Barlow is a writer and producer on the show as well as. We do this so no one ever feels like, I havent heard from iHeart in a month. A decent example of this is a program we have called NextUp. Actor Will Ferrell said Thursday at the Podcast Movement conference in Los Angeles that he has begun live-taping performances he is doing in L.A. which will serve at the anchor of The Ron Burgundy Podcast 's forthcoming outing. No, for real. The Ron Burgundy Podcast. Youre doing ad injection into the feed? I think our marketing team spends literally 95 percent of their time thinking about how to deploy what wed call house ads, and then maybe 5 percent of their time on paid marketing. Most of them are like, Facebook wont give us the time of day. iHeart recently restructured and you became the CEO of a formal division. We dont care. Like I told you, we all have the same problems. Coming February 7th, The Ron Burgundy Podcast takes a long hard look at the issues that matter. A third of all the media we consume is just audio. I can test exclusive or windowed content there. Thats interesting. Im open to video. Podcasting is helping us do that, because ts grabbing so much of the oxygen in the room, especially in the last year or two, and now people are like, Oh, wow. Its a way for us at iHeart, candidly, to pull them into audio all-up through podcasting. Were a very good partner with creators. For those unfamiliar with Mr. Burgundy, he is Will Ferrell's obnoxious, headstrong . Yeah. Have you had conversations with Spotify about making stuff exclusive? I have not mastered this, by the way. Ron has his good friend Lonnie Jenkins, famed jingle writer, on the pod to get a littletipsy, and sing some songs. Up or down on NFTs? I can go on as long as I want.. In true Ron Burgundy fashion, these conversations have a tendency to go off the rails, and we . It comprises broadcast radio, live events, and a few other things. Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the world-famous Ron Burgundy Podcast! If there are principles that I try to remember once a week or so, its probably those three. Big Money Players and iHeartPodcasts. This was a year ago, and so now hes like, Whatever, dude. You take the point. I dont know that it needs innovation. Notable Verge traitor Ashley Carman, who is in this room somewhere, wrote a great story at Bloomberg about Podtrac and how you might be inflating those numbers with mobile game downloads using the Jun Group. "SmartLess" with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett is a podcast that connects and unites people from all walks of life to learn about shared experiences through thoughtful dialogue and organic hilarity. This was extremely funny and enjoyable to listen as Ron stumbled through another day reliving memories. Just SKIP them, also they complain about the live audience which I get but I doubt theyll change it. Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the world-famous Ron Burgundy Podcast! You could also say that you have a division that might be declining and a division that might be growing at a faster rate. It didnt go well for him either. We have a huge digital revenue sales team run by Carter Brokaw, whos fantastic. You start to reverse-engineer all the content you make because that works best on such-and-such platform. One of America's most famous fictional news anchors, Ron Burgundy, is back with his own podcast. Heres a funny anecdote. Everyone else in this room is like, We have to make TikToks because that is the future of all podcast marketing. Sorry, Im making TikToks. There was no digital media when I went to college, let alone podcasting. So I said, All I can tell you is just have your aperture be wide open, man. Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Its not that being inside Discovery was bad, it was just different. Menu. Is there any way to actually innovate? Are you feeling the pinch of the ad downturn? In true Ron Burgundy fashion, these conversations have a tendency to go off the rails, and we find out things . Its clearly not as regulated as radio. Host, Producer, and Writer on The Ron Burgundy Podcast, Host on True Romance with Carolina B, and Guest on The Daily Zeitgeist, Everything Iconic with Danny, and Behind the Bastards. You always do if youre running a startup. Thats a really cool medium if only it were video. Podcasting is not video. iHeartMedia is the first to go live with Sounder's AI and Machine Learning (ML) technology, giving brands . Its a massive amount of the stuff we take in and that we call the media. If you can never get enough true crime Congratulations, youve found your people. Then, up and coming Tim Heidecker joins him. What that meant for us was that we were not the main course anymore, as it were. Ron takes a stab at the most popular genre of his new chosen mediumthe True Crime podcast. I dont have this concern in the same way I had it when I was writing text-based articles for HowStuffWorks.com 20 years ago or when I was focused on social and digital video at Discovery Communications. You have this relic now, that is a podcast limited series of what this language means to this guy and why he captured it in a podcast. Is it just Bob Pittman being like, Chaos reigns. But I also think it fundamentally tripped up a little as a business model. I ask it of everybody. A little bit. I end on this team because its very important, we have our business affairs team. In the producing realm, she has worked with Will at his production company Gloria Sanchez for 6 years, and is clearly well versed in the notion of marrying comedy with romance in ways that captivate an . Its incredibly collaborative. How do you do it? Hopefully the truth will be revealed during the first season of the newly announced The Ron Burgundy Podcast. These are marketers who are usually really good at this stuff like really good. What worries me a little bit is that we have this tendency on the internet, and since Ive been working in digital media overall, to have this belief sometimes that I think is false that everything really needs to be a video when it grows up. In the Big Money Players network, comedic talent like Langston Kerman or Carolina Barlow are right alongside folks like Bowen Yang, Nikki Glaser, or Eric Andr. Our partners at Work x Work. To try to help with this, iHeart, the multi-platform group, built a product called smart audio thats really cool. Wheres the tension there? Go follow Decoder on TikTok, its great. I dont think this is wishful thinking. Our marketing people are here, youre very good. You launched a lot of new stuff. It was a packed house and a great time. Its also how we got here. Everything, I promise you, is simpler than you think. I just need answers.. We love talking about movies, tv shows, and everyth. Credits:Ron Burgundy: Host, Writer, Executive ProducerCarolina Barlow: Co-Host, Writer, and Producer.Producers: Whitney Hodack, Jack O'Brien, Miles Gray . Do you even talk to them, or are you just like, Screw it, take my RSS feed? We do talk to them. Do I think were mature enough to have all of the things that a big, respectable, grown-up-table business should have? You have a content type that is the highest quality in the world, I would argue, out of any content getting made today, except maybe TV, which is pretty good right now but we are right there next to it. If you love digital audio and you want real reach, there is no way to get real reach in digital audio. Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. iHeartMedia came along and offered us two or three things specifically. The longer answer is, were in an odd economy. He used his podcast as a way to capture that language and report on how a language dies off the face of the earth, never to come back. We also have an original content series we make with IBM called Smart Talks with IBM. All of the distribution points that we distribute to today through RSS feeds are equal to us in terms of the money we make, because thats just how RSS feeds work. Lightning round. We realized that maybe our greatest asset was the people who worked there. I know Im sort of recapping the obvious, but this was an inflection point in our whole industry, that you suddenly had big brands and sometimes big holdcos swooping in and wanting to invest in podcasting. The fifth season brings canned laughter and an audience . The second thing we do is spend a lot of time focusing on every show that we have on our network. Were going to buy ads somewhere where someone will push the button and download the episode, the number will go up, and hopefully some of them will stay. It said, Lets do mega deals. That could be worth it, if a creator is that good, you may want to pay that. I understand where we sit in the pecking order in terms of cume. If I want to hear a perpetually adolescent man scream PEE PEE through my speakers there's a ton of YouTube channels I can subscribe to. Oddly, no. Nothings perfect, but its pretty close to perfect. The tales he unfolds and his interview with a criminal psychologist are positively bone chilling.Credits:Ron Burgundy: Host, Writer, Executive ProducerCarolina Barlow: Co-Host, Writer, and Producer.Producers: Whitney Hodack, Jack O'Brien, Miles Gray, and Nick StumpfExecutive Producer: Mike . Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. I can talk about the things I cant talk about on the radio. YouTube is a good example of this. Hes going to start this journey now of trying to get into college. Ron and Carolina get advice about how to navigate the dark web. People trust podcast content more than they trust what they see on social media by like 60 percent more. That definitely helps, so we jumped in. In true Ron Burgundy fashion, these conversations have a tendency to go off the rails, and we find out things about people we never knew we wanted to know. Theyre just audio podcasts and thats awesome. Thats probably how I think about it. I feel like I already know how it went. We were especially interested in, If we got gamers into our podcast network, could we then bring them into these live shows in iHeartLand? We dont use it anymore. Hello, my friend. If anything, were making that more of a focus and paying more attention to it in the last two or three months. I just keep hearing the trailers and it sounds godawful. Youre saying, Oh, theres a seamless back and forth, but surely you must see, Oh, okay. We obviously have a podcast team, run by the president of the iHeart Podcast Network, Will Pearson. Hes like, I want to get as much audience as possible. What it allowed us to do, along with a lot of other stuff, was to talk more freely to the market about how well this segment was growing, specifically podcasting. Its an audio medium. This show is also a podcast where we capture the file, distribute it as an on-demand thing, and then it drives upwards of 15 to 20 million downloads a month. A company thats like, A lot of action is in business affairs, is a company that has figured out a bunch of stuff. Ron listens to an Opera Singer, to see what all the hype'sabout. He was a great guest, super game to answer the questions, especially in front of a live audience. Ron Burgundy! Crypto company Gemini is having some trouble with fraud. At the iHeart Network, we have about 70-ish shows in the iHeart Podcast Network that drive over one million monthly downloads or more some of them way more. I know you do. Both are completely okay and actually really perform well. I think its real. But to tell it in a reductive way, 20 years ago, when some folks were sitting around a table deciding how they were going to distribute all these great podcasts they were going to start making, they could have used several different technologies to do that. You brought up SEO. Go follow Conal on TikTok, its great. There were lots of things that moved what were initially experimental marketing dollars from those big brands and holdcos into permanent marketing dollars. Podcasting not to your question, but as a side answer has bucked that a lot to date. In podcasting, it is fundamentally different. To be clear though, theres a whole lot of fluidity between these segments. You dont? Its another 60 percent this is the only reason I remember these numbers or more specifically, like 57 percent, of marketers currently spending in podcasting are going to be spending more next year, not less.