Peter Whitehead, the Financial Time’s Digital Business Editor is enthusiastically talking about Podcasts. They launched last year and thought of it as an add-on to the paper. It later became apparent that the podcast had to have it’s “own content and it’s own flavour and it’s own colour”. They decided to put some resources into it since, although it serves a small audience, it’s an important one – and they expect quality.
Trevor Dann, Director of the Radio Academy, is a Bafta award winning former BBC producer. “As far as I’m considered, what Peter [FT] is making is radio… it’s coming at us through different delivery systems…. on my ipod I’ve got bits of the Financial Times, The Guardian, the BBC… I’ve got the Arse Blogger… I still think of it as Radio…”
Guillaume du Gardnier, Director of Online Communications at Edelman, shows a video from MacBreak TV, a video podcast. He likes the content and the way it’s presented, because he likes the “real people” voice it has, and because he can subscribe to it and watch it whenever he wants – the freedom of it.
Guillaume makes a good point – podcasting works on a model that companies and advertisers already know because it’s one way. Because of this, it’s much less scary than getting into blogging, which is a two way conversation. Brands keep control of the message with podcasts and video. Peter Whitehead of the FT agrees – it’s not scary like doing stuff live.
And Say Hi to Peter too – he’s another good friend ;-) I should clearly be there,,,,