Episode 235
Paul Suchman, Audacy multiplatform audio powerhouse
For marketers, creating a powerful connection with consumers is key — and audio plays an important role in that connection.
Audio branding and radio expert Paul Suchman has dedicated his career to honing audio into the perfect tool of engagement for brands large and small. We recently had the chance to sit down with Paul to discuss what it takes to create powerful audio brand experiences, as well as how you can get started leveraging sound in your own marketing efforts.
Audacy is a production company specializing in creating narrative audio content for brands, agencies, and networks. "We're always looking for new ways to push the boundaries of storytelling through sound," Paul says. "It's really exciting because there are so many different components that go into producing great audio – sound design, music composition, voice direction – all of these things come together to make something special. But I think the most important thing is finding a way to tell a story that resonates with listeners. That's the key to success."
It's truly an art form, and there are endless possibilities that come with creating audio content. You never know what kind of stories you're going to uncover and how they'll be received by your audience. That's what makes it so exciting!
"At Audacy we pride ourselves on having some of the best producers in the industry – people who understand how important storytelling is and know how to craft something special out of their work. Our team works hard to ensure that the audio content we create accurately reflects our brand and its values," Paul says.
Since Audacy rebranded from Entercom, the team has been working diligently to uphold the mission behind it. "We've worked on creating memorable audio content that resonates with our audience and is in line with our brand identity. We want people to feel like they're connected to us, whether through a podcast or a radio show, and recognize the work that goes into making this content," Paul described. "We are continuously pushing ourselves to create something new and innovative while staying true to who Audacy is as a company – a conglomeration of many different audio brands coming together under one roof. It's an ongoing process, but we believe it's the best way to keep our partners and advertisers engaged and looking forward to what comes next. We strive to maintain a level of transparency when it comes to how we are creating, distributing, and marketing our content so that everyone involved has an understanding of where their investments are going."
"We also want to make sure that our team is supported in any way possible – with the right tools, resources, guidance, etc. Our goal is for everyone who interacts with Audacy's brand experience to feel good about what they're getting out of it so that they keep coming back again and again. We believe this is how businesses can not only survive but thrive in today's competitive audio landscape," Paul says.
To accomplish this, Paul says they focus on creating a comprehensive experience from the moment our partners decide to advertise with us. Audacy offers detailed insights into our listener base and track their engagement with our content so that they have an accurate understanding of how their campaigns are performing.
We also strive to provide regular updates throughout the entire process – from initial strategy meetings before the campaign even launches, to analyzing metrics after it is completed – in order to give everyone involved a clear picture of what has been achieved and where there is still room for improvement.
At Audacy, we understand that brand experience matters and are committed to delivering unparalleled support and service to ensure each business partner's success. That's why we constantly refine our approach based on feedback, find and develop new research methods, and continually look for ways to improve our performance.
We also place a lot of importance on building strong relationships with our partners, so that we can work together towards common goals. We want to ensure that everyone involved in the process feels confident and excited about how their campaigns are being managed on our platform. In doing so, we believe that both Audacy and our business partners will experience greater success.
It's all about creating an effective brand experience for our advertising partners – one that makes them feel supported during each step of the campaign journey. With this goal in mind, we continuously strive to provide valuable insights through data-driven decisions and feedback from both sides so they can get the most out of their partnership with us. We also ensure that each campaign is as efficient and effective as possible by streamlining our process to provide the most relevant, up-to-date information in real time. By doing this, we can be sure that our advertising partners feel taken care of throughout their campaigns with Audacy.
We are dedicated to fostering relationships with all stakeholders – from those who use our content to those who advertise on it – because we know that collaboration is key to success in today's ever-evolving digital landscape. Our goal is for everyone involved in these partnerships to come out better for it and for Audacy to continue being an industry leader. That’s why we put so much effort into creating a brand experience
Thank you for joining us today, Paul. As the Chief Marketing Officer at Audacy, Paul's insights on how to create moments of listening and motivate audio content creators are invaluable. We especially appreciate his advice to focus our efforts on great content and a great brand experience. Your words have inspired us and we can't wait to see what Audacy achieves in the future.
Copyright 2024 Mark Stinson
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Well, welcome back friends to our podcast, unlocking Your World of Creativity. And the keys to unlocking our creativity are often in the creative use of the medium. And these days, audio content creative for audio of all kinds, podcasts, radio, audio dramas is at the forefront of our mind. And today we have a guest that can really give us insight into the past, present, and future of audio. And that's Paul Suchman of Audacy. Paul, welcome to the program.
Speaker 2:
Mark. Thanks. It's a treat to be here and I appreciate the opportunity to connect with your audience.
Speaker 1:
Well, great. Well, as the chief marketing officer you've really got your hands full in navigating this marketing process and branding for this large network of audio brands. What's the state of? The State
Speaker 2:
Of the state is good. One of the things you said in your opening soliloquy stuck with me, and I think it's the answer of why audio. You said you were talking about things that are in the front of our mind. And I think the thing that over these last couple of years that has struck me about why audio has been on this meteorological rise with advertisers, with consumers all over the globe is because it is visualist medium. And when you have no visual biases and it, it's just sound going into your ears and then into your mind, your brain and your body are free to be part of the story that is creating and you are creating that story in your own mind theater of the mind, that visualization of words and sound. And I think that that has what has listeners wrapped and that is what is bringing advertisers there. And I think there's never been a better time to be in this audio business.
Speaker 1:
Well, great. And it's certainly a challenge and we want to get into all of that. I want to talk about the moments that you see listeners using audio. You just published a great report, the 11 Moments of audio, but I also want to talk about the branding and rebranding process of Audacy and then your involvement with universities and their journalism and their content creation programs and what you see as the future. And of course, I even want to talk about an alternate universe where the chief marketing officer really becomes an oceanographer, not a marketing guru. So we've got some great stories to tell Paul.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:
So why don't we start with this thought leadership piece then. I mean, audio used to be thought of as almost a background medium. I got the radio plane in the background, I got some music playing. But you guys have really defined through some research now that it really fits into a listener's day a lot more than we ever thought it would.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's exactly right. So we publish thought Leadership twice a year. We do it under the title, the State of Audio, and we focus on different topics. And this one came from a hypothesis question that we had in understanding all of the unique characteristics of audio. As I was saying in the beginning, it's screenless, it's ubiquitous, it goes with you wherever you are. It has the opportunity to be actively consumed while you're actively doing something else. You could be exercising and actively consuming audio. You could be driving, you could be just laying with your eyes closed and there's no other medium that lets you do that. So with that as a known entity, we had a question, and the question we asked ourselves is understanding that people are very ritualistic. They live their lives in a series of rituals or habits that they perform each day.
And then understanding that audio can be with them in any of these rituals. We wanted to understand what was the role of audio in people's rituals and what did that mean? What was then the opportunity for advertisers to take advantage of that? So that was the basic question we set out to answer. And the research we did, we did ethno ethnographic research we did lots and lots of interviews. We did lots and lots of surveys. So it's a statistically rich piece of research as well. And what we uncovered were that yes, people do live their lives in a series of rituals, and they do that because it makes life more predictable, it makes accomplishment more probable it gives you satisfaction in your day and it gives you comfort in your day. And with that, we've found that audio plays a huge role in these rituals. And we identified 11 real moments that where audio was not only part of the ritual, but in cases enhancing the ritual or driving the ritual itself. So it was really fascinating to see it Mark.
Speaker 1:
Well, and as a podcaster myself, we often imagine where is our listener walking the dog, Dr. Driving in the carpool? I thought there were some surprising rituals though. For example, staying in the car until my favorite interview or song or program is over, I found myself doing that as well.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely. And even people driving longer routes or really just sitting in their driveway until the segment of the radio program is over until the episode of the podcast is finished until the playlist is done on the stream, we found that people will, again, that's a ritual or it becomes the ritual itself. I'm going to take the long route or I'm going to leave my home at this time because I know I wanna catch this segment on this sports program. Very interesting stuff.
Speaker 1:
It is. Well, and listeners, if you're making the block right now, we have a few more minutes of insightful
Speaker 2:
It's going really well for me as a marketer, as a creative person, it has been the single biggest, hardest and most rewarding challenge that I have ever worked on professionally. Just amazing. And again, we don't need to rehash a year and a half, but the basic issue we were solving for was that Audacy was a house of brands. There were 250 of best radio stations around the country, second largest commercial producer, creator, distributor of podcasts, a streaming business called radio.com and a live events business. All really disconnected and that wasn't serving our listeners, nor was it serving our advertising partners. So that was the genesis of it. And here we are a year later and we're finding that it, it's starting to land.
Our listeners are not only identifying with the stations, they listen to the podcasts, they listen to the stream, they listen to the events they go to, but they understand that it's from Audacy. So we're building equity with consumers now. We have more work to do, but we're absolutely building equity. And for our advertising partners, we've made it easier to buy this multi-platform offering called Audacy. One of the challenges that we do have is that within the audio space there are some established giants and we recognize that and we relish that. So we behave, we work like a challenger brand within the industry. And allowing ourselves to do that is an incredibly liberating experience. Being a challenger brand is fun. You have to be more nimble, you have to work faster and harder. You have less dollars to spend. So you need to make every single dollar work harder and deliver better roi. and we're having a lot of fun doing it. I mean a never ending battle, but we're having a great time with
Speaker 1:
It. Terrific. Well, and you mentioned something about working with advertisers and making it easier for them. And I think we, marketers and branders often look at the, what would I say, the visible, the top layer, great sonic branding, great visual brand, great music brand and so forth. But you're kind of talking about under the hood operational stuff that really is the brand experience for your business partners. I'd love to hear more about how you've created that experience for the business and advertisers.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely. So what we recognize about our listeners, our advertising partners, they love our content, they love our brands they love our hosts, they love our personalities. But at the end of the day, they are really on our platform to connect with our audience, to connect with our 200 million listeners in very meaningful ways. And they believe in audio for all the reasons we just talked about with the research. People are so engaged with the medium and when they're deeply engaged with their content, they're more receptive to advertiser messages. So finding ways for advertisers to insert themselves into the content, into the hosts, into the brands, into the programs in really additive meaningful ways is the promise that we deliver to our advertisers. And the second thing that we recognize is, is that audio consumption varies throughout the day. People are listening over the air to A M F M radio, people are listening on the app, they're streaming their favorite station, or they're streaming an exclusive channel, or they're rewinding and listening to a different show, or they're consuming a podcast. So we know that listening varies on device. And by the way, of course they're listening in their car, they're listening on smart speakers, they're listening on their phone, they're listening on their laptop, they're listening on virtually every device. So the idea of the brand bringing it all together under the brand for advertisers is that we can be with those listeners throughout every single part of the day across virtually every device whenever our listeners wanna be with us. And that is really, really compelling to our advertising partners.
Speaker 1:
Yes. Well, and the metrics have certainly evolved over the years, used to be just what are the ratings? Let's look at the quarterly book and see what the ratings are of the station now streams and downloads and infinite number of metrics. And of course you mentioned what a tough market that says Wall Street gets a vote in this too, and they sometimes can be punishing. But as you look at this dashboard of metrics what's on your mind?
Speaker 2:
It's a great question. When I look at that dashboard of metrics we hold ourselves accountable to our advertisers. So the audio game in and of itself has changed from a discussion of reach to one of reach frequency and precision. So we're holding ourselves accountable to the same reach metrics that really put radio on the map in the very beginning, capital R Radio we're holding ourselves accountable to those frequency metrics as well. But now with so much of our content being delivered digitally we are able to target audiences and measure how that advertising is resonating and performing with precision that we never had before. So we have precision metrics that sit on top of that. So that's ultimately the scorecard when you get away from the revenue, right? We're a public facing company, we need to grow revenue, but when we're delivering for our advertisers day in and day out, it is about delivering them that audience at scale with precision and with campaigns that work.
And at the same time, on the listener side, it's about keeping our listeners engaged, getting more share of ear, our listeners. We don't really compete with just other audio brands. We're competing with virtually every media brand on the planet. If a human being has time to consume media, we want them to spend that time with audio and we want them to spend that time with Audacy content. So we are always in the mode of learning and keeping our listeners trust and growing that audience. And those are the metrics. It really is that simple. I mean it's not simple, but it's that
Speaker 1:
It's simple to define.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's really, really
Speaker 1:
Hard. I think it's worth pre framing for our listeners and underscoring this reach frequency, which we've all known forever, but now precision. I love the addition of that. And does that speak to the content creators as well? I mean, should we be thinking more about a precise audience that can be well defined and well honed in on instead of just creating general good audio content?
Speaker 2:
It's a great question. I think great content finds its audience and your content creator. And I think what makes all these content creators unique, whether they're sports content creators or news content creators, music content creators, whether they're storytellers and podcasters, it's their voice and their perspective and their stories that the listeners are there for. I think the question becomes how do you connect the right brands in the right moments to that content versus somebody changing their story, changing their personality to fit the advertiser mentality because then they're not going to be authentic anymore. And smart people will see right through that. So I think that the challenge is and really the great opportunity is thinking about our advertisers, brands thinking about their messages, thinking about their audiences, thinking about the rituals that they can play in and aligning them with the right subset of content creators.
Speaker 1:
Very helpful, very encouraging, really for content creators. And maybe that leads me to my question about the future, both for audio content and these audio content creators. You have a unique vantage point in working with a couple of boards of universities. What is your sense of the future content creators coming up and how the universities are training them or how they're driving what they need to learn? What's your viewpoint on this?
Speaker 2:
My viewpoint is going to be very biased cuz I grew up in that creative world and I still believe in my heart that great creative, great work, great content is the great differentiator and there will always be a premium on that as well as great storytelling. And what I see in getting the opportunity to work with universities, and I assume you're talking about USC and the University of Oregon, right? I have the great privilege of spending time with students and I will tell you there are some really smart passionate people in the university system right now. And there is a love of great creativity and a love of storytelling. And one of the things that always sticks with me is I come in and the conversation starts as an audio conversation. But what you're seeing is that these people are so digital native and so fluid that they can move between a broadcast to a digital, to an audio, to a TikTok, to a Facebook, to an Instagram to a Twitter spaces, to back into a radio conversation really seamlessly.
And I think they are putting the premium on the story itself and telling it across the best medium to tell that story and telling it across all mediums. And by the way, I think that is probably underscored too, by the way. You're seeing talent out in the marketplace doing the exact same thing. You have talent that is broadcast talent that now has a podcast and go, or are you seeing radio talent coming onto the stream for a fifth hour? So talent is moving between mediums and audiences are following them. So I think that students, the universities that I have the great privilege of spending time with, they absolutely love audio. They see it as a critical tool in their war chest. They see it as the great place to tell stories and they see it for its role in the larger media ecosystem.
Speaker 1:
And I love that passion being the fuel, whatever they absolutely wanna get out. Yes. Well, let's go back a little ways in your story, Paul. I read a great profile in Adweek magazine that said, oh my gosh, you could have been an oceanographer that you had a passion back in the day and there must have been a fork in the road moment. But you had once said, Hey, maybe I'll go to school for oceanography because of I love of ocean and did I read this right, sharks in particular?
Speaker 2:
Well, that's right. And I will tell you something, nobody believes it, mark, I don't expect you to believe this because nobody has, and I've said this dozens and dozens of times, but Shark Week was my idea. I had it before there was a shark week. Yeah,
Speaker 1:
I love that.
Speaker 2:
And those meanings at discovery took it away from me, but when I was a student so I went to usc, which is why I stay, I connected to that university. I have a deep love and respect for it. I had a dual major. I was majoring in integrated marketing, which I hate dating myself, but integrated marketing back then meant something very different than it does today and ocean sciences. And my plan was I really wanted to make films about sharks. I wanted to go to film school. And when I graduated from school, I had taken all the biology prerequisites and I was going to go to Scripps in San Diego and study ocean sciences, study marine biology and study film. And instead I wound up pushing it a semester or pushing it a year and taking a surf trip with some friends. That was supposed to be just a couple of months, but it turned into a year, almost a year and a half.
And that's another story. When I came back my folks said, that's wonderful you went and did that. You need to go get a job now. It's need to start to work. So I kept pushing that dream down the road while I went and built a career so I could live and eat and have a car and do all those things that you need to do when you get out of a university environment. And all of a sudden I started to really fall in love with the craft of advertising and marketing and I just went full on to do that. If I could go back, if I could get in the way back time machine and go back I think I would pursue the oceanography thing and
Speaker 1:
Isn't to think about
Speaker 2:
Speaker 1:
Well Paul, what a great conversation. Can't thank you enough for sharing both your experience, your insights, and this idea of passion. And I guess I'd love to close on this, Paul, and that is a lot of times in this podcast we talk about the tools and techniques and methods and so forth, but it does come down often to the confidence to get our workout. We believe in the story, but sometimes we're just should I hit the published button? Should I produce the podcast? It is a commitment. Should I reach out and make those connections? What is your view on this and what encouragement you could you provide our listeners in the area of confidence?
Speaker 2:
I think that again, another really, really good question. I think that there are so many to stories that still need to be told, and there's so many different perspectives out there that it's important that we do tell that story. And particularly in audio, when you're putting those stories out there, you may not be sure who you're connecting with, but there's lots of like-minded people out there who want to hear the story, who want to experience the content, who need to hear it. And I think that we as storytellers, as content creators, as creative champions, we need to be strong and tell those stories and have the confidence in our voice in storytelling to do that. And we're going to continue to get better at it. We're going to continue to evolve and we're get tomatoes thrown at us and that's okay. There's no failure. There's just opportunity to learn. There's nothing like a good story, a good piece of content and audio is just such an amazing medium to do it. And I go back to what I said at the beginning, you have theater of the mind on your side. You can bring listeners into your story and let them take that story and make it their own. And there's no other medium. I'll let you do that. I couldn't be more excited about this next generation of content creators.
Speaker 1:
Oh, fantastic. Thanks for sharing that excitement with us. My guest has been Paul Suchmanchief Marketing Officer of Audacy. Paul, thanks again for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:
Mark, thank you again for having me.
Speaker 1:
And we'll put all the links to Paul's profile and Audacy in the show notes as well. And listeners, we travel around the world certainly, but we also travel around the world of different creative outlets and mediums and passions. We talked to restaurateurs, we talked to scientists and inventors and of course authors and songwriters. And imagine all of these people having a story that they could tell on audio. I think Paul's given us the idea and maybe the encouragement to tell our story and show share that passion with the rest of the world through audio content. And we really appreciate Paul being a guest. So come back again next time we'll continue around the world journeys talking to creative practitioners everywhere about how they get inspired, how they organize their ideas, and most of all, how they gain the confidence and the connections to launch their work out into the world. So until next time, I'm Mark Stinson and we're unlocking your world of creativity. See you, soon.
