business, not having a definition has real financial consequences, because what happens is buying agencies or brands that buy the space, they end up with a channel that gets stuck in a no man’s land. Nobody’s quite sure who owns it. Is it audio’s problem, radio’s problem, social’s problem? I see people talking about podcasting and discovering it sits with their offline division.
The consequence of that is we actually will see some advertisers pulling away from sponsoring content, because it’s just too much work to figure out how to get into it and whose problem it is. I think that if we’re going to be in a multi-billion dollar industry and expect it to grow, and we want to decide what the total revenue of that industry is, and we want investment in infrastructure and private equity and venture capital and things that we need to help fuel everything that we do to continue… at some point, we’re gonna have to figure out what the hell is a podcast and maybe have some agreement.
JC: There is a long form definition which uses lots of fancy words, but there’s a shorthand version which I really like. “If it works with your eyes closed, it’s a podcast.” That to me is super simple and super easy.
DG: You’ve been describing it, I think, in a very parallel way, which is something for your ears when your eyes are busy. I think what we’re all trying to get at is what’s the standard, what’s the burden of proof to say this qualifies as a podcast? I think having a shorthand gets the spirit of what we’re trying to do a little further down the field. And then when we really truly need something technical, we now have that definition.
JC: Next, we have more definitions, definitions of how people are consuming podcasts, and more technical stuff about audience exposure. Giles, there is a definition in here of a play, and that’s a relatively simple definition, isn’t it?
Giles Martin: Yes, it is. It was not quite as simple as it might seem getting to this simple definition. Um, and we did have a lot of conversations about different variations of on this that had more qualifiers. Um, and as you might imagine, you know, the more qualifiers you put in, the more that sort of opens up possibilities for different parties having sort of different points of view or different interests on it. Um, and so it’s perhaps inevitable that we landed on something as simple as this. But yes, we landed on a play occurs when a user consumes at least 30 consecutive seconds of a podcast, whether audio or video.
I mean, one thing, for example, that comes to mind immediately is you know, there’s no parameter there for a window with which that will qualify. So, like might that be within 24 hours, might that be within a session? These are the types of things that sort of we discussed. And in the end, I think personally I was a little disappointed, but it was just not easy to get to a sort of definitive answer on this. Perhaps when this makes its way into the market and to the IAB, that might be something that gets further clarified or codified. But for now, at least that’s a good starting point.
It was really excellent, I think, for us who were working on the task force to see Spotify announced relatively recently that they were going to adopt this 30-second standard for their plays. James, you had observed that YouTube obviously have a view standard, which - I’m not sure if it is sort of explicit anywhere - but I think it’s fairly generally understood to be 30 seconds. With Spotify and YouTube both being in that ballpark, that’s very meaningful for the industry and encouraging in the sense that already parts of the Accord are getting some some meaningful traction.
JC: To ask the stupid question, what is wrong with a download?
GM: I think it was always somewhat problematic for those of us that were paying attention to these things. For most of podcasting’s life cycle, it’s not really mattered that much because I think we all just accepted that the download was the currency. But I think as video has come in, it’s just a different type of consumption, content, distribution, and it’s very different from a download. With this new video era where all these metrics are reporting something quite different from a download, that’s where I think the issue has really been forced for the industry.
DG: James, you’ve seen it since the beginning. Who’s been funding the industry? 15 years ago, it was Amazon affiliate links that Adam Carolla or whoever would say, make sure you use the link, go to my website, click the banner, and go buy stuff on Amazon. And we’ll get a share of that. And that was how they funded the shows a lot of times.
And then we start getting into the advertising world 2010, 11, 12, around the time we started coming into the picture, you could actually start to monetize. But who was buying that? It was all direct-to-consumer, kind of e-commerce, disruptive brands that cared about one thing, which was ad performance. What they didn’t care about was a verifiable impression.
This whole business was built for a decade on the backs of companies that were looking at performance outcomes. But the industry has gotten to a place now where it’s time for the big brands to come in. You just simply cannot win the trust and credibility of global blue chip companies if your only measurement is “we’ll count your promo codes and you’ll see how good it is”. They need something that’s more reliable than that. As the marketplace matures and the and the appetite for revenue matures, we have to get more sophisticated in our instrumentation.
JC: Some people would argue that radio has had virtually no comparable data for many years, but it seems to have done okay - it’s still making much more money than podcasting is. So why should podcasting be any different?
DG: I don’t know that radio is really the model that we want to follow! I love radio. I spent the first decade of my career in radio. We did leave for a reason, and I think that everyone in in the space would acknowledge it’s an iceberg that is melting slowly, and it is likely not the future that anybody sees as being a rich opportunity. I think the growth numbers that we’ve experienced as an industry are gonna be hard to keep up with as we go into the future, and it’s gonna require some reinvention.
There’s more of this conversation in the Podnews Weekly Review podcast.