Doug Downs: Strategic Storytelling for Brands

Tara Sands  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now,

Matt Cundill  0:12  
Doug downs. Now, there's a name I have not heard in a long, long time. I actually met him at pod summit yy Z in Calgary back in September, and I stared at his badge, and then I remembered We both used to work in Edmonton back in the 90s. Him on TV, me on the radio. Him in the morning, me in the afternoon. Anyhow, turns out he's working with podcasters now in Calgary, launching shows and using PR strategies to do. So yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about his radio career, his TV career, and then he's going to share some really excellent methods to building audience and sustaining that audience. Stand by for the tips and now Doug downs joins me from Calgary. Tell me about your podcast stories and

Doug Downs  1:00  
strategies for public relations and marketing is a podcast that's deliberately aimed at the public relations professional marketing is a massive genre, and you got like Jenna Kutcher in that but I think a subset of marketing is PR, which is less salesy and more helping organizations manage their brand and messaging. And there's, I watch presidential speeches, and all I do is study the messaging and how it was, where they're trying to place things. So that's what the podcast is about. We look at, you know, presidential speeches, but we'll look at behavioral economics, we'll look at the science of ums and ahs. That's, actually, it's one of my favorite episodes, because ums and ahs are valuable in your podcast. So if you're cutting them out, don't do that. There's science showing that people remember more and understand more when someone has more ums and ahs in their presentation. Isn't that amazing, other than complete and utter disfluency? So yeah, comes out every Tuesday, and 20 minutes long, it's as long as a sandwich and a coffee. You've got a lot of great takes.

Matt Cundill  2:07  
We're going to get into some of those great podcast takes that you've documented over the last number of years. But I want to go right back to the beginning and ask you about how you ever got started in radio.

Doug Downs  2:20  
So this goes way back for me, when I was three years old. Matt, the family got it. So that was 1969 the family got a new tape recorder, and it was one of the so old that is one of those tape recorders where you had to push record and play at the same time, and it had a little tiny stick mic. And I was so enamored with this tape recorder that I would run up and down the apartment hallway. We live in a small apartment in parkwoods village Lane in Scarborough where I grew up. I'd run up and down the hallway in the apartment building, and I would record my voice, and usually use the hockey play by play about Dave key on shoots he scores or something for the leafs. And then I would listen back to it, and I'd be in hindsight, I realized I was doing this at the time. In hindsight, I was listening to, how am I presenting myself? And it was this, this phenomenal new toy. And the shine of audio just never went away, even as I got older and started to gradually understand, you know, the mystique of audio is that theater of the mind thing. When you tell a story using only audio, you're forcing people to fill in the blanks for what the visuals might look like. They're actually a more active participant than if they're watching a video and we're all visually driven, but they start filling in the blanks themselves, so more parts of their brain are active, and that's just cognitive neuroscience. So that's what got me going into radio. And I went to Humber College and got lucky, got hired in Ajax, which is right near where I lived in East side of Scarborough, and started working in radio, and just fell in love with it. That never left me.

Matt Cundill  3:57  
What was the radio station? C,

Doug Downs  4:00  
H, O, O, Chou. It was a country music station I got hired to do was weekends and then quickly overnights. You know, now they have, like, the overnight is done from Toronto, probably, or it's just, it's AI for the most part, right? But at the time, you had overnight DJs, and I was, I was in less at 12 to six overnights. I was 19 years old, I'd go work at CHI, Chi's, where I waited on tables.

Matt Cundill  4:25  
There's a throwback,

Doug Downs  4:27  
yeah, exactly, exactly, and occasionally, where I can tell the story now, occasionally, where at the end of my shift, I sat with a few co workers and maybe had a

Matt Cundill  4:39  
refreshing beverage,

Doug Downs  4:41  
yeah, and then had someone drop me off at the station. I was always very careful, and I'd be on the air from 12 to six overnight, and a great guy named Joe Conrad from Montreal. Joe Conrad was the one who hired me. He's the singer who sang, clap your hands. Clap your hands. He was the program director. At C, H, O and Ajax, and he believed in this, this little guy, and he gave me my first start in radio.

Matt Cundill  5:07  
Can you believe that they used to leave us in charge of the radio station for like, the whole night? Like, first of all, I mean, I was like, 18 or 19, and they left me alone in the building just to play the music and talk, and I'm like, wild.

Doug Downs  5:22  
It was a bit like letting your kids go play in the street, come home and the street lights are on. In hindsight, that was the mentality, right? There's that All right, go mess it up. Don't screw it up, kid.

Matt Cundill  5:33  
And I know this story because we might have shared it over a beer or two, but when you're working all nights, you're at the mercy of anybody at the radio station who wants to pull a prank?

Doug Downs  5:42  
Oh, man, I had an awesome gag played on me country music station. And I do like country music, but I really I was a top 40 kind of guy. I was 19, and I just started, and we'd get calls and in country music, so inevitably, the callers were there, talking a little. I need to play some lefty frill. All right, fella, I'll get that on for you. And hung up the phone and I just forgot about it. And next song I put on phone lights up again. This is like two o'clock in the morning, and he says, I told you to play some lefty frill. Try to put it on. I said, Okay, settle down. I'll get to your song. All right, we'll get to it, and I can make a point of not playing it, just because this guy was being a you know what? And next song comes on. Sure enough, Bing right away. Phone lights up and he's mad. He said, I told you what you were going to play, and didn't play it. And then he starts threatening me. And this at this station, at this time, there was a clear window behind me, and then another clear window that led out to a wooded area in Ajax. I know AJAX is massively developed since 1986 or 87 when this happened, but at the time, there were wooded areas, and that's what the back of the station led to. And so he starts saying, I'm a gun fellow, and I'm at the back of the station, beyond the pane glass, and I'm pointing it at your head right now, I'm still cocky as hell, right? Because I'm 19, and I go to take a sip of my coffee and holding up to my lips. And he says, You go ahead drink that coffee. Be the last thing you ever do to all over myself this warm, hot coffee I'm in most of it was coffee. I don't know if all of it was coffee. I'm in major panic. Turns out it's the creative director, and he this is a gag that he did for all the newbies. He would come in to initiate the newbie. He would call from within the station. I didn't know he's he was in the station. He would call from within the station on a line that did not light up on my phone, and that was his he had he was sort of peering around a corner, looking at me. And I never noticed best gag ever played on me in radio, and I spent the rest of the the morning and greeted the morning host when he showed up to do his shift with completely soiled pants, and it just you're the new guy I take.

Matt Cundill  8:15  
Oh man, tell me about going to Kirkland Lake, because we all have one or maybe two or three that you know you're gonna go there, you're gonna work, but you may never return, and I

Doug Downs  8:26  
haven't, I feel a little guilty for that. So from Ajax, I got hired in St Thomas, just south of London, and I felt guilty about this, but within a month, I got hired by a bigger Station in London, cksl, which I think now is Q 103, I'm not sure, but at the time, it was 1410, cksl, and I got hired there, and I started, I mean, you know what? Radio pays as much as I loved radio, I had someone at the local Shaw cable station approach me about doing some stuff on Shaw as a volunteer. Yeah, let's do it. And he was a big golf nut, so he asked me to host a weekly golf show that he was putting together. And so I would go out to the golf course and host. Anyway, I had a TV reel by that point, and I decided I wanted to get into TV. So I started sending my stuff to CTV Toronto, and the CTV stick in Timmins saw it and said, Hey, we want to open a new bureau in Kirkland Lake. Your coverage area will be two hours in every direction. You're going to go down to temagami, you're going to go cover all the hailebury, New lisgard area. You're going to go to Ville Marie the Abbot, to be timiskaming, and even valdor in Quebec. So the two plus hours, and not quite all the way, I think, up to porcupine, close to porcupine, not all the way up the Timmins. So I had a massive coverage area, and I got hired in Kirkland lake at the time. It had like 1000 people in it. And this was 1991 so we were economically in recession, and it was just devastated. The Macassar mine wasn't doing very well. And there was a fatality at the Macassar mine, the gold mine, while I was there, middle of the night, and I got a call. I befriended an editor at the Toronto Star. I was kind of trying to work my way back to Toronto, and they called me middle of the night, asked if I'd go do some stories from there. And of course, I started calling my news director. I didn't have a cell phone, but trying to get a hold of my news director to tell him, I'm doing this. I went out and I got shots and a very, very, very brief, brutal interview with the wife of the miner that had been killed, not well done. I'm not proud of that moment. I think I basically asked her, How do you feel, which, in hindsight, like I hate that.

Matt Cundill  10:40  
Yeah, that's also a bad question. When you ask somebody at the Super Bowl as well after the you just

Doug Downs  10:44  
won it, how do you feel? How do you feel? Much different answer, but yeah, so, so that worked really well. And I spent a year in Kirkland Lake, and, yeah, life in the northern town. I think that song came out, like right around that time. Oh, 8686 okay, because I remember playing that song a lot, and kid from Toronto, up in Kirkland Lake, and, oh, when I first got this is, this is funny. When I first got there, I noticed all the vehicles had electrical plugs sticking out from under the hood. I thought, Oh, this is how advanced is. They've all got electric cars. This is phenomenal. What I didn't realize was, you know, those were rad heaters, right? Block heaters, because you had to plug your vehicle in overnight or the dang thing wouldn't stop. I had no clue about that. As a kid from Toronto, I had no clue that you plugged vehicles in overnight like that, just to keep them warm.

Matt Cundill  11:38  
I learned that about Winnipeg. My favorite was seeing people drive down the street with the plug, you know, trailing from the car.

Doug Downs  11:45  
Oh, they do. Oh yeah, they do. That was awesome. And like, then I went to Sudbury for three years, which that was cool.

Matt Cundill  11:53  
I just did the move across country, and I took a look at that route, which goes campus, casing through Timmins, I think, near Timmins, and then all the

Doug Downs  12:00  
way down to Val door and kapooska, saying,

Matt Cundill  12:03  
yeah, yeah. I thought about taking it, and then I thought, I don't know that I want to be driving with the moose and everything else out at this time of year. So, I mean, I stayed on the southern route, you know, around the Great Lakes, but I see that highway 11 goes all the way, you know, up north campus casing. And you know, where a lot of people will tree, plant and stuff like that.

Doug Downs  12:23  
They do. Did you take the US side between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste Marie or the Canadian side?

Matt Cundill  12:29  
No, I stayed on the Canadian side.

Doug Downs  12:32  
So that's the shield. Man. That is gorgeous.

Matt Cundill  12:35  
Yeah, I've forgotten how shockingly gorgeous it is. Is it Thunder Bay to Sault Ste Marie?

Doug Downs  12:41  
That's what I mentally fight that. So that's going back to 94 for me. I haven't done it since then, but I just remember going, Oh my God, why haven't I seen this in a magazine?

Matt Cundill  12:53  
If you can ride that in a nice car, it is a great trip. And on a sunny day, it's, it's unbelievable. And I'm always, you know, the number of Canadians who've never driven that route, there's a lot. If you get a chance to do it, do it, it's a long

Doug Downs  13:08  
drive Ontario is massive. By the way. We're still like, we're everything we're talking about is Timmins, Thunder Bay, south, right? There's north. I've been up to palanique, the Indian community up there, First Nations community up there, Attawapiskat as well, which, you know, has been in the news. And I'm surprised it wasn't in the news sooner. It's a at least it was a tough, tough community. But I spent some time in, like, the real Northern Ontario. Ontario is incredibly big. I've heard it would be the eighth biggest country by land mass, if it was a country. I don't know if that's fact, but that's what I've heard. How'd you get to Edmonton? I decided in 94 I was trying, I was in Sudbury, I was trying so hard to get down to Toronto, and I just wasn't getting any pickup from CTV or or global or CBC, and I just kind of it wasn't going to happen. And I was in, was I 28 and I I'm right in my important TV years, I had to get to a major market. I'm ambitious, so I drove across Canada. I did interview in Winnipeg, and almost got hired in Winnipeg. It just, just some odds and ends fell apart. Was that

Matt Cundill  14:16  
global, or CKY? Or, I

Doug Downs  14:19  
don't think it was CKY. I might have been the global station, but I, honest to God, don't remember. But it was such minor, minor stuff wasn't, wasn't pay. It was something else, and we just couldn't. And she moved on really fast to somebody else, almost to teach me a lesson. And, okay, cool. And one of the stations, I went to Calgary, and I went to Edmonton. I didn't go as far as as Vancouver. One of the stations I interviewed at was ITV, which I don't know if you remember, but ITV was this marvelous satellite setup. I watched it from Kirkman lake. It was by satellite. It was available everywhere. They were. So forward thinking. Oh.

Matt Cundill  15:00  
So if you were on the right cable system, you know, there was a chance that that thing would would appear, you know, in your cable package. And so here's people in the Maritimes or in Ontario watching this TV station from Edmonton, seeing young talent,

Doug Downs  15:15  
Gord Steinke and Darren dietitian, yeah.

Matt Cundill  15:19  
Lorraine Mansbridge, what a lineup. Yes.

Doug Downs  15:22  
Lorraine, yeah. And I got interviewed there by a great guy named Mark Jan van, and he liked my stuff. He liked the interview. I could tell it went positive, but drove back home, taking the shield route. That's the last time I saw the shield. Well, no, because I saw it back when after I got hired, and about eight months had passed, so nothing, and I'm, I'm recalibrating, what am I doing and all this stuff, and I went down to Pittsburgh with a buddy of mine, and just because you could rent a cell phone at the time, so this was 95 I rented a cell phone, and it could connect to my home phone, and it was this big, clumsy thing, but just because you could, I rented one while I was in Pittsburgh, and I'm sitting there like a big shot where we're at the pirates game. It's the Padres and the pirates. I'm a big Padres man, me and my buddy, my roommate, and I get a call on my cell phone. I could see it's from Edmonton. It's a 780, and I answered the phone, and it's Mark Jan Brem, asking if I'd come out and work for for ITV and need you here in two weeks. I think

Matt Cundill  16:25  
I can correct you historically. That would have been a 403, I don't think 780, came in for another few years after that.

Doug Downs  16:31  
Ah, damn it. Let's rewind the tape. Rewind the tape. And with our razor blades, let's, let's cut the tape and tape it back up. Yeah, it must have been a 403 that I answered.

Matt Cundill  16:44  
Well, I remember because they changed it to 780, and I'm like, Oh, how's this gonna work? I mean, it sort of, it sort of spoke to how Alberta was, was growing and expanding. I knew I was in the right place. And for those listening, I worked at the Baron Edmonton at the same time you were doing, I think your show was mornings on ITB, you were doing the morning show.

Doug Downs  17:03  
I was quickly put on mornings, yeah, and it was a three hour haul, so it was like, it was like an announcer shift, yeah.

Matt Cundill  17:10  
So tell me about working broadcast in Edmonton. You and I never ran into each other once. I don't think I was working in the other TV building by the way out on Stony Plain road.

Doug Downs  17:21  
Yes. Cfrn, yeah, yeah.

Matt Cundill  17:23  
And you were working mornings and I was working afternoon, so there's very little opportunity for us to

Doug Downs  17:29  
as a sleep in the afternoon. Man,

Matt Cundill  17:31  
yeah, there you go. Exactly,

Doug Downs  17:33  
yeah, sorry, you might have woken me up a few times.

Matt Cundill  17:36  
Yeah, probably Yeah.

Doug Downs  17:39  
I'd like the bear. I liked Marty, and I liked listening to the bear, and

Matt Cundill  17:43  
it's great station.

Doug Downs  17:45  
It was good. ITV was such a forward it was Mark. I mean, Tim spellless, he was a big part of that, too. But Mark was, Mark was really the guy that was forward thinking and aggressive in the right ways to say, Nope, we're bringing in this technology. We're doing this. We're willing to hire someone from out of city, out of province, because they think differently, or they've got what we want. He was willing to take the chances on things. Mark Gendron and he aggressive in the right ways and is thinking. Got a chance to know Stein a bit. But Stein is, you know, does kind of, in a nice way, keep to himself a bit. We got to know Perry silkowsky, who became a buddy Linda Steele, who she's like hardcore journalism, journalism, journalism, like she'll net. That's I admire that I admire Linda. We've stayed in touch, stayed friends. Sometimes she sees things through the left side of her glasses, and I see them through the right side of my glasses. But doesn't mean we see the world completely differently. She just has her perspective, and I have mine. So I don't always agree with her, I'm trying to say, but I sure respect the heck out of her. And then a bunch of the the videographers, like Dean towards it, who became like a lifelong friend, and George gilbo, it was incredible. Such a it was a gung ho young team that was behind cfrn in the ratings. Not many people knew that, because ITV looked so good. A lot of people thought that I and ITV was number one in the city proper, but cfrn was amazing once she got out into the more rural areas of Edmonton. So cfrn was number one and we were just the young, aggressive gung ho. Let's get it done. Team that wanted to become number one.

Matt Cundill  19:31  
Tell me about the pivot away from broadcasting. Was it a big risk? And were you, I guess, scared to leave it behind?

Doug Downs  19:39  
I should have been at the time, no, but Matt, looking back and I'll just, I'll just tell you the story quickly, and maybe can help outline why. Now I think I maybe should have been a bit more scared. I just by the time I was 3233 I just kind of reached this point in life. I'd gotten married, I knew Sherry and I wanted to have kids. Yes, and I was looking at my skill set you have like this microcosm of fame, especially when you're on TV, right? You get recognized the grocery store in my sweats, and you get recognized, which is cool. Now, I wish it would happen a little more often, but at the time, oh my God, it was like it really wore it does wear you down, because they people expect you to be on and the pay is okay, but my skill set and talking to people is really important. But that was my skill set, reading the prompter, talking to people, and doing a superficial layer of research. And I, you know, I'm sorry, journalists, now that I'm working in comms, it is, it's, it's a very top layer of research that gets done when you're when you're a journalist. And I decided, long before I made the move, I decided I had to, I had to make the move. I had to get into corporations. I applied at Edmonton police, got next to no response. I thought, I actually thought I'd be a prime candidate there, but I got no response there whatsoever. Plighted a few spots, and then there was a news conference I was at where it was the MLA John Hancock, I don't know if you remember him. That's his real name, by the way. And he was in the news for something not scandalous, but something kind of oops. You know, he was in the news for that, and he just so happened to be having a news conference about his whatever his ministry was trying to promote. And I went to cover that, and I went to interview him, and I'll never forget his handler handled me, grabbed my elbow, pulled me and said, just so you understand, this interview is about today's announcement, that's all. And I said, okay, and I proceeded to ask nothing about the announcement. And every single, every piece of my questioning was on this thing that he was in the news for, and she was Doom and mad, and he I could see he was trying his best to put on his best face. What I didn't know was someone from epcor, which in Montreal, it's like a smaller Hydro Quebec, but it is a big, big deal in Edmonton. Someone from the comms team at epcor overheard all of this, and she approached me afterward and said, Tell me about that. And I told her, Well, here's my thinking. And I've been a journalist for a long time, and epcor was heading into deregulation, and they knew this billing thing was going to blow up on them. They knew they were over the course of the next couple of years, they were going to be in the hot seat, and they knew it. And at the time, the model for that was to hire a PR person who could take the heat. That's changed. Now you put experts in front of it and teach them how to talk to the media, but at the time it was hire a media savvy person who could just take the heat, and that's how I was hired. I really didn't understand the job. I did not understand communications, even though I'd spent 15 years in broadcasting, I didn't know marketing. I took marketing later so I could start to piece it together. I went in pretty raw, and I got lucky that the interviews I did, I pulled them off, and I used that seven years at epcor. God bless epcor for having the patience with me. I used that seven years to really deepen my chops in public relations, stakeholder engagement and even marketing strategies. And eventually got hired by the province wide planner of the electrical system in Alberta, the Alberta electric system operator, just as they were heading into a big fiasco. But my role was much different. I actually led the whole comms campaign for it wasn't just media at the time.

Tara Sands  23:35  
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Matt Cundill  24:09  
But don't you think that being a broadcaster gives you a lot of superpowers that would be able to steer you through all that? Because I know, like any broadcaster, especially you doing live TV or I was doing live radio, it gives you the superpower to know how is this going to land, and unless you really screw it up, you know how it's going to land. And today, I am seeing some of the most amateur jobs by politicians who should know better than to say stuff, and they putting it online. And I'm like, I know you mean, well, but that's gonna land badly, and you're not gonna get reelected. And they're stepping in it every day. And it used to be that, all right, Matt and Jake will go to town with it on drive time, and then the next day they'll make the news on ITV, and it's splashed all over CFR, and there used to be sort of like this news cycle behind all this fumbling, but now you may. Make the mistake. It goes online, it goes viral. But people remember this stuff on their own, and it costs jobs. The President of the United States of America excluded from all this. But you know, at the local and provincial levels, we need better PR. We need better comms people here. Where are they?

Doug Downs  25:17  
Yeah, when you're superimposing African American faces on the bodies of cartoon apes. I think jobs should be at stake there, and not, not just the graphic designer, sure, maybe the graphic designer, but at the end of the day, it's the President that okayed that. So, yeah, I hope it does cost jobs at the midterms, and I hope it costs him his job in the end. He's He's rich, so he doesn't care, but horribly offensive and but don't you think

Matt Cundill  25:42  
social media has really been the problem, where people can just pick up the phone and start to do stuff and it's like, Oops, probably shouldn't have done that, or they're boring.

Doug Downs  25:52  
Which is worse? Yes, yeah. How do you tread the line? Yeah, it's democratized communication, and it's, it's neutered the effectiveness of traditional media for sure. It used to be well, so in the 90s, I can't say the news would break at 6pm I think the news broke in the newspaper that morning. I think the news cycle was in the mornings. By the afternoon, you wanted to know about any follow up to it, but by six o'clock, that's when you wanted to see it and maybe have a glimpse of understanding to the analysis end of the journalism cycle, the why did this happen? Where are we going? And then, over time, the experts would weigh in. Now, it breaks on social media. And doesn't just break on social media. This happened. It immediately breaks with a perspective on why. So Alex pretty gets shot in Minnesota by National Police, the ICE officers. And I don't just see the video, I immediately get interpretation from whatever side of the lens of glasses is showing me the video. We know one side of the lens is saying, this is horrendous. This is awful. This is murder. And the other side of the lens is saying, clearly, he's obstructing police and getting in the way. And this is police just defending themselves, right? So it's chaos that's out there, and the traditional media is not doing itself any help. When the BBC I'm no Trump fan at all, but when the BBC is cutting a speech that Trump gave to attach it to something else he said 50 minutes later in the speech, so that they can deliberately distort the message of the speech. Nobody trusts the media. Nobody anymore. When I look at the news. What's the source? Who is it? Well, I don't believe them. Let me go look for other stuff.

Matt Cundill  27:46  
How did you get into podcasting? What was your gateway podcast that lured you in

Doug Downs  27:51  
stories and strategies? The PR stuff was awesome. I worked corporate, sold my soul for 10 years at those two big utilities, made decent money. You know, you don't get happy at the paycheck. When you see the paycheck, you get ticked off of the taxes, and you find a way to put money in RSPs and and all that stuff, and then then you're saving a little bit. So I'd done my time, and I could hang a shingle, and I was a PR consultant for seven years, which was cool. Dabbled a little bit with ahs and even with n Max, did some projects for them during economic downturns where I knew the PR consultancy wasn't going to do well. So I got hired to do a couple of big projects and get me through and in, I think it was in 220, 20, when so many people started podcasts. I just, I think was 2020 or 2019 I just decided I'm launching my public relations Podcast. I'm well versed in this now. I sure know radio. I know what I'm doing when it comes to broadcasting. I know public relations. I want to do an interview, and I just decided to do it. But I kept working as a PR consultant. And then one day I'm looking at, I don't know what host feed you use, but I was using Buzzsprout, and I'm looking at my numbers on Buzzsprout on my computer screen, I'm thinking, why couldn't I have 20 of these? Like if I had people willing to pay me to record it, cut it, promote it, market it, and even coach them on broadcast, which, you know, you're right. Broadcasters do have a set of skills. And until you try to be a broadcaster or to host a show, it sounds like just a couple of guys shooting the you know what, but there is a skill set to it, and you just learn it by doing it, not by by reading about it. And I thought, why couldn't I do that? So I found a few people willing to take a chance on me, and just from that they had guests on their podcast. And occasionally the guest would say, Who podcast? Can I do that? And I would say, Well, yes, you can. We should talk, and you just do good work for people, and you give them more than they've paid for right? Always be available. People, and then they'll speak for you, and that's how we've grown. And when you and I got together in Calgary, it sounds like your growth has been kind of exactly the same way.

Matt Cundill  30:09  
Yeah, a lot of word of mouth. One of the reasons I want to have you here today, and it sort of dovetails into this question that I have, is like, why are PR people so good at marketing podcasts and making sure they're organized in order for them to have success with an audience. Are they good

Doug Downs  30:28  
at marketing their podcast? Do we want to go down that rabbit hole on how effectively podcasts are are marketed

Matt Cundill  30:35  
and grown? I think PR people know how to deliver a message. I think they know how to make it so that they find the audience for the podcast. When I say marketing, I don't mean to buy, you know, bus billboards and and, you know, have a screen at Times Square and buy a Super Bowl ad. I just mean finding the right audience.

Doug Downs  30:53  
Yeah, and that, you know what? That's it. If you're listening to this, what you're saying is, don't try to be all things to all people. You're not trying to be Joe Rogan, Brene Brown, any of those, not unless you already are, then great. But typically, you want to find your niche. And I've taken niche, and I now call it your premise. So when I think of vulnerability, I do think of Brene Brown. I think she almost owns the word. When I think of habits, I think of James. Clear. When people think of podcasting, the first name that comes to mind, I don't even have to say it. What name comes to your mind? Famous name comes Who is it? Who comes to mind?

Matt Cundill  31:31  
Joe Rogan comes first.

Doug Downs  31:33  
Yeah, there you go. That's it. So Joe Rogan's premise is podcasting, which Good for him. He's somehow cornered that word. So what is your premise? And it doesn't have to be a word, it can be a feeling, but that's part of target marketing, and I learned that early in my EP core time, because we got into these key messages. And I could explain deregulation and billing, I could explain it in two minutes, and you would blame the government for this horrible mess. But when I was speaking to stakeholders and doing media interviews, government was actually my main audience. I needed the MLAs to get off my company's back. I really wasn't concerned about this terrible but that individual customer from whom we made maybe $150 a year off of I wasn't over. I wanted their bill to be right, but I wasn't concerned about whether they were mad at me. I was concerned about whether the government was mad at us, because that could, that could really hurt us. So all of my messaging was designed to basically point out the good things the government had done and where industry, where we had two computer systems that couldn't talk to one another. That's target marketing, man. And so if you're building a podcast or anything that you're trying to sell, who is it? What is their pain? What is hurting them right now? In that case, the pain was the MLAs were getting calls from angry constituents. They needed those calls to stop I was talking to their constituents so that they would yell at me and not the MLA and all my messaging was designed that way.

Matt Cundill  33:09  
What's the value of video? And you've written about this, I'm going to put it in the show notes of this episode. But what is the value of video? When somebody comes and says, Doug, I want to do a podcast, and I want it up on YouTube, and I want to look sharp.

Doug Downs  33:24  
Yeah, go for it. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, right? Google's number one. They're both the same company, so your podcast will be found more readily on YouTube. And there's studies, the Canadian podcast listener study that Matt heard, puts together constantly identifies that most people listen to podcasts on YouTube, 100% correct. Except if the result was What app do people spend the most time listening to podcasts? Totally different question. The result would be apple. The second result would be Spotify. Then maybe the third result would be YouTube. So YouTube and putting together video is for discovery, and my suggestion to a new podcaster is don't jump into that part too heavily at the beginning, because at the end of the day, podcasting shouldn't be about how many downloads or even viewers did I get it's not about how many it's about how deeply, how much time did each one of them spend with you. And if they're listening to about 70% of your episode, that's when they're going to bring it up over dinner and say that Matt guy podcast that I listened to, what? So he had this guy on, and he was talking about Kirkland Lake. You lived in Kirkland Lake, right? That's when they start listening to your your episode at length, and that's audio. So use video for discovery. Don't overspend on fancy, fancy video. And I've got clients who right out of the gate. They want to sit in their living room. They want to have the fireplace in the background. They spend money on lapel mic. X, and they're trying to set up the shot, and they're so worried about looking at the camera that they forget that audio is the chief part of this, and video will come video is an augmentation to the audio.

Matt Cundill  35:13  
So metrics wise, Give the hack on how people can find consumption numbers.

Doug Downs  35:19  
Yeah, I find Apple's the best, but Spotify works too, and YouTube gives consumption as well. I'll start with Apple. The only study I've seen about consumption is from Jeremy

Matt Cundill  35:31  
ends, oh my goodness. Jeremy ends, he's amazing.

Doug Downs  35:35  
Jeremy did a study this a couple of years ago. He may have done other studies since, but I haven't seen the results. His study showed that larger podcasts seem to be averaging about 63% consumption as measured in Apple, and that smaller podcasts measure 67% so the target we use for clients is you want to hit 70% consumption, and it'll show right in Apple podcast Connect. That's the tool you use, and if your podcast is on Apple, you or somebody, at some point, used an Apple ID to connect to Apple podcast. Connect and make sure that it's connected, even if you did it through your host company like Buzzsprout or blueberry or whatever you're using. Ultimately, you did connect through Apple podcast, connect to get it up there. Work with the good folks at Apple to log into that, look at that total consumption rate. But then, and you can do this in Spotify too, go into the individual episode and look at the bar. Where did people drop off? So okay, you got 70% consumption, but did it all happen all at once? What did you do in that spot if you run ads in the middle of your podcast, I'll bet you, especially if you're a larger podcast, I bet you you got a little dip down during the ad. Yes, ads are very effective on podcasts. I'm not saying they're not. We lose 10% there you go, one in 10, at least, algorithmically or statistically, pushes skip something like that. Yeah. So it's actually, it's a very effective tool for ads and promo swaps, but, yeah, you're going to suffer that. Then in YouTube, YouTube will give you your your view time. What I find in YouTube if I publish a 30 minute episode on Apple Spotify and YouTube, my apple and Spotify consumption are pretty close, maybe a little shorter on Spotify. And I might, the way I figure that is because Spotify is the newer podcast listener. They don't have a long legacy habit with podcasts predominantly, whereas the apple podcast user is more they're not drinking rye, they're drinking scotch. You know, it's not brandy, it's cognac. They're a little more sophisticated. Those Those Apple listeners, and they listen for a longer period of time, and they might say they listen for 25 minutes to that 30 minute episode on YouTube. Man, if you can get an eight minute Listen, bravo. I know some people get 20. I got it cool. Well done. Appreciate it, because that those are killer, killer numbers. But for the most part, man, you're cracking. Well, most people are like, 30 seconds and then bail, right? But if you can crack two minutes, you're you're okay.

Matt Cundill  38:09  
That's a fantastic hack, by the way, one of my bigger ones, by the way, that I like people to have is to always have a trailer. You can make a trailer anytime you want. You can update your trailer all the time, but that stuff sits at the very top of apple and Spotify, and be sure to go into those same places. Label your trailer and make sure you have one

Doug Downs  38:29  
that trailer you produced for the decluttering podcast.

Matt Cundill  38:33  
Oh, the declutter queen

Doug Downs  38:35  
as a good one. It made it feel like Indiana Jones. I felt like there was a big rolling ball of clutter that was going to steam roll over me, and I had to get out of the cave. It was so well produced.

Matt Cundill  38:48  
Yeah, I will say I've had some misses in my day on this stuff. But again, if you don't get it right, you can keep working at it until you get one that

Doug Downs  38:54  
works right. Matt's your guy for trailers. I never that was the best trailer I've ever heard. Ah, thanks.

Matt Cundill  39:01  
Just me interrupting for a sec. If you do want to hear the trailer in its entirety, I'm going to put it at the end of the episode. I play it now, but we got a good thing going here, right? So let's keep going. It's also my wife's podcast.

Doug Downs  39:13  
Check out the podcast. You didn't have to mention that. I may

Matt Cundill  39:17  
not. I may cut that. I just want

Doug Downs  39:19  
to know how often she mentions you in the decluttering podcast.

Matt Cundill  39:22  
I've been mentioned in a few tick tocks. Check out my husband's messy bedside table. That's right, he's a Buffalo Bills fan.

Doug Downs  39:32  
Oh, God, we have that in common. Oh, no, that's good. Oh, it's painful.

Matt Cundill  39:39  
Well, we don't have the Toronto Maple Leafs in common, that's for sure.

Doug Downs  39:42  
No, I don't cheer for the leaves. Tell

Matt Cundill  39:45  
me a little bit about taking a break for the holidays, because this one comes up all the time with people. I'm going to take a break for Christmas. I'm going to shut down and take a few weeks off, because nobody is listening. And I think that's not true, right?

Doug Downs  39:59  
Well, so. First of all, podcasting is a haul. Man, I get it. It's a slog, and it's hard, hard work, and if you mentally need to take a break, okay, right? Just whenever you choose to take that break, don't choose Christmas or the holidays, because you think nobody's listening, because there's no such statistical evidence. They did a study one year and found fewer people listening. They did a study the next year and found just as many, if not more, people listening. What we do know is that the number of new episodes published, especially by the big guys, you know, the ones that steal all the listeners all the time, way fewer episodes are published. The Ocean might have just as many fish in it is just a lot less red. There might be more of a blue ocean there for you, I'd almost double down over the holidays, especially if you're an intermediate to smaller podcaster, double down man and see if you can scoop up some of those fish in your net. And there was a well known podcast agency founder, great guy, and I like him a lot, but I'm not going to say his name because, because I'm I'm disagreeing with him. And anyway, he published something on LinkedIn saying, Yep, studies show that listenership goes down. It's good time to take a break over the holidays. I don't know what studies he's got that I don't got, because there ain't no, there ain't no such conclusion that I can find.

Matt Cundill  41:21  
Well, the downloads might go down over the holiday season. However, here's the opportunity that's being missed. The opportunity that's being missed is that you've got a lot of new devices coming online because it's Christmas and people are trying out new stuff. There are lots of different habits. People have acquired free time, and if they are going to be listening, they're going to try something new. That's why you should be available, because you could be that new.

Doug Downs  41:47  
You could plus there's a lot of driving that takes place over the holidays. It's actually a lot of loan time right after Well, we do Christmas here, but whatever you celebrate, you know, with family, you don't want to be with family hour after hour after hour after hour. You kind of want your own space. We found across the board, all of our downloads went up way up in December, they softened for us a bit in January, almost across the board, which to me, means December rocked, and none of my clients took a break January. I think people got back into the swing and they were trying to catch up, and they just didn't have as much time to listen. But it'll, it'll correct in February. People will make up for for lost time. Yeah, even

Matt Cundill  42:31  
sooner than that, probably by the third week of January, they will have listened to all the episodes they might have, you know, missed earlier

Doug Downs  42:37  
if you got to take a break, if you're at your wit's end and you just got to take it then, you know, take the break. Just don't use the holidays as a well, no one's listening anyway, because it's just not true. There was one study that said that might be the case, and another study said, no way it's not. And by the same people, by the way, I can't, I can't remember.

Matt Cundill  42:56  
This is the podcast that releases an episode every December 25 so you know where we stand on this?

Doug Downs  43:02  
Exactly, exactly. No, I think do it through the holidays, because the big guys aren't publishing, and there's a golden opportunity

Matt Cundill  43:09  
for you. Who do you want to call you to become your next client?

Doug Downs  43:15  
Oh, what an amazing question. Well, I'm so I'm tempted to say Coca Cola, or Jeff Bezos or, I don't know if I want Elon Musk's podcast, well, sure, I would do it. I would do Elon's podcast. Yeah. Why not? I would do it.

Matt Cundill  43:29  
Let me ask the question, What stage is somebody thinking? If somebody's thinking about doing a podcast? Oh, I

Doug Downs  43:35  
see what you mean. I see what you mean. In a perfect world, I'd rather you have the podcast going. You're about 100 episodes in. You're not recreating it. You've got some marketing research, maybe you've done some promotion. You have a show concept. You're just not sure if the concept is working or if the concept is still working. You might be starting to experience some churn, and that's legacy. Listeners who just aren't they're not leaving you, they're just not listening to you as much. So a recalibration that's that's the perfect podcast client for me. But that being said, if you are starting it brand new, it's just it's typically harder, because it's like someone signing a new gym membership, and they really have never gone before. And it can be a fun, arduous task to help someone create a new recording and planning habit for themselves that simply is not going to pay off in the first three months, as they hope, slash expect it to, but it will pay off after a year or so if they stick at it and do it well. Doug, thanks so

Matt Cundill  44:37  
much for doing this, sharing the career, getting back together and rehashing some of these old stories. It's been it's been great, another trip down memory lane.

Doug Downs  44:45  
It's so good. You and I have some some stuff that we want to work on together. I'm looking forward to that. Check out Matt on my YouTube channel and we flip it where I'm asking the question and Matt is answering. It's a pleasure to be with it. You. I

Tara Sands  45:04  
another sound off media company, podcast.

Matt Cundill  45:10  
Wait, don't hang up earlier in the show. I promised you I would play you the trailer from the declutter queen. Here it is.

Mary Anne Ivison  45:20  
We buy more than we need, we keep things we don't use, and we hold on to objects long after they've stopped serving us open a cupboard and something falls out. There's a chair in the bedroom that exists only to hold clothes. The Garage hasn't fit a car in years, and somewhere in your house is a box you haven't opened since the last move, and you're afraid of what it might say about you. We live in a culture of constant consumption was brought to you, sales, upgrades, limited time, offers. We're told more is better until more becomes overwhelming. So we keep things just in case, because they were expensive, because someone gave them to us, because throwing them out feels wasteful or guilty or scary, and it's not just physical stuff. Our email inboxes are out of control. Our phones are full of photos we'll never look at again? Our calendars are packed. Our minds are noisy. Clutter shows up everywhere in our homes, our schedules, our relationships and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we should keep at some point, the clutter stops being about stuff and starts being about stress, anxiety and exhaustion. That's where the declutter queen comes in. Hi.

Avery Cundill  46:50  
Oh, you're here, yeah, Isn't this where I voice my part? Absolutely, you have a really nice studio. Have you ever thought about using a recycle bin in here for all of your scripts,

Mary Anne Ivison  47:01  
you know what? That's a

Avery Cundill  47:02  
good idea. I'm Avery Cundill, the declutter queen. This podcast is about clearing space, not just in your home, but in your life. Each episode tackles the habits, beliefs and emotional attachments that keep us stuck, and offers practical, compassionate strategies to help you let go. We will declutter closets, kitchens, garages and all of your paper piles. We'll declutter inboxes, phones, calendars and routines, and yes, we'll even declutter the mental madness that keeps you overwhelmed and stretched far too thin. This isn't about perfection. It's about clarity and it's about making room for what actually matters.

Mary Anne Ivison  47:55  
The declutter queen is available on Apple podcasts Spotify and Amazon music, and you can find every episode, plus resources and support at the declutter queen.ca

Avery Cundill  48:08  
if you're ready to clear the clutter inside and out, this is your invitation to begin you.