Inside Chris’s Head

The warrantee on my PT Cruiser is apparently about to expire. I know this because Chrysler has called me both on my cell phone and on my home phone. A machine generated voice explained to me that this was a “courtesy” call and that my warrantee would expire soon. I appreciate them informing me that it was a “courtesy” call because I might easily have mistaken it for something else when they called me the 5th or 6th time.

I believe the definition of courtesy that they are applying to this call would be:

consideration, cooperation, and generosity in providing something

My problem is that I keep thinking that they mean courteous behavior:

marked by respect for and consideration of others

Frankly a machine calling me at its convenience never ever passes for courteous behavior. Have we so lost touch with the meaning of courteous? How about a little honesty. Why don’t they at least call me and say:

“Mr Christensen, we are seriously concerned that you may not pay us more money. We are so concerned that we though we would call you call you again and again and again and again until you just can’t stand the notion of future calls and relent. With any luck we have called you while you were in the shower, or on the toilet or perhaps in the throws of passion. If you don’t pay us money soon we will start calling all your relatives to apply collective pressure.”

Popularity: 30% [?]

If you have not heard of BzzAgent it is a company that gets paid by companies to create word of mouth advertising or buzz. I have been a BzzAgent for some time now but had not participated in any campaigns. But recently they had a campaign advertising a new burger (the Smokehouse Bacon Burger) at Chili’s restaurants. Well, I happen to like bacon and burgers and Chili’s is where I took my family for my birthday dinner (the tradition is that the person whose birthday it is gets to choose the restaurant). So this seemed like the time for me to activate from my sleeper agent role and create some buzz.

BzzAgent sent me a kit which included a brochure about the new burgers and 4 coupons to try a burger for free. My wife and I each used one of the coupons and then gave two of the coupons away. The idea then is that I tell people about my experience. BzzAgent is very clear that the agents should tell the truth which left a good taste in my mouth (and hey so did that burger if the truth is to be told).

I then need to report to BzzAgent on at least 3 times that I told some one about the new Smokehouse Bacon Burger (subtle right?). As part of the report I need to attest that:

YES, every person I Bzzed in this BzzReport knows that I’m an Agent and that I received a way to experience the product or service, even if it’s not specifically mentioned in the report itself.

It was an interesting experience. I still find the business model strange for BzzAgent but I found the experience to be more positive that I expected. I understand now why one of my co-workers raves about being a BzzAgent. Besides, I really did enjoy the thick tasty (marinated?) bacon on the Smokehouse Bacon Burger.

Popularity: 29% [?]

I have been trying to figure out what the video setup of the living room of the future is (or at least of my future) and a new discovery on ABC.com makes me wonder if it is time to ditch my television completely.

But let’s back up a bit first. My current setup did not used to seem quite so dated. I have a big screen tube style TV (the largest tube from back when my company went public) connected to the DirecTV box with (their brain dead version of) TiVo. Flat screen Tvs have now come down in price to the point that I am willing to buy one, but if I get an HD TV then I need to get a new DirecTV and this is where things get complicated.

• I love the TiVo but because I have the DirecTV (brain dead) version of TiVo I can’t copy shows off to put on my laptop or iPod to use when I workout. I could buy the expensive HD version but it still does not have all the TV functionality I want. And frankly DirecTV is fine but I am more loyal to the TiVo than to them.
• I could switch to cable (ComCast) and that would even allow me to change my DSL line to cable. Given how my DSL line with AT&T is less reliable than my old DSL line and also screws up with our phone line (the old line was a separate line) that is a plus. But ComCast’s own TiVo box is still not in my area and it sounds like they also have screwed up a good solution.
• I could switch to cable and get a new TiVo box that would work with cable cards to connect to the cable network. This would be a more acceptable solution but also is the most costly per month.

All of those options are more expensive than doing nothing and not appealing enough that I have made the switch yet.

Getting back to last night, I was catching up on Lost because I had only watched the first episode of the season and my TiVo was getting full. I watched a couple episodes on my TV and I watched a couple of episodes on ABC.com. I have previously used ABC.com and find it more than adequate for the task. I can’t fast forward through the commercials but they only give me two and a half minutes or so for a show instead of 20 minutes on broadcast. That seems to me to be a fare trade. I would not be surprised if this was also more valuable for them as I can recall (unaided brand recognition) that I was watching ads for Toyotas Tacoma (do they know that they named a car after the city in the U.S. with the highest suicide rates?) and for Starwood resorts.

What I did not realize until last night is that Lost has two different versions of Lost on ABC.com. About a week after they release a show they release an enhanced version of the show which is annotated like a show from Popup Video. As the show goes along they explain that the color light Desmond is seeing is like the color of the light from back in season 2 when the hatch blew up. Sure it was distracting, but it was also cool and it was something that ABC could do because this show was being distributed on the Internet. Having a second version of the show that some people will love and some will hate would just split their audience on network TV so they would never do it. It would use up another precious time slot on the schedule (of course they could air it late it night when TiVo could find it but the cost they would have to pay the studio and the fact that they don’t control the affiliates would get in the way). On the Internet that show is additive for them.

So what if my next “Television” is a computer. Are we there yet? I don’t think I can get all of the shows I watch through any one legal method and legal is a requirement for me. Shows I watch on BBC America don’t seem to be on the web yet. I could buy shows on iTunes although the crossover for when the shows are more expensive than a $50 cable bill would be 25 shows and I think I watch more than that.

My todo list:

• Are all my shows on line somewhere
• Is my cable (satellite) bill really only $50? (Always marry an smart woman with an MBA if you can so you don’t have to pay the bills.)

Is MLB Baseball the only thing keeping me attached to broadcast television?

Popularity: 33% [?]

Michael Geoghegan (who hosts the Official Disney podcast among other things) is stirring up the podcasting community again (like the good friend who comes over to your house for an intervention) with an article titled “Podcasting - It’s a Community Not an Industry“.

I agree that “this is the year that podcast advertising takes off” seems like the slogan every year. At each of the last 3 Podcast Expos there was a meetup group about monetizing podcasting. The first year the group was just Paul Colligan and I and it has grown over the last two years. My feelings back in 2005 was that the whole ad selling process was harder than people realized based on my experience during the dot com boom at an advertising supported company. My guess at the time, as I recall, was that it would take 5 years for podcast advertising to take off. I signed with PodShow in 2006 in part because I did not see anyone else out there that I thought would do a better job and I thought they would help me grow my audience. A lot of people thought a potential 3 year contract was way too long, but I was pretty sure that I would be done with the contract before things really took off in podcast advertising anyway.

Part of the problem is that the whole advertising industry needs to change and that is only slowly happening. The money going into television is not proportional with the value that advertisers are getting from that media. The agencies actually know this now and a number of companies know this as well now. GM just announced that half of their budget next year ($3B) will go to the Internet. I would love to say that all of that will be for podcasting but that would be naive. I think that GM’s decisions is the beginning of a good trend but also of a period of instability and upheaval within the advertising industry.

The other unrealistic expectation that Michael did not touch upon was that advertising will pay based on what influence do you have and who do you influence. I have known people who have quit their day job to podcast when they have 50 listeners. That might be a good plan if you have a podcast heard by 50 billionaires.

When I was selling advertising on my own i was getting a $50 CPM for advertising on the Amateur Traveler podcast. But people spend more money online on travel than any thing else and my audience is not just composed of travelers but they are the people their friends ask for advise about travel (one of my listeners in Istanbul told the story her friends keep asking how she knows so much about different destinations) so many podcasts should not expect rates at that level. So best case, even if I was able to sell out advertising every week, traffic of 80,000 downloads a month would pay me $4000 a month or $48000 a year. My wife and two kids are all in private college so that would not be quit your day job numbers for me. And as Michael points out, podcast are generally not selling out ad inventory every week.

So is podcasting done? I don’t think so. Is it taking off slower than most people expected? Certainly. Will some companies go through hard times? I think so (see the rumor that PodShow is doing layoffs). But I also see some positive signs.

• The audience for podcasting is growing. Dollars will eventually follow the eyes and ears.
• Well known brands are starting to get more regular advertising by big brands, at least in my sector of podcasting which is travel. If advertising comes to podcasting on a regular basis we should expect it to come first to podcasts from old media. I expect that advertisers will start with the people in their rolodex until their is more demand than supply and then they will branch out to the larger podcasts and then they will look at aggregation of smaller podcasts. This is what I expected in 2005 and what I still expect in 2008. Of course, I also still expect that 2010 is the year podcast advertising will come together.

My plan is continues to continue to grown my audience and keep podcasting… for now at least. My plan is not to quit my day job… for now at least.

Popularity: 31% [?]

It occurs to me upon listening to a number of podcasts (I subscribe to around 100 podcasts) that many podcasters dabble with failure but never really fully embrace it. It seems like even the worst podcast has something that someone somewhere would value. But what, I wondered, if we combined the worst part of the worst podcasts. What would such a podcast sound like? Why would anyone even think like this? That I cannot answer but I can picture some practical applications if one really could devise the Titanic of podcasting (although even the Titanic had survivors). Say you wanted to quick podcasting and you did not want to ever have anyone ask you to return to it. This is the podcast that you would put out as your last episode that would cause the thought of you podfading to cause people to send you flowers and chocolates. So without further excuses, here is the recipe, in my opinion, for the world’s worst podcast.

Key Goals

• Practical - Don’t be
• Entertaining - Forget it
• Content - Avoid it

Sound Quality

Sure you could use a bad microphone, a noisy conference call service and the tried and true method of mumbling, but we these may just produce emails about your how your sound quality stinks. I used to record interviews on the same track as my guest and channel Dark Vader as I did heavy breathing over my guest talking and my show still grew. So to really fail we need to push the envelope here.

• Uneven Sound Levels - One particularly practical suggestion is to have an interview show with the two channels at vastly different sound levels. I don’t mean that one of the guests is hard to hear, I mean that even the dogs in the neighborhood are not sure that sound is coming from their iPods. Then you want that speaker to have long and presumably interesting monologs so that the user is tempted to turn the volume up, way up, “this one’s got eleven” up. Then when you have lulled them into thinking that this is the appropriate volume setting slam them with the loudest talker. Some shows (think Today in Podcasting) have actually reached sound differentials that can cause your ears to bleed. This is our goal.
• Clipping - A bad microphone is unimaginative, You can achieve much more annoying sound by simply setting your sound levels high enough that every unexpected laugh, sneeze or bilabial fricative (and we are going to want to do a lot of this) will clip in painful eye crossing ways.
• Drop Out - Don’t just make the sound quality bad. Make it bad at the worst possible time. “The secret to a six figure income is mumble pop squeak pop mumble”. “Wow Bob that’s incredibly simple. Anyone could do that!”

Pre-roll Ad

Clearly if we want to cause people to unsubscribe in droves we need to start with a preroll ad. We need to start with a long pre-roll ad. Ideally this ad needs to be totally inappropriate and offensive to the audience. We are looking for something here that makes the PodShow “Suck Less” campaign (one minute long) to become a fond memory. Think about the audience for your show. Annoying is easy but we are looking for rage or disgust. Have a Rock and Roll show? Consider a fund raising ad for the “George W. Bush Presidential Library”. Have a serious business podcast? Sure you could go with a Viagra Ad but people have been desensitized to such fare. Find words the repel like “bowel”, “sphincter” and “welfare state”.

Schedule

Of course you could skip a show or two and then spend the first 5-10 minutes of the next show apologizing or explaining just why your life is so busy, but who hasn’t done that. Try releasing two shows within an hour and then talk about the first show a lot in the second show since many users have iTunes and have it set to only download the latest show… then skip 4 weeks.

Intro

Your intro is very important. You have the listeners attention. Now is the time you want to lose it. Don’t be in any particular hurry to finish the intro. I know a show that extended the intro of their show, the part that was pretty much the same from show to show, to fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes before they got to any real content. Can you do fifteen minutes? Tell them your email address, your blog address, what software you use to run your podcast, what cereal you had for breakfast and why, throw in an ad for “Go to My PC”. Don’t be entertaining. If you can’t help being entertaining then try the same jokes week after week. Script this portion of the show and try and not say this with any sort of personality.

Show Length

If your show is too short then you are not adding enough pain. Do people listen to your show at 30 minutes? Double it. Are this still listening at an hour? Double it. Don’t add more content, just add more time. Say things. Say them over again. Repeat them a third time. Insult your listener’s intelligence. When you are absolutely positively sure that even their toddler riding in the back seat of the mini van must understand your point by now, then dumb it down and say it again. Then repeat it again next week. Assume every email compaining about your show length is a complaint that you are not explaining sufficiently and explain it again. Don’t put in chapters in an iTunes enhanced version. That would save people’s time. Don’t just waste people’s time, waste lots of it.

Humor

Humor should be avoided at all costs. If you find this impossible, only use inside jokes that you never explain, preferably that defy definition. Some people fail to be truly awful because they try and make the humor offensive. This is a trap you should avoid. Never assume that there is a joke too low to stoop for. Someone out there likes that kind of humor. Some try and make the humor in their show impenetrable. That is also a trap. Someone will understand your joke about Attaturk or Micronesia. So again your best bet here is avoid humor or just beat the same shtick again and again.

Edit

Never never edit your show. Distain it. Insist that podcasts are not the same as main stream media. Shuffle your notes, take a bathroom break, stutter, Editing a typical half hour interview and you could easily remove 5 minutes of useless content, don’t.

Show Ending

If you have done your job correctly it won’t matter how you end your show. You could give away a free car to the first person who sends you an email and still keep the car.

Popularity: 44% [?]