Neil founded Fresh Air Productions in London in 2003 — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
Neil Cowling: Fresh Air is a specialist podcast company for brands. We are an agency for brands, both on the production side of podcasting and also on the media side. Our first client was the National Trust in the UK, and then we built from there into doing lots of corporate work for brands like Barclays or Hewlett-Packard Enterprise - so a really wide range of companies that we now make podcasts for.
Sam Sethi: Are branded podcasts something that people are now understanding, or is it an education process that you’re still having to do?
Neil Cowling: For a long time, I had to start every pitch by explaining what a podcast was. Thankfully, I don’t have to do that any more!
It’s a much more recognized medium, of course, but it’s still a very misunderstood medium. We went through huge growth during COVID: a lot of brands who wanted to get into podcasts because podcasts were cool, and because they also had a video budget that they couldn’t spend, and therefore they decided to make a podcast. But there were also a lot of vanity projects during that time. So there were just a lot of projects where we made a podcast, and we enjoyed it and the brand loved it, but we couldn’t really justify at the end why they’d done it. The ROI was difficult to quantify.
So we’re now helping brands to understand, okay, so you want to make a podcast, but what is that going to achieve? How are we going to measure it? How are we going to prove that it’s successful? And how are we going to do it in a way that genuinely entertains people and informs people, but also treads the tightrope between doing that and getting a piece of communication out there? So that’s been quite an education for everybody involved. And the brands that we have worked with who’ve done it long term have done it really brilliantly and really built up their understanding of why podcasting works.
I still find that every time we speak to a new brand, we have to start from that low base - there’s still a huge education piece to be done on how this medium works and why a brand should get involved.
Sam Sethi: How are you measuring success? Is it brand awareness? Is it number of downloads?
Neil Cowling: Most brands that we work with, they’re not looking to create something that is number one in the podcast charts. They’re looking to create something that speaks to a niche audience and gives them something really useful. The show that we make for (UK bank) Barclays is aimed entirely at mortgage brokers. So it’s presented by Phil Spencer, who’s quite famous in the UK in the property sector. The topic is tightly controlled and tightly targeted at a specific group of people. So that audience are really valuable to Barclays. And therefore, yes, it’s downloads, but they also do brand studies to understand how that group of people are regarding Barclays as opposed to how they they used to regard them. Listen-through rates are obviously really important.
We use the measure that Dan Misener at Bumper came up with a while ago, a “cost per minute” of attention. That always starts to help brands to understand that that investment is all about attention and the amount of time that that really valuable audience is spending with the brand. It’s quite rare that we’re purely looking at downloads.
Sam Sethi: You’ve also gone into original content production recently. Why?
Neil Cowling: It was to broaden the range of types of work that we do. It’s not a huge diversion away from the branded work - my worry with originals has always been that it’s a distraction from the core of what we do. Our first is called That’s Just Wild with Steve Backshaw, who’s a brilliant and heroic wildlife presenter. We saw there was a gap there, and it’s also sort of flexing different types of creative muscles from our point of view. We think there are models for funding original content that probably haven’t been fully explored yet. And so at the moment, this is a traditional original where we’re building it up from scratch and we’re funding it through advertising and sponsorship. But the beauty of what we do, of course, is we have conversations with brands and platforms a lot. So we are able to hopefully see sources of advertising and sponsorship that others wouldn’t spot.
Sam Sethi: You talk about other means of funding it. What are they?
Neil Cowling: I’m interested in looking towards brands to see how they can fund original work in the future. We’ve not gone down the commissioning model very much. We do work, for instance, for platforms such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and TripAdvisor and BBC StoryWorks. And so that’s one route for us - to make work for publishers who work for brands. But I also think there are models for funding podcasts and original work that haven’t even been touched on yet.
If you look at TV, there are barter models, for instance, where shows are made and media is exchanged and sold at a profit. And those are ways that shows get funded through intermediaries. And yes, they’re more complicated than the traditional podcast models, but they’re really unexplored. I really think there are ways of working with talent, for instance, that haven’t been explored. When we’re talking to really big talent, we need to find ways of getting brands involved from the off so that those shows can be funded through a combination of sponsorship and live events and other routes that get them the funding and the money that they need right from the start to get involved, rather than having to wait six months before it pays for itself - clearly top-level talent aren’t in it for that.
There will be models that emerge in the next eighteen months that I think hopefully sort of fill the gap left by Wondery and move us beyond just thinking that there are only two routes to making originals: ad-funded or commissioned. There’s something in the middle there that we’re all trying to work out. And it’s sort of fun to work it out! It definitely involves brands.
Sam Sethi: Thanks a lot.
Neil Cowling: Pleasure.