Should I apply to the House of Lords?

How are you?

Oh that’s nice / I’m sorry to hear that*

*Delete as appropriate.

I get a lot of spam email. I’m sure you do too, excluding this one I just sent to you which definitely isn’t spam. But yesterday morning I got my favourite message ever. The title was ‘House of Lords Application’ and the opening paragraph read:?

Dear Neil,

I am contacting you to see if you have ever considered applying to the House of Lords. Reviewing your profile, you are a good fit for the type of candidate who is encouraged to apply to become a cross-bencher or political peer.

Further down, the nice email person states that ‘we are solely interested in serious contenders’. Now, I don’t want to do myself down and it’s clear that the current government is a little short of ‘talent’, but why me? A reward for services to podcast-related newsletters? Is Boris Johnson secretly my father? Is The House of Lords trying to find a way of getting its own podcast on the cheap?

I’m certainly well qualified as a ‘serious contender’. I’m a white, middle-aged, middle-class man with some ill-informed opinions and a tendency to fall asleep in awkward situations. If I had the time, I’d respond to the email and fill in the application form just to see how far I could get, but mainly to use the results for future newsletter content. I like a good robe, and Lord Cowling of Swindon has a certain ring to it.

We’ve been on a podcast (without Richard)

Who are Fresh Air? What do they do all day? What makes them any good at it? How did Neil and Michaela meet? How do brands make a podcast and not just a big advert? What is the Burger Murders thing all about? All these questions can be answered by listening to this week’s Radio Academy Podcast which is a special interview with Michaela Hallam (King) – Director of Content and Fierce Woman – and me.

Richard Blake – Director of Pressing Send on the Email – was sadly not asked to take part in this podcast, which has not gone unnoticed. By him. Hayley – the presenter and producer of the show – requested a nice picture of Michaela DoCaFW and I together, but there was only one we liked, which was taken at last week’s Lovie Awards. Given that it was originally a photo of all three of us, we had to carefully crop Richard out. This has also not gone unnoticed. Please can someone invite Richard onto a podcast in the next couple of weeks just to even the balance out?

Acast & Proximic

I know we’re all gutted about the imminent demise of the third-party cookie. Who doesn’t love knowing that they probably just clicked on a thing that will report back to another thing about that thing they did and then follow them around forever?

Well, with such cookies on the way out soon and some of the less imaginative members of the advertising industry having sleepless nights about it, acast has done a deal with Proximic to allow advertisers to buy cookie-free audience targeting. Proximic’s first party data sets and AI predictive models will allow you to reach people through podcasts. For so long we’ve been almost apologetic about podcasting’s lack of data, tracking and targeting capability. Anything that helps with that is great news and we really look forward to seeing it in action.

Direct Response performance

Still in the world of podcast advertising, the other element that’s been lagging behind in the UK is direct response advertising. Well, if it’s DR campaigns that float your boat / pay your salary then there’s a new tool to help you work out which podcasts are likely to be most effective.

Performance+ from Podchaser analyses the behaviour of a podcast’s audience and their likeliness to respond to a Direct Response message. So it can go beyond the simple audience reach figures, to understand elements such as back catalogue listening, schedules and streaming versus downloads, and then recommend which show you should spend your money on. As I always say to my wife, never mind the size; performance is everything. She’s a big fan of predictive direct marketing tools and loves this newsletter.

Making Things Sound Much Much Better

I know a new AI tool is a bit of a yawn, but some of the things we’re now able to do with audio are really astonishing. For instance, reverb has always been a nightmare for sound editors. We could turn some EQ buttons and make you sound a bit bassier or tinnier if you wanted, but if you’re in an echoey room there was really nothing you could do about it. The only solution was a duvet over your head before you started recording. Nowadays, the ability to remove reverberation is there at the touch of a button. I’m not saying it’s perfect but the improvements are huge.

Another issue has always been a speaker being ‘off-mic’ – i.e. sounding like they’re too far away or a looking in the wrong direction. This has been especially noticeable with the increasing use of remote recording, when a producer can’t be there to set up a guest’s mic or settings. Again, previously we’d have said there was nothing we could do.

So a round of applause please for ‘Adobe Podcast Enhance’ – a system still in BETA, but which could change the game for improving sound quality in even the trickiest recordings. Please check out some of the samples on this brilliantly geeky blog and marvel at the possibilities, especially the clip recorded in a conservatory. It is, in short, a miracle-working robot turd-polisher. And God knows, we all need one of those from time to time.

Our Podcast Recommends are below..

Welcome to Clara Kavanagh 's House of Gossip...

I hope you don’t mind this shameless plug! My own podcast House of Gossip has just undergone somewhat of a renaissance - shedding its former name of Thirty, Flirty & Perishing to become House of Gossip. Whilst my co-host Sophie and I are not the most domestic of women, if there’s one house we can manage, it’s the House of Gossip - a weekly dose of pop culture nourishment. As resident Creative Directors, we are in the gossip closet serving up the latest juicy topics worthy of our carefully curated analysis. Every Tuesday, we sashay onto the factory floor of entertainment and cover breaking scandals, give general celebrity commentary and everything in between.

Listen here.

Martin Poyntz-Roberts returns to claim his throne...

Crass, puerile, loud, rude and funny, Kevin Riley and H. Foley are two US comics who run this show (now on episode goodness knows what, but in the hundreds..). ? The objective is for the duo to interrogate their guests (mainly other comedians) with questions designed to work out whether the guest is classy or, as the title suggests, Garbage. Starting with their back story, such as where they came from, what their childhood was like, who raised them and what their family tree is like, they progress towards the far more high-brow, analytical questions such as do you cook or eat out (Steve-O, guest in the current episode, is a massive fan of Taco Bell), what sort of fridge he owns and whether he has a pool or not. It’s toss away stuff, but funny and a diversion from the serious stuff I usually fill my head with. Definitely worth a chuckle. And if you dip in and find the right episode with the right guest, you’ll love this. ? Favourite question so far? How do you swim in stilts?

Listen here.

What we've been listening to this week

Long term readers of this newsletter will know that I’m a big fan of noises from space. Partly because it’s always quite mind-blowing, and partly because it fills this section of the newsletter when I can’t think of anything else.?

So thanks to Ronnie Jones – our intrepid Devon-based producer who flagged up the launch of NASA+ – a streaming service from, well, NASA. There’s an incredible range of pictures, videos, documentaries and archive on there to properly blow your mind.

But whadayaknow? There’s also a load of brilliant audio too. There’s their podcasts and a whole variety of sounds to lose yourself in, from a recording of a ‘Marsquake’ to the Space Shuttle taking off, and ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ to data that’s been turned into a ringtone (which we all know is a made-up thing). Honestly, you could spend hours there, and it’s the main reason I’m late delivering this newsletter to Richard again.

What we've been doing?this week

On Monday night, I went to see ‘Dear England’ at the Prince Edward theatre, which I’d thoroughly recommend if you’re an England fan and have a deep emotional connection to the story of Gareth Southgate. Surely that’s all of us, right?

Throughout the story, Southgate’s partner in the development of the young team is Pippa Grange – an Australian sports psychologist. It’s refreshing to go to a play with no prior knowledge of the cast or the plot, but the accent fooled me and I spent the whole time trying to work out where I knew the actress from. I learnt later that she was the brilliant Ballykissangel star Dervla Kirwan. However, with about 15 minutes to go, I had fully decided that it was Jackie Woodburne - Susan Kennedy from Neighbours.