I guested on DisrupTV a few weeks ago, with the always amazing Ray Wang – @rwang0 to his zillions of Twitter fans, and the equally futuristic Vala Afshar, aka @ValaAfshar. Their podcasts live here.
This wasn't our first pony ride, so I knew they'd want to know what I was up to and what I'd want to talk about. And they know that while we are generally all in the same wheelhouse about disruption, innovation, and the digital future, my point of view can be radical and different. Radically different, in fact. So, I decided that while I was going to send them the usual list of points I've been working on and/or thinking about, I would write out some script for myself to increase my chances of staying on topic. Not my strong point…
I made the mistake of sending them, along with the title as I've used it for this blog, not counting the podcast part, the four big points. But, they wanted to talk about podcasting first, and that turned out to fill up all the time. That left me with a lot of material. So, here are some of the podcasting high points, and I'm going to follow this up, over the next several blogs, with the other stuff. Because you know you only want 500 words or so in any given blog, right?
So, how did we get from rock and roll to podcasting? When it was in its infancy, rock was blamed for all the ills of the world. And we proved that wrong, didn't we, my fellow boomers? I get to go backstage at a lot of concerts, and love meeting the guys who are still performing fifty years later. It's an adventure in nostalgia, and they're making money off of it. Hail, hail rock and roll! And they're starting to podcast, telling the stories of their careers, and who was doing what to who, and all that great stuff we didn't know when they were doing it. It's better than watching cable news! But here's the business story.
The podcast business is huge. Spotify bought Gimlet and Anchor for a ridiculous amount of money, and you probably never heard of either. And get this. They still call it POD-casting. Like the iPod you had BEFORE your iPhone replaced it and everything else you used to carry. Except your Swiss Army knife, but they're probably working on that. So if you want to disrupt that industry now, your main job is to come up with a more innovative name. Or start manufacturing retro iPods.
Actually I think the next innovation in the industry will be interactive ASYNCHRONOUS podcasts. As in, you can comment IN them – become PART of them – way after they first aired – and your part will be accessible to anyone who wants it.
Consumer nostalgia is driving legacy marketing and vice versa. We did it live so we can do it online BUT we want the teaming – we want to do it with other people.
And that's pretty damn sexy.
