Roger is CEO of JAR Podcast Solutions — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
James Cridland: JAR Audio has rebranded to JAR Podcast Solutions. Why the rebrand?
Roger Nairn: Part of it is the fact that podcasting is evolving. Audio and video, we do all of that when it comes to the clients that we work with.
The larger, more strategic answer for us as an agency, is because the industry is evolving so much that we’re getting asked a lot more difficult questions from the clients we work with, specifically CMOs and brand leaders. They all want to know: “What is this podcast going to do for my brand?” The great thing is that we’ve always had an answer for that. We’ve always been able to create great podcasts that solve different business challenges and meet business goals. So, the “podcast solution” side is something that we’ve always been doing - solving business challenges with podcasts.
JC: You have a new system as part of this - the launch of the JAR system, which luckily stands for Job, Audience and Result. Tell me about what that system is and how it works.
RN: We look at everything through the lens of this JAR system.
Everything starts with a job - what is the job that this podcast needs to be doing for you? It used to be that podcasts were a nice-to-have, something that brands were testing out and playing with. Now they’re seeing the value in a podcast playing a key role in their marketing ecosystem. It can’t just sit there and be a fun little toy to play with, it actually has to have an ROI behind it - what does it need to do? To engage with a specific audience? To increase your thought leadership? To educate an audience on something? That’s the job that this podcast needs to do.
So then, there’s the audience. Who is it that this podcast is meant for? But, more specifically, how are they engaging with content these days? What other podcasts do they like? What are the other things that we need to know about them in order to truly create something that’s of high value to them?
And finally, there’s the result. What can we point to to say this podcast was successful? How can we measure that? We work with a bunch of incredible partners that help us measure, with all the different analytics and everything that we have access to these days as an industry. We’re building custom stacks depending on the clients we’re working with. And how is this podcast impacting the brand specifically? And that’s something we’re always looking at.
James Cridland: How are you measuring some of those results? What are you going back to a client with, to say this was a successful thing?
RN: It’s a typical marketer answer - but it depends. Everything is going to be unique and different for a client.
A lot of times we’re measuring brand lift. So we’re working with people like Signal Hill Insights who are helping us with brand lift studies. There’s the quantitative side, which is downloads and the engagement rate. But then also, on the qualitative side, looking at reviews and comments, and we’re running surveys and we’re doing everything that we need to be doing in order to get as much input from that audience and feedback from that audience, and filtering it back into the project.
But we are using a ton of different stacks to measure conversions: different things to connect the actual podcast to the brand itself. They’re measuring different impacts the brand is having on trust and authority, via different surveys that we’re doing. And we’re also able to measure things like loyalty and more likelihood to purchase from, or more likelihood to engage.
We once worked with American Express on a podcast called Build it Braver, and with Signal Hill Insights we developed a survey. One of the questions we really wanted to know is: how is listening to this podcast going to increase the consideration for a small business owner in subscribing to an American Express business card. We were able to measure a certain percentage that the podcast had an impact on, and we’re able to quantify that. In some cases, we’re looking at things like awareness - did you know about this brand before listening to the podcast? And show does that impact the brand after you’ve listened? So it really depends again. Marketer’s answer.
JC: When I was writing radio commercials, we used to talk to direct clients and talk to them about the purchasing ladder. My job as an advertising copywriter was to get that brand one rung higher in that ladder. Ideally more than one. I guess that’s one part of brand lift.
RN: To flip that, we think about a purchase funnel. It starts with top level awareness - understanding what the brand is. Podcasting plays a good role in that. But then, there’s the engagement part of the funnel. How long can we keep their attention and capture their interest and keep it? A good podcast is sticky, it keeps a listener not only as a subscriber, but it gets them more into the ecosystem of the brand itself. So a great podcast is great for that mid-funnel which would be considered consideration. You often see thought-leadership in that tier.
Then there’s the conversion itself, the actual purchase, and we can talk about this for days. Some podcasts are are better than others when it comes to conversion. I think a full branded show is not what I would consider to be a good investment. If you’re looking for quick conversion, podcast advertising is - but not an actual podcast itself. You’ve got to build up an audience, you have to layer in a lot of advertising, frankly, and talking about yourself and the brand - and that’s not what a listener wants to experience when they listen to a branded show.
JC: Do you think companies are taking branded podcasts seriously or are they sometimes still seen as a bit of CEO indulgence?
RN: It’s a mix. It depends on the brand, and how seriously they take the relationship they have with their audience. You see a lot of brands that are very focused on themselves, talking about all the great things that they’re doing. That’s not what content marketing is about.
On the flip side, you see brands that are doing an incredible job of providing a ton of different content that just happens to be coming from a brand - and they’re the ones that take the podcast a lot more seriously: frankly, I think they just have a ton more respect for their audience, respecting their time, understanding them more, and having a deeper connection with them.
We do still see a lot of the brand leaders saying “my CEO wants a podcast”. And some CEOs can be great. Some CEOs are founders and they’ve built this company and nobody knows the ins and outs of a certain category better than them. But then sometimes they’re just frankly difficult to work with because they’re so busy, and to actually produce a podcast with a CEO as a host, without losing your cadence, is incredibly challenging.
JC: Roger, thank you for joining us.
RN: Thanks so much James. Appreciate it. Thanks for everything you do.