The Sonic Truth

NPR – National Public Radio is famous for shows like Fresh Air with Terry Gross, How I Built This and Planet Money. Launching new shows used to be simple. The NPR name and distribution mechanism alone meant a million eager, regular listeners. But with new podcast content coming out by the minute, NPR and other platforms like it face new challenges. Maintaining and increasing their listenership requires new thinking. From creating ‘listening habits’ through short-form content to bolstering the expert, longer-form journalism that NPR is known for, all is revealed in this episode of The Sonic Truth. Scott Simonelli sits down with Bryan Moffett, COO, National Public Media, and Gina Garrubbo, CEO of NPM at Advertising Week New York for this insider’s chat.

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Audio gets a bad deal when it comes to adding disclaimers at the end of ads. Why? Other media channels are cleverly able to hide it, but audio, radio specifically, is forced to place it at the end. Many people claim disclaimers ruin radio ads, but no one has ever looked at what the data says…until now.

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The more time spent thinking about functional sounds, the more you realise just how important they are to the products and objects you use every single day. We were joined by Dexter Garcia from Audio Branding agency Audio UX to put his knowledge to the test and learn just how important earcons or functional sounds really are to brands everywhere.

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Scott Simonelli was joined by Megaphone’s Ken Lagana to unpack best practices around host-read versus announcer read podcast advertising. The commonly-accepted narrative is well-known at this point: host-reads, by nature, should be more effective. But what does the data say? Listen below, or read the article here.

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Audioboom is a podcast network that hosts, distributes, and monetizes
podcasts through a number of different platforms. Scott was joined by two
of its executives, Oli Walters and Mike Newman to talk about the industry,
and some of the reasons why people and brands are really listening.

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Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia was an early adopter of using video as a way for brands to message their wares on social. In early 2018 he opened VaynerSmart as he looked to make a name for the media businesses in a new, emerging category: voice. The agency has since built Amazon Alexa skills for brands like Diageo, GE and JP Morgan Chase. Its VP, Patrick Givens joined Scott Simonelli to talk about building audio experiences for brands.

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Listen to an audio ad — on the radio, a digital audio platform — wherever. The voiceover you hear is, almost 75% of the time, spoken by a man. Whether that reality is based on some long-held misconception that the male voice carries more gravitas or is more convincing — or it’s simply “just the way things have always been done”– that’s the reality. Scott Simonelli is joined by Suzy Schulz, SVP, Cumulus Media/ Westwood One & Stella Voutsina, CTO, MDC Media Partners to discuss.

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Scott Simonelli is joined by Smirnoff brand leads — Luke Atkinson and Neil Shah — live from Advertising Week New York. The three spoke about how the alcohol brand has utilised music in some of its latest campaigns.

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