Shaun Hettinger: How Do You Launch and Produce a Successful Podcast in Today’s Media Landscape?

Welcome to Media Minds with your host, David Wolf.

Welcome to Media Minds. I'm David Wolf. Joining us today is our director of podcast production at Audavita Studios, Sean Hedinger. How are you, Sean?

I'm great, David. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. I'm looking forward to kind of sharing the who and who we are and how we work at Audavita, you know, vis-à-vis the podcast production and, and related kinds of projects that we do. I mean, God knows we see a whole lot of different kinds of products or podcasts in the course of the work we do? I mean, it's a wide range, right? I mean, what is— I mean, some of them are simple, some of them are more complex.

Yeah. Yeah. We do a lot of— well, everything seems to be remote, but we do a lot of interview-based podcasts. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is the podcast format that is so widely accepted over the last years. And we have had a few occasions with more of a narrative, more of a narrative podcast too. I think Danish Originals, and there's some others probably that are a little bit more sort of, uh, almost documentary style. Yeah, we've seen a lot of different things.

Yeah, I can name them for you if you want. We get Evolutions Per Minute, uh, Stories in the Room. That was a great one. Yeah, yeah, these are some good ones. A little bit more heavy lifting on the editing process for those.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, in the templating process. And, uh, you know, you and I were talking the other day about just sort of dive in the middle of the conversation, the sort of the trend away from long intros and outros, right? It's interesting what's happening in the market.

The analytics keep changing the way we work as a business, and I think it's for the better. The audience keeps changing, so we have to change with it. I think with a lot of the AI voices and stuff like that, people are— I just said, uh, and And this is what I'm talking about. People are finding, uh, and ums to be truly authentic. Uh, so now we're not removing as much as we used to try to make everything polished and perfect, but the listeners are telling us, you know, the, the analytics are in, uh, the hosts are found to be more reliable, relatable, authentic if they keep ums and uh in the podcast. So I'm not gonna edit this out. No way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all the natural human tics and characteristics and rituals that we use when we communicate in real life. You know, they want to see that in production. And it sort of stripped away this, you know, I come from broadcast media, as you know, and that's a world where everything was, you know, needed to be whatever perfect means, right? And so we've moved away from that. Of course, on the audiobook side of Audavida's business or any producer of audiobooks, it's a very different problem set. But with podcasts, it is about connecting, being really you, And I think more and more, uh, the distribution part of it, which I know you're not intimately involved with in our world, but, but you're, you're preparing the files for distribution and the distribution, getting your word out in an authentic way, which is what you just pointed to, is really becoming more paramount than having pristine production with a few exceptions.

Yeah. Uh, some of the corporate clients like a little more production, you know, but yeah, Ed, you know, I think if a year ago, say our slate of podcasts were 50% audio based and 50% video, they, are now 90% video and 10% audio, and everybody wants to get social media clips pulled out of their episode recording. So we've baked that into the packaging that we present to our clients too.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. So let's see, when it comes to launching a process, a podcast, let's talk about the process of just launching a show for the newbie. And that's your— that's front and center for you. So I— we come in, we've got a new client, we have the meeting. Then what?

What?

Where do we go from there?

Well, we try to figure out what is their podcast, who are they, what's their voice, help them think about the promise to the listener that they're going to deliver every single week. Right. A little bit of a call to action. But we build the show from, from the ground up and we do that in a couple of ways. First, it's just identifying a voiceover, theme music, and the script for the voiceover. And then we animate that. And now we used to build these longer intro and outros. As you mentioned, we've cut that down. People that want to hit play and they don't want to hear an intro. They want to hear what we call the cold open, which is a highlight nugget from deep in the episode. First thing you hear, you're kind of hooked as a listener. It pulls you in. You want to see the how, the why they got there. Um, and then maybe follow following that nugget, we get to a brief intro, just a little, the, the voice of the podcast, whatever it is, music, animation, quick out to the show. But then we build the whole look of the, of the, the show, the lower thirds, the graphics. Um, is there like a little animated loop in the background? You know, if it is just an interview-based format, host guest, how are, how's everything lining up? And then likewise, how, how everything's gonna stack up when it's vertical for your social media clips. We have to build out a template and then from there it's easy to cookie cutter every single week, every single episode going into that format.

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. How important is it for, well, I, I'm asking the question I know the answer to, but how important is consistency when you're releasing and that release schedule, you know, in terms of not only audience build but engagement? Yeah.

Just talk a little bit about your, I mean, I think, Yeah, I think consistency is key. Whatever you decide, once a week, every other week, every Tuesday, every third, it doesn't matter what day you pick as long as you're building your audience to know the new episodes are consistent on this day, this time. The hard thing is to stay on track. What we try to do, we try to do is create a 4-episode buffer, as you know, meaning if we're releasing this episode, we already have the next 4 episodes edited, approved, ready to go. So we're not chasing, oh, this needs to be edited by tomorrow, which occasionally happens with the late fee. That's okay. But yeah, we try to create these buffers to make everybody's life easier, including the podcasters. Yeah.

The way I say that is you're not chasing deadlines for guests that may cancel, or maybe you're sick and can't do the show that week.

So you want to take a vacation or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Another thing that's kind of key that I think comes up for us is this sort of relationship between long form and short form. You know, and that's evolving. How do you see that, the relationship with— so we do these long 20 or 30-minute shows, maybe longer, and then there's this whole social media ecosystem that has to be, and often fed by the long version. So talk a little bit about, you know, this idea where we, we cut, cut shows into smaller bits, you know, all of that. Yeah.

Yeah. I, it's kind of funny before I think social media was trying to feed people to go to the podcast. And now people are almost using the podcast to feed the social media. You know, there's two different ecosystems. You can pick whichever track or let the audience decide which track is best for you and your podcast. But from one recording, you can get what, 3, 4, 5 different clips more depending on how much you want to go. But yeah, you know, you're trying to get the most viewers, listeners somewhere. Either it's for the long format or it's for the short ones. People can go viral and, you know, get lucky on YouTube, Shorts or Instagram Reels. It happens.

It happens. As a creative guy, and you and I are sort of comrades in that we're both composers, and so we kind of approach this whole thing very musically, what in your view is the direction that we're taking? You know, we talked about so much of what we see and hear is an interview. Are there trends or things around the horizon that you see can make podcasts more interesting to viewers and listeners going forward and, uh, you know, just whether it's B-roll or— I'm gonna, yeah, sort of seed you a little bit into that. But yeah, anything that bubbles up for you.

I mean, I think B-roll is— and you're looking at these brand new AI tools that are making our jobs a lot easier, right? There's good and bad of AI, we have to say that, full disclaimer. We're not using AI to replace our jobs, but we are using it to enhance our jobs and enhance our clients' podcasts. So all of a sudden, you know, if, if we could remove all the filler words by a click of a button, that allows us more editing time to do things like pull B-roll and to make things more visually engaging. One thing we don't do a lot of, but I'm seeing it more is, you know, just the host read ads, of course, just baking those into the episodes because I'm, I'm trying to scroll through YouTube too. Like, I don't want to see the ads. And then you're like, Dang it, you got me because the host is still there wearing the same jacket or something. So I think, and I know those are more financially lucrative than regular inserted ads. So yeah, I don't know. Those are some of the things I'm just thinking about.

Yeah, I mean, we can always throw in sound design as well and some other sorts of things along with B-roll. And there's also sort of this convergence too between, I don't know if there's a convergence exactly, but between the webinar events and podcasts and capturing a webinar event to be then an episode or a series of episodes. I mean, there's—

it's all content, right?

It's all content. I was just going to say, is it— it's content is content is content. And you could chop it up and mix it up and cold open and B-roll and all. And but for us in the production world, it's all kind of the same stuff.

And, you know, pulling transcriptions out of all of these episodes we've recorded for you and then Putting it into some kind of AI to create an ebook, you know, like here's the best, the 20 of the best guest answers for the same consistent question or however you do it on your show.

Right. An ebook and an audiobook companion.

Ebook, audiobook. Sure. It's all kind of feeding itself in some weird way.

Yeah. You're talking about the sort of the cross-pollination. In fact, we are market testing right now, podcast to book where you take, you know, some number of episodes and transfer it into an ebook and then that becomes an audiobook. So again, this crossover thing, and from a client perspective, we see that as well. We see authors who now want to do a podcast based on the book they already wrote. So it's again, content is content is content. It's so interesting in that way.

And to go back to, uh, what we were talking about, other things we can insert, and you know, with the new technology, AI technology, I'm thinking about, yeah, using, using Descript, and they, you know, for B-roll, for example, you can just type something in and the AI will generate the B-roll thing you're looking for. Like a diamond mine. You're talking about a diamond mine on your finance podcast and like, we can pull that up and drop it in. It's a lot easier now than it's ever been before. Yeah, just to create things and make things visually engaging and sound design engaging. You could do the same thing with sound design, you know?

Yeah. Is there any advice you have for someone who has a business or they have a practice or you know, they just have a hobby or whatever it is, coming in brand new. Um, maybe it's a form of myth-busting about what they can expect doing a podcast series, like in terms of the production process. Is there anything, um, that might, um, that you would say to people to give them advice about, uh, about planning to do their show and what it should be?

Sure. Uh, most people think, oh, I want to do podcasts, it seems so hard, I could never do it. It's easier now than it has ever been. Oh, but I'll need a microphone. I'll need this ring light, like I'm trying out right now. It's cheaper now than it's ever been. You get on Amazon, get a decent mic for $40 or less. I mean, you can get your studio with good lighting, good sound, ready to go. Um, you should be doing it like, uh, what do you call one of those green screen backgrounds? But it's not even a green screen. You just click the button, the virtual, the virtual backgrounds. Everyone's messed with in Zoom. It's easy to look good, sound good, get high production value out of so little. So podcasting, I think it's— now is the time if you're interested in dipping your toe in that pond. And, you know, on the flip side of it, that was very positive. But the flip side, I think a lot of people are like, well, I've got great content, I can go viral. And you might have great content. It's very hard to go viral. And if you want to go viral, If that is your goal, then you must set aside an allotted budget for social media and PR and stuff like that.

Most definitely.

Yeah.

And one of the things sort of related to that, and you're a guy that has released music as well, I mean, knowing whether a song is going to go viral or be a hit or a movie or film, feature film or series is going to be a hit. I mean, that's a crapshoot. You know, you just don't know. You just have to do the work of the show. And if it connects, it will connect. And it's not something you can necessarily control. But the other piece of that is there's sort of two sides to the why. That's sort of the why you do a podcast. A lot of people come into this, my view, it's all about audience size. And what I like to say in terms of managing expectations is it's not necessarily about the size of the audience, but the quality of the engagement and the ability of that podcast in the business sense to develop your pipeline for new business development. And so there are new tools that we're starting to test now that can create, can position the podcast as a marketing engine for building your pipeline for sales. And, uh, again, that's, that's something that's outside of your world directly in terms of production, but there may be some interesting ways that we can call to actions and, you know, build in some formatic things into the show that help, uh, our, our clients, you know, build more of a pipeline for their business when they're doing their podcast. So that's kind of exciting to me as a business person.

Yeah. And I just want to piggyback on that. Like, you know, do a podcast because you love it, because you want to do it, because you have something to say. But build a podcast to be part of your brand, part of your portfolio. Right. It's not going to be the one all solution for— Right, right. Yeah. But to your point, like having on guests people that you want to network with, uh, potential business clients. Like, what, what a great leveraging tool it is.

It's an amazing thing. Sean, thanks for doing this today. We'll do it again, I'm sure. Sean Hedinger from Autovida Studios, our company. And, uh, it's good to be with you. I just want to share the who we are and how we work. So thanks for joining us, Sean.

All right, thanks, David.

You've been listening to Media Minds with your host, David Wolf. Media Minds is produced by Audivita Studios, a premier production company producing audiobooks and podcasts for clients worldwide. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about the team at Audivita Studios, visit audivita.com.