The Show is on the Road.
I may have hinted at this before. In fact, we did a whole session at the Podcast Show, but this is the week when our biggest project so far went live. Show on The Road from Auto Trader UK is, without a doubt, one of the most ambitious brand podcast projects ever undertaken in the UK, and it’s OUT NOW.
How do you create a podcast for a car brand without it being for petrol-heads? And how do you make a podcast with celebrity guests that provoke new and interesting conversations? The answer: You get out on the road and take famous guests around their favourite places in a car that they’re excited about. Voila: ‘just enough car’, and a mass-appeal piece of audio entertainment with genuinely moving content.
For the last two months, we’ve been driving around Britain with guests from Jill Scott to Iain Stirling and Scarlett Moffatt. We’ve played with the Ford Mach-E, the Mercedes G-Wagon, an electrified MG Midget, an Alpina B4 and other very fun motors, plus driven a snack-filled lead mini-bus, worked with a brilliant presenter/driver, and configured a whole load of gadgets.
There’s social content, wonderful artwork, guest social posts, a promotional campaign stretched across multiple platforms, video montages on the Auto Trader site, and, I kid you not, a competition involving a car full of potatoes. It’s what happens when a brand totally ‘gets’ podcasts and makes it central to their content strategy.
One day, we’ll write it all up in an epic case-study, and the Production team – Annie & Oli – will relay the whole thing to their respective therapists. But for now it’s been the biggest adventure with a result we’re hugely proud of.
We’d love you to listen, review and tell your friends.
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I Still haven’t had a Crisp Sandwich
Despite all the built-up last week, I never got to have a crisp sandwich. However, I do have a recording of Annie Day – Head of Snacks – talking about crisp sandwiches to a professional chef for 5 whole minutes.
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Doing the Cannes Cannes
One of the best things about Fresh Air is a lack of cultural hierarchy. We’re all a single team who really like each other and we don’t act like swankers*. If you know what I mean.
However, Richard – Director of Pressing Send on the Email – Michaela – Director of Content and Fierce Woman – and I are off to Cannes next week for the International Festival of Creativity. We’re there to see what it’s all about, have some lovely conversations and meet some brilliant people.
However, we’ve learnt that it’s genuinely impossible to talk about going to Cannes without sounding like a proper swanker. The three of us have needed to discuss flight times, diaries and access to beaches, but throughout this process we have been understandably mocked and snarled at by colleagues who are doing actual work for the whole week. It’s like trying to say you’re having lunch at Soho House without someone mentally doing hand gestures at you. Even my promise to bring home a stick of rock was met with derision and not a word of thanks.
Anyway, we’re there in Cannes from Tuesday to Thursday next week and we’d love to meet you if you’re there too. We can discuss podcasts, brands, or simply compare linen summer-wear in the sun while our colleagues back home do that work we’ve asked them to finish off for us. I’m definitely not becoming a media swanker. Not me, no.
?*Swanking (Verb, invented by Michaela DoCaFW) : The act of networking in a swanky environment with swanky people, looking swanky.
Peppa Pig Podcast
Who is the greatest literary character in the English Language? Hamlet? Sherlock Holmes? Jay Gatsby? No, don’t be silly, it’s Daddy Pig.
What’s the greatest line in British comedy? ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy’? ‘Don’t tell him Pike’? No, you idiot, it’s “I’m very sorry Officer. I don’t know what I did, but I won’t do it again.”
Honestly, recording a voice session with Richard Ridings – the voice of Daddy Pig – was one of the greatest thrills of my career and, if you’re like me, you’ll be excited that the worlds of audio and Peppa Pig are coming together to create a whole new series for Audible.
There’s nothing to show for it yet, but it’s in development and the only sad thing to say is that Fresh Air won’t be making it. Despite children’s audio obviously being a great thing (car journeys and kitchens with Amazon Alexa are perfect arenas) it’s always been tricky to crack in terms of monetization. But fingers crossed this breaks new ground for bringing children’s audio content into the mainstream, and (shhhh) we’ve been talking a lot about it recently too.
And our wonderful recommends this week...
Jayne Morgan didn’t want to like this recommend...??
领英推荐
I didn’t want to like Educating Daisy. I didn’t even want to listen to it. Partly because, I don’t know if it’s true where you are but, I live in London and everywhere I looked there was an ad for the wretched thing which just made me mutinous. But mainly because I have a huge beef with over-exposed, smug comedians talking bollocks to their mates for a barely edited hour and calling it a podcast. However, I was recently blown away by Daisy May Cooper’s uncategorisable TV show, Am I? Being Unreasonable? so I ventured in. Blow me down, she’s played another blinder. The premise is simple. DMC hasn’t read a book since GCSE English – and even then she got an A* by learning To Kill A Mockingbird crib notes off the web but never actually opening it. So she’s getting various mates (yes … we’re veering dangerously close) to bring her a book and to try and convince her to read it. But instead of overlong self-indulgent drivel played for easy laughs, we get six highly listenable and entertaining conversations. Daisy is authentically and quite charmingly completely clueless – she says that the only thing she knew about Salman Rushdie was that he was an extra in Bridget Jones’ Diary and I don’t think she’s making it up – and her persuaders – including Tim Key, Nish Kumar, Katy Price, Jamali Maddix, Diane Morgan (this is the best one) and Alan Carr (who brilliantly realises he’s told the producers the wrong book half way through) – are sincere in their attempts to get her interested in books they genuinely love. It’s funny, has just enough format to keep up the momentum, has that feeling of revealing a slightly different side to those people who are usually just trying to get laughs (ironically, Nish Kumar is much funnier when he’s not trying to be), has laugh out loud moments and moments of rueful shared recognition when they say things we’ve all thought – like why does Dickens have to take SO many pages to describe someone’s coat or the wallpaper in Mrs Mungwash’s back parlour? I binged listened the whole thing in an afternoon. Give it a go.
Julie-Anna Needham recommends...
I’ve recently finished Filthy Ritual. A tale about a ‘shamanic’ scammer who targeted Hampstead's wealthy residents and got a well-connected but down-on-his-luck osteopath to do her bidding.
This tale is both sad and sometimes farcical: some victims were told they had cancer but could save themselves by making sacrifices of large sums of money to be pinned on a tree in Suriname. The victims not only lost tens of thousands but also their trust in their friends and in their own judgement.?
The presenters (Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala of RedHanded) bring sensitivity combined with a lightness of touch that suits this story.
What really makes this series work brilliantly are the thoughtful interviews with many of the victims. Their sense of shame and embarrassment at falling victim to the con is still apparent more than a decade on.
What have we been listening to this week?
At its best, the BBC pushes the boundaries of broadcast and non-broadcast content in a way that commercial channels couldn’t. The unique remit means the corporation can afford the time and space to be genuinely creative and innovative purely for the sake of trying new ideas. It employs world leading experts to break new technical ground, and brilliant creative minds to indulge whole new ideas.
So thankfully the BBC has taken time out from knocking out a cheeky new podcast series with Jamie Laing to do something really interesting. They’ve called it Adaptive Podcasting and it takes data from your phone to alter a classical music mix to your surroundings.
If you’ve got an Android phone, please try it out and let me know what you think.
What have we been doing this week?
Yesterday, I got my face and ears waxed. I only went in for a haircut and the lady said ‘would you like hot wax on your face and ears?’.?
My first thought was not ‘Will it hurt?’, or ‘How much will it improve my appearance?’.
I swear my first thought was ‘Well, I’m short of content for the newsletter, so why not?’. So I did it for you, dear reader.
It really really hurt. It hurt my nose and my ears and my forehead and the bit next to my eyes that I don’t think there’s a name for. Actually, they’re called temples aren’t they? Yes, temples. They hurt too.
But, to be fair, my ears are now as smooth as a baby’s bum. A baby’s bum that’s been covered in hot wax. No, that’s wrong. Anyway, my ears are smooth and I will be asking all my new friends in Cannes to stroke them.