A New Kind of B2B Podcasting with Harry Morton

Jeff Umbro: Hey everyone, welcome to Podcast Perspectives. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of the Podglomerate. The Podglomerate is a company that produces, distributes and monetizes podcasts. You can learn more@thepodglomerate.com or shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com. On this show, we talk to industry leaders who are building the next generation of the podcast industry, whether that be producers, distributors, marketers, [or] just ideas people.

Today on the show, we're talking to Harry Morton. Harry is the founder and CEO of Lower Street, which is a branded podcast company out of the UK. There's a lot of really interesting things that we talk about today. 

Harry is very impressive. His organization has grown tremendously over the last few years. He works with organizations like PepsiCo, Stanford, Hewlett Packard, Booking.com, and he makes shows that go beyond just a narrative chat show where we can explain the brand to the listener and he really tries to make storytelling the centerpiece of the shows that he's putting out, and tells people about a brand through initiatives where they get to know the brand.

It is a really new-ish kind of podcasting. It's been around for 10, 20 years, but what Harry and his team at Lower Street are doing is trying to move this into the next phase. Harry and I met a few months ago in the UK at the podcast show in London, and we've been fast friends ever since. We're both agency founders, so we dive into that a lot. But I hope y'all enjoy the interview and thank you so much for joining us.

Welcome to the show, Harry. Thanks for joining us.

Harry Morton: Thanks for having me. Pleasure.

Jeff Umbro: I wanted to start by just asking how you got your start. You started Lower Street, which is a branded podcast agency, and there's a lot that we're going to get into about what that is, what that means, what you do every day.

But I feel like often it's a very particular kind of person that starts their own agency or services company. So, how did you get from point A to point B?

Harry Morton: Yeah, a very sort of masochistic kind of person. 

So I've been in audio basically my whole life. My mom taught piano. I grew up in a house that was surrounded by music, so  sound was always a part of my life.And I went to university to study music and music technology specifically. And I left that and went into audio post production. 

[I] worked in a post-production house in London, which was kind of in the advertising industry. So that's kind of where I got my start. And I worked there for a couple years as an assistant producer, but eventually wound up getting fired because I lost the voiceover recordings from a session from a bleach advert.

There's a bleach brand called Domestos over here. And I specifically remember losing the recordings of that. And that was the end of my time at that particular studio. But to be honest, until that point, I was loathing life. I hated it. I was like, “This is what I thought was gonna be my dream job.”

And it turned out it was, it was loathsome.

Jeff Umbro: It's never like Mad Men, right? Everybody thinks that they're about to be Don Draper.

Harry Morton: Totally. It was miserable, but [I] kind of got a bit of experience. I went from there to basically, as a kind of reaction to that, I went and moved into sales and marketing and ended up working in sales in B2B, for the next, kinda like six or seven years. So, completely separate from audio, but really understanding marketing, sales and kind of the world of B2B. And it was basically during that whole time I spent my time listening to podcasts to educate myself on how to start my own business. I knew that's what I wanted to do.

Jeff Umbro: What's the timestamp on this? What year?

Harry Morton: So that would've been kind of the period of, I guess, 2012 to 2017, maybe 2011 to 2017. I was doing, kind of, [a] sales and marketing job. They were in London and then that led me to Australia. I worked there for a couple of years and then came back and yeah, just spent a ton of time listening to podcasts to sort of learn about how to start a business and what that could even be, and then, the light bulb probably took a little too long to go off, but I realized that, “Hey, I've got skills in this particular thing, this medium that I'm listening to all the time. There's some value I have to add here.”

So in the very end of 2016, beginning of 2017, I launched Lower Street in my underpants, in my bedroom. I was saying “we” trying to project this image of an agency, but it was very much just me and have sort of slowly built up from there. And it's really since, I guess 2019/20, things have really kind of scaled significantly and we've been able to go from working with a couple of great shows to some kind of really big brands and doing some great projects we're really proud of.

So it's been a slow and steady journey here.

Jeff Umbro: I love that. And you and I have a lot of overlap when it comes to starting our own agencies, and mine wasn't my underwear in the bedroom, mine was my parents' basement.

Harry Morton: Nice.

Jeff Umbro: And yeah, I sent an email out to like 200 of my closest friends and family saying that I'm sending this for my parents' basement. Please help me get out of it.

Harry Morton: Beautiful.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. I still dread that email. I have nightmares about it. But you have a really interesting, and I think for some people rare, but for a lot of people, not rare experience in terms of getting into the podcast space. Because when you were doing your agency work, I feel like you're doing this consumer advertising and creating these videos that are gonna be on people's TVs or Facebook feeds or whatever.

But you're not selling – it's not B2C. Like you're actually selling this stuff to agencies and to big corporations who are buying this stuff, and then they're the ones that are gonna go out and place it, or the agency might. So there's a little bit of a disconnect, because I think a lot of people, when they hear advertising, they're like, “Oh, you get to go and talk to the mom and pop shops and figure out what's gonna work for their customers.”

But really you're not, you're working with these Fortune 500 companies that are going to, you know, give you a thousand deadlines that you're never going to meet and pay you too little and you're not going to have enough help to do it. So it always makes me chuckle a little bit when I hear somebody who has that experience and then goes, “Okay, I'm going to do this for other brands in the podcast space. That'll be better, that'll be easier.” 

So when you were listening, you know, 2011 to 2017 or whatever, were you listening to commercial shows or were you listening to more B2B shows?

Harry Morton: So specifically what I was listening to was like, Pat Flynn was my gateway drug. I'm unashamed to admit that the Pat Flynn Show was my first thing, and then that led me to Tim Ferriss, and then I read the Four Hour Work Week and then the Tropical MBA and Startups for the Rest of Us and all these kinds of shows.

That was the stuff that was influencing me. It was like, “How could I bootstrap a business?” Because I didn't want to raise money and I didn't know how to raise money and no one was going to invest in some kid in his underpants, in his spare room. So that wasn't gonna work for me. I had to figure out how I could build something from nothing.

And so the only way I saw to do that was through services because I could just trade my time for money and then figure out how I could charge more money than I had time and then fill in the blanks, you know?

Jeff Umbro: And just to break this down, because I think people throw this word around all the time – a services based business is you're providing services to other companies and organizations. In your case, you are providing podcast production and marketing help to businesses.

So I do want to kind of break this down to the core elements. What is B2B marketing?

Harry Morton: It's the same as any marketing. We're trying to influence the people that are the ideal buyers for the stuff that we have to sell.

And I think the difference between B2B and B2C is that B2C, we’re oftentimes, we're selling to a much broader spectrum of people, usually for a much smaller investment. So, the difference between selling a mattress and selling a year's worth of consulting is, you know, the difference of a great number of zeros and a much more defined market that we have to try to attract in B2B. Right? That customer that's looking to buy a year's worth of consulting services, there's far fewer people that are looking for that than are looking to buy a Casper mattress.

Jeff Umbro: Now, I'm actually wondering though, let's pretend Casper wants to make their own podcast about sleep or something. How would you look at that as opposed to Casper buying a bunch of ads on existing podcasts? What would that conversation look like?

Harry Morton: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think we really do tend to focus more on B2B and we can get into why, but I think it's super interesting. I really love B2C podcasts because I think there's a lot of creative opportunity there, because effectively, what Casper doesn't wanna do is sit there and make a 30 minute infomercial because nobody's going to listen to a 30 minute infomercial every week.

So what they have to do instead is go, “Okay, who's our ideal buyer? We can't speak to everybody that wants to buy a mattress because that's just every human on earth. So what's our ideal buyer that we want to make a show for?” And let's say it's, I don't know, millennials in the state of New York who earn over a hundred thousand dollars a year and they like NFL or something.

The brief then is to figure out, “Okay, how do we make an NFL, New York focused podcast –” this is a terrible example, but you get the idea - “that's just fun, right, that people just enjoy listening to. Because what Casper wanna do is spend time with that audience. And then the next time they're thinking of buying a mattress, they're gonna think of Casper because they hang out with Casper all the time.

So they're not gonna be saying, “Okay, here's our product, here's our, well not service. Here's our product. Go buy it today.” Instead, they're like, “Here's our target audience. What can we make that they're gonna genuinely love and choose to listen to on a regular basis? How do we make that?” And then by making that, we're gonna be aligning our brand with that stuff, and we're gonna be top of mind when they think of buying a mattress.

The alternative to that is that they could go out and they could say, “Okay, we are gonna buy New York Times adverts on all New York Times shows, or just on their sports stuff that we think is most relevant. And we're gonna place an ad, which is much more direct response. “Just buy a mattress today. Here's a coupon code to get your discount.” Those are two very different plays in the different ways that we could use podcasting. And that's, I don't wanna say unique, but different to the B2B kind of play in podcasting as I see it.

Jeff Umbro: What is an example of a quote unquote branded podcast that you think is exceptional?

Harry Morton: So Bring Back Bronco was from Pacific Content who's a competitor and therefore evil. No, I'm kidding. They're awesome. And they made this incredible show Bring Back Bronco, which I think is just a really great example of trying to rekindle a culture around, you know, something that had a real brand as something that really meant a lot to a huge amount of Americans, and they portrayed that through awesome storytelling. I think that's a really great B2C example of podcasting.

Jeff Umbro: There's a couple great examples of shows like that where it really tries to connect with the consumer because it's some kind of beloved brand.

Like Inside Trader Joe's I know is an often cited example, but they do episodes where they'll kind of tell you where your favorite foods are from and who's making them, and the farmers and the producers and everything. What is an example of a really bad or poorly produced branded podcast?

Harry Morton: Yeah, nothing's  immediately coming to mind.

But yeah, I get the trends. The themes of bad branded podcasts are ones that kind of do what I said to not do just a minute ago, which is make it an infomercial. Like I think a lot of brands get really tempted to go, “Okay, this is part of our marketing, we've got to sell stuff here.” And so they just talk about themselves and their products and their services, and that sucks because who wants to listen to that?

It's an ad, like nobody wants to listen to that. The trick is to basically take the bet, and this is what more and more brands are understanding because they're seeing it being done elsewhere. But I think it doesn't always kind of make complete logical sense to people that our goal isn't to sell our product and service.

Right now, our goal is to just create a thing that our buyers want to spend their time listening to.

Jeff Umbro: I'm gonna spend half an hour telling you about why this breakfast cereal is what you should be eating, right?

So Harry, I know that you kind of have this idea of what makes a good quality branded podcast, I think, that is easily identifiable and displayed in listenership rates and numbers and downloads and consumption.

But historically, with very, very few exceptions, narrative commercial podcasts are going to be more popular than branded shows. And I know that that's a weird blanket statement to make, but it is arguably true. What can you and what have you learned from a commercial success that you can then implement for a branded business podcast?

Harry Morton: It's an interesting question in terms of sheer numbers. It's, yeah, it's hard to argue that Serial is not gonna outperform, like, Acme Corp show, but like I said, we're trying to make the favorite show of a very specific and small group of people, and so if our addressable audience is 500 people and we get 450 of them, then, you know, I would argue that's a pretty damn popular show.

But what have I learned from really successful big shows? I think just an overarching focus on really high quality storytelling is the thing that I've learned the most from the big hitters in podcasting because I think it's frankly just something that not enough brands do.

I think one of the things that I'm on a mission to fix is just like brands going, “Ah, I see podcasting. I get it. It's just two people talking. I can do that.” And they just stick two people in a room or on a Zoom call and record them using their laptop mics and it's painful for us all. It's bland and it's boring, and it's just gray mush that just joins the sea of noise. In the world of the internet, really, if brands are gonna extract any value from doing a piece of content, they should actually genuinely make effort to make it a noteworthy piece of content, something that's actually worth the time of their listeners because you know, they're trying to reach, oftentimes brands are trying to reach really senior decision making people with their content and senior decision making people are busy and they've got better stuff to be doing, and they could be listening to Serial.

So we have to say, “No, don't listen to Serial or the latest season of Serial. Come and listen to this podcast and here's why.” And if the answer to the question, “here's why" is because it's too old white dudes talking about technology like you have heard on every other podcast in the world, that's not enough to get me to click subscribe. Brands that are doing really cool stuff in podcasting are the ones that get that. It takes more than that and are willing to kind of invest the time and energy and to make something that actually involves true storytelling rather than just an exchange of facts.

Jeff Umbro: So walk me through the process. Somebody comes, I come to you. I work at some SAAS company that will make your bookkeeping like 2% better every year. This is my budget, this is my timeline. What's the next step from start to finish? Like what's the process from ideation to actually publishing?

Harry Morton: Yeah, so the first step is to really obsess over who's the buyer we're trying to go after.

So for accounting software, that could be any business owner, but we're gonna say to the client, “Hey, I assume it's not every business owner we're going after here, so what is the segment we're gonna go after?” And they'll tell us who that might be and when we can really understand who that target listener is, who are we trying to make this show for. 

We can really look to understand a whole bunch of stuff. So, firstly, What are they doing day to day? What do they care about? But also the work that we can do on the podcast is like, what are they already listening to? What other shows do they consume? And what we like to do is build out a competitive landscape, as we call it, for the show.

So what is the sort of neighborhood of shows that this podcast is gonna sit inside of when it's launched. We just wanna have a really good idea of the full spectrum of the stuff that is common among our specific chosen audience, because then what that gives us the opportunity to do is determine what's already out there and what's working among the best shows in our category.

Like what are the common themes that we wanna make sure we learn something from and incorporate into our show? Cause clearly that's what the market wants, but also, where's there opportunity for us to do something that doesn't exist elsewhere? Where's the thing that only us as Acme Accounting Software Inc. can provide?

So yeah, really understanding the competitive landscape is super important and that also informs then how we're gonna think about promoting this podcast once it's created. You know, if we understand where the audience is already hanging out, we know where to get it in front of to try and get that audience going as well.

Jeff Umbro: That all sounds amazing, but like when you're really getting into the nitty gritty of it, who are you choosing for the host of the show? Like how are you training them on how to speak into a microphone? How are you working with their schedules to actually make sure that they can record this thing in some kind of regular cadence?

Those are the things I think that usually trip when, on our end anyway, that's what always trips up the client.

Harry Morton: Yeah, they do trip up the client and they're often the things that come up in conversation earliest to someone that's never podcasted before. Those are the things they immediately jump to.

And I think my focus is always trying to shift the focus away from like, don't worry about all that. We'll sort that stuff out. That's fine. But like, unless we make something that's worth making and that your audience actually wants, it doesn't matter. But anyway, yes. Once we get to the kind of practical side of things, the host of the show and the technical aspects, it so depends on the brand and who's behind it and how much money they've got, honestly.

Because, you know, one of the ways that we can massively increase the exposure in the audience that our show has the opportunity to get in front of is by picking a host who has that audience already. So we can get an outside host that's not inside the organization. A lot of brands choose to host it internally because they want their voice to be truly a representation of the brand.

Jeff Umbro: Or sometimes it's an ego thing, like this executive really wants to be in front of the mic.

Harry Morton: Absolutely. So oftentimes, we'll have folks reach out to us, “We wanna make a podcast, or specifically I wanna make a podcast.” The person that's really driving it, that's holding the budget, is like a podcast fan, or used to be in radio back at university or something, and they just like are really excited by it and they wanna do that and that's awesome.

They're often times some of the best clients to work with, but it means that yes, they're the nailed on host for this thing because they're super excited about it. The biggest challenge for us typically, because obviously, as you can tell from my accent, I'm based in the UK, the team is based between here and North America, Europe and beyond, but we are fully remote as a team.

So that means we're generally not in the city of our clients always. So we're having to kind of coach folks through this remotely. So that means we have to really work hard to think about what's the recording environment you're gonna be in, what's the equipment you're gonna use? How do we coach folks on how to use that?

And so it means a lot of video calls like this to kind of coach through that process?

Jeff Umbro: For better or worse I am very familiar with that. So you mentioned a lot of this depends on budget. We all know how economics work, but I was hoping you could walk us through, you don't have to give numbers or anything, but how do people charge for production?

Is it like a project fee? Is it hourly? Is there a development charge? Like how do you guys do it?

Harry Morton: We don't tend to think about it as an hourly thing. I much prefer to sort of think about it as a deliverable, as a value to the client because I don't think a client really cares how many hours it takes us to make a podcast.

They just care about is this a good podcast or a bad podcast? And so we tend to think about it more just in terms of what we're delivering. But in how we scope out projects, it is very much a case by case. So in some cases we're doing a project, so a single season where we might do eight to 12 episodes for a client, and we just, we run with those episodes, it comes to an end, and then we think about renewing for season two.

But lots of clients will also want to produce a show, which is always on. It's just out every week or every two weeks, or multiple times a week. So that really varies. So one version will have a monthly retainer and one version will have a project cost for the whole season. But to your point, we do have a strategy cost, you know, we call it like the launch package.

And it's really just about kind of developing the strategy for the show. Like I said, talking about the listener, understanding all of that stuff, developing the concept for the show, coaching folks on the gear that they need and how to work and use all of that, and setting up all the technical stuff and the, you know, the distribution side and your analytics and all that kind of stuff.

So we kind of go through a lot of work on the front end to get the show up and running. And then after that point, it's like a per episode rate or a per season rate, or like I said, the monthly retainer of it's an always on show.

Jeff Umbro: You mentioned that you'd like to get, if you had nine out of 10 of your listeners that you're actually looking for and targeting for that particular brand, you're happy. But how are you measuring that? Like what kind of metrics or KPIs are you paying attention to?

Harry Morton: Yeah, it's really hard, isn't it? It's like, it's tough.

So the KPIs that we really care about and pay attention to are the consumption rate of a podcast. That is a very clear proxy for “Is this content resonating? Do people care about what we're saying?” Because if the consumption rate is 5%, then clearly you're doing something wrong. But if the consumption rate is a hundred percent, then clearly you are making something that people care about and want to listen to.

So that's like a primary piece of data that we follow. And I think everyone in podcasting that knows what they're doing feels the same.

Jeff Umbro: It's always the most painful conversation when I'm chatting with [someone], because we work with quite a few shows where we don't produce the content.  So it's kind of like –

Harry Morton: Something you don't have any control over.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, and it, most of the time, it's really, really great, but when you find something that's worth flagging, it's always a tough conversation because no matter how you frame it, you're basically saying like, you need to do better with this.

Harry Morton: Yes. Your baby is ugly. Yeah. It's hard. It's really, really hard.

Yeah. The thing that I think we all need to do better at, and something I'm really thinking about a lot at the moment is, so we talked about, you know, again, you said like, “How can you know that you're speaking to the right audience?” I think we need to do better. A combination of surveying and focus groups to really understand from our specific target audience “Is this performing well?”

Surveys are notoriously difficult to get people to respond to. Again, if we've got a C-suite exec target audience, like that's a hard ask to get people to fill out a form. But I think anything that we can do to get real meaningful feedback from our target audience is really important. And right now the tools are getting better.

And I have every faith that they will help us in the long run. But as of today, it's hard. I mean, most clients come to us and they say, I want X number of downloads, as if that means something. And they can assign some value to that, but it's kind of a meaningless number.

Jeff Umbro: Goes back to the ego.

Harry Morton: It goes back to the ego. That's exactly what I was gonna say. And the same with chart ranking. You know, one of the things that often times gets internal teams incredibly excited is like, “Oh, we hit the top five in this category,” and that is, by the way, like not to detract from that, that's a great achievement, that's wonderful.

But it doesn't actually mean anything.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, there's a million ways you can achieve that.

Harry Morton: Yeah. Internal teams love these vanity metrics and that's cool, but I think what really matters is who's listening and how are they listening? And really, we can only find that information as of right now from asking them.

Jeff Umbro: I've probably told this story on the show already, so I apologize for any listeners who have heard this, but my first podcast was in 2014. It was called Writers Who Don't Write. I hosted the show and I would speak to authors that I loved about, you know, their storytelling and careers and whatever. I was ready to throw in the towel because I was just, you know, we were getting a couple hundred downloads here and there, and it was a lot of fun, but I don't know that I was actually reaching anyone.

And a woman in Ireland wrote to me saying that she used to listen to these episodes when she was milking her cows.

Harry Morton: Amazing.

Jeff Umbro: And that email kept me going for three more years. So I'm just like, “I gotta do it for Kirin,” or whoever it was, you know? It was so good, but –

Harry Morton: That's awesome.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. The reason I mention that story is because I think that you can dive into metrics or KPIs as much as you want, but really what it comes down to is what are you trying to achieve? Is your goal just to make someone who's milking her cows happy, or is it to make a couple sales, or is it to increase your thought leadership and your marketing leverage or collateral?

You have to answer that question before you can decide what to pay attention to.

This is a very particular question for you, but Lower Street is so good at really messaging what you do and the services and the value that you can provide to your clients. You're really concise and accurate, and I go to your website or I watch one of your interviews or go on your Twitter, like, I know what I'm gonna get.

It's funny because you and I just met in person for the first time three, four months ago and I feel like I've known you for years because of the way that you are messaging and branding all of what you're doing. And so I guess my question is how do you think about that, like how intentional is it?

How much time do you spend to try and position you and your company in that space? And it might be a dumb question, maybe it's just what naturally happens as you do the work, but I thought I would ask to see if you put any thought and consideration into it?

Harry Morton: I mean that's wonderful to hear. Thank you for saying it. It's awesome.

It's definitely on purpose. I guess I wouldn't say necessarily that it bleeds into, until now, because it's actually something I'm currently focused on. It's like my personal brand and what I'm talking about is something I'm putting effort into focusing on right now.

So it's cool to hear that you think that what I say on Twitter is consistent with that because I try not to complain too much about, like, the queue at the post office or, you know, the latest vaccine that I just had or whatever, but no, on the website, the way that we message things, that was very particular.

We spent a lot of time thinking about who we are trying to reach, and what do they care about, and how do we message that. We work with a really talented copywriter. Shout out Lianna Patch. She's awesome. [She] helped us to sort of refine that into the words that you see on the website. So it is something we think about a lot and it's something we're working on constantly because the podcasting space is changing.

Content marketing is changing, and B2B marketing is changing all the time. And also, frankly, just in full transparency, one of the big challenges that we have is that what we offer is quite specific. It's podcasting for brands. That makes it really hard, for me at least, to kind of really speak to a very specific subset of our client base because we've got clients who are Fortune 500 massive brands and we've got mom and pop shop agencies on the other end who are also awesome clients.

So we serve a huge spectrum of people because of what we do being so specific and niche. So, it's really easy to talk about what we do in podcasting, but to be able to position that in a way that that resonates equally with brand A and brand B is super hard. So, it's an ongoing challenge, but yeah. Appreciate the feedback mate. Thank you.

Jeff Umbro: On that note though, I'm curious because, this is kind of a new distinction that I'm starting to see pop up, but you have these branded shops globally or in the US or North America, like Jar Audio, Pacific Content.

But then you also have the branded shops attached to some of the larger organizations.

Harry Morton: Yes.

Jeff Umbro: Like Ruby at iHeart.

Harry Morton: Yep.

Jeff Umbro: Formerly Spotify studios. Now just Spotify, I think. Still Spotify Studios actually. But do you find that you're competing against these like, you know, big monster shops like the Spotify’s and Serial’s of the world?

Harry Morton: One of the really interesting things is that when we're speaking to folks about a show, so rarely do they mention any of these names that you've just mentioned. So Fresh Air in the UK or Pacific Content or Jar Audio, it's pretty rare that they mention that they're speaking to these other companies.

It's a pretty fragmented space at the moment, it seems to me, and the way that people are discovering the companies that they wanna work with is also fragmented. And so I think what I see is, the biggest challenge as I personally see it, is really educating buyers in branded specifically, because the analogy I'm coming back to time and again at the moment is that to the untrained eye, so like a Toyota doesn't look that much different to a high-end Mercedes, right?

Like they’ve both got four wheels. They’ve both got a steering wheel, brakes, like they get you from A to B, they're vehicles, right? And so I think to the untrained B2B marketer's eye, or ear, a podcast is a podcast. Are people talking on a mic and it's audio and you put it out on the internet? Yes. Fine. And it's very difficult until they've had a conversation with us to understand the difference between what we do and what Resonate Recordings, let's say, or you know, insert anyone who's just like, “We'll edit your audio for 250 bucks,” or whatever it is, you know.

Jeff Umbro: It's so funny now because when you look at these branded agencies and marketing companies and everything else, like for the last decade, every one of these companies for the most part has been running on word of mouth.

Like your CMO friend at one organization will tell their friend at another, “I use Lower Street or Jar or whatever, you should go to them.” Or maybe they’re moving from one organization to another and bringing the business. But now I do find that in 2023 and in the last couple years, a lot of these organizations have gotten a lot smarter at content marketing, email, web, SEO, social media, doing interviews like this.

And so it's very funny to me because it's like you have this homegrown industry that's starting to like, you know, it was born officially like 20 years ago and now it's in its early adulthood or teenage years or whatever. And I'm very interested to see kind of where this is 10 years from now, because other industries, like they live and breathe off of their online marketing savvy.

Harry Morton: Absolutely, we're headed that way. It's been the wild west for the first little while here, and I think that what we're seeing now is the name of the game for me at this point is education. Like I think everybody knows that podcasting is a thing. Everybody knows that it was hot thing in 2020. I think there's this slight perception that that hot thing has now died, and everyone's kind of bored of it.

But we all know that that's just the correction and we're just continuing on our path of continuous growth. But I think that –

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, this thing's not even close to dead.

Harry Morton: Right. But if you were to look at 20 years ago, video or social media advertising, no one really understood or knew what they were doing there either, and it was this developing thing and agencies were popping up. And again, it was that word of mouth thing.

I think that's exactly the part of the life cycle that we're in. Our job right now is to educate marketers that are buying this stuff on what it means, how to use it, how it works, what it is, what it isn't.

And I think in another five, 10 years time, it's gonna be very comparable to what we see in other sides of digital marketing. So we're all gonna have to start upping our sales and content marketing game to stay in line with that basically.

Jeff Umbro: Which terrifies me, but also welcome to Podcast Perspectives.

Harry Morton: Exactly.

Jeff Umbro: So anyway, Harry, we'll let you get going, but thank you so much for joining us today. This was a lot of fun.

Harry Morton: Yeah, it was. Thanks for having me, Jeff. Cheers.