Taking The Creepy Out Of Personalized Podcasts

Personalization of podcast is filled with pitfalls, including a well-deserved reputation of being creepy. But the true benefits of personalized podcasting have nothing to do with making ads better.

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

Podcasting is a one-size-fits-all medium. We, the podcaster, you, the podcaster, create once, publish once, and it's distributed everywhere. So COPODE . But is that one-size-fits-all approach that you and I have been taking to podcasting really the best listener experience?

Now, I have to start by saying it is difficult to talk about personalization of podcasting without getting the side-eye from the privacy advocates out there. Hi Andrew. But that's only really because personalization has been a cover for so long of just privacy invading tactics that really just give you better ad targeting that can make the platforms more money.

I get, I understand, why people who are privacy advocates look at personalization askance because we've not done a fantastic job in lots of things. We've done some absolutely terrible things in the past, all under the name of personalization and making more relevant content when it's really not been that way.

But you know, better ads isn't really what humans want out of the deal. That's not what the - when I want something that is personalized for me, it's for me. Not what's personalized for you, the person giving the content to me. But we're humans, we want personalization, but because it's personalization, we want different things. What I want from personalization is different than what you want from personalization. And we each and every one of us want to reap the benefits of personalization.

I heard a great story recently that stuck in my head, which is why I want to talk about this today. It was, there's an Englishman - this is not a joke, by the way, the story came from an Englishman, and as an Englishman, he has a favorite pub and he's well-known in that favorite pub, and here's his story of personalization. For him, personalization is when he can walk into the pub, the bartender makes eye contact with him, and immediately the bartender begins pouring that Englishman's favorite pint. That is the perfect customer experience in his mind. Maybe he gets to skip ahead of the line. Maybe also, because he's known by the bartender, he can just put it on a tab that he pays at the end of the night. Who knows, right?

But what we do know is this, in order to figure that out, in order to make that personalized experience, the bartender didn't need to know this guy's birthday. The bartender doesn't need to know the address or even the zip code in which this gentleman lives. He just needed a certain amount of data, just the right amount of data, in this case, a beer preference, to deliver in his mind, the patron's mind, the perfect customer experience that is highly personalized.

Now, of course, that wouldn't work for me, being a craft beer nerd, I want to see what's on the menu. However, I can still have a personalized experience because I want that same bartender when I go up and say, "What's new tonight," that bartender would be able to skip all of the saisons, the lagers, and the hefes, and just go for the things that he knows my palate is into.

Of course, everything's there if I want to explore it. I'm not talking about limiting my choices. I'm just talking about getting a personalized experience that is likely what I want, because I have given some data to said bartender to make that personalized experience. They know my palate.

All right, enough talking about beer, Evo, what does this have to do with the podcast listening experience? How do we make a more personalized podcast experience? But more importantly, what might listeners want from a more personalized listening experience rather than the one-size-fits-all approach we give them today?

Well, let's see. For example, here, Podcast Pontifications, this show that I do four days a week. Maybe there's someone out there who only wants to get certain sections. Maybe they only want to hear my thoughts on listener experience, like this episode, and maybe future forward thinking, another topic I have, or perspective shifts, another category. Maybe just those three things are what they would like to have sent down to them. That's the ones that they get the most value out of.

Again, I'm not stopping producing any of the rest of the content, but that person just wants perhaps those three topics sent out to them. If they wish to see what else has happened, maybe I don't talk about those for a week or so, maybe there's something that comes up where they can then go back and look at all the episodes. I mean, they're all available. Everything's in there, but maybe their app only gets a notification sent to them when it meets these particular criteria. Who knows.

Or maybe there's a listener out there, we'll use The Geologic Podcast, a show by a friend of mine, George Hrab. Maybe that listener wants a much shorter experience with only comedy, or more comedy, I guess I should say, and less science because George does a good mix of comedy and science. I don't know why somebody would want that, but regardless - more comedy, less science. So maybe they're going to opt out of the science-y stuff like Interesting Fauna, or Rupert  McClanahan's Indestructible Bastards, you know, getting rid of those things out, just so they get more of the funny stuff. I don't know, maybe that works for them. But again, they would have all of the content there and available, just that the section sent down to them in their feed, their personalized feed that they made a choice of, would just be those sections.

Or maybe a network like QCODE, which makes great serialized podcasts, lots of fiction, cool, self-contained series. Maybe they know that this listener is a mainliner, and they're going to wait, then, to dump all of the episodes of a show of their serialized content down to that listener when it's nearing completion, maybe the second to the last episode or something like that, giving them time to get caught up, and then boom, mainline through it. Maybe.

These are things we can do with a certain amount of personalization in podcasting. Also, you should know, stepping away from podcasts for a moment in the larger world of CX, customer experience, this is the direction the industry is headed. This is the direction where the experiences we as customers and listeners, our customers get, gets more highly personalized. Even for us podcasters. Because done this way, personalization does not have to be creepy, doesn't have to be invasive.

As long as whoever's doing the personalization makes the benefits to the customer, to the listener, in our case, obvious and demonstrably better, people will then have no trouble stepping up and saying, well, here's just the right amount of information you need to know about me to give me that highly targeted experience, not targeted ads. That's the different thing.

So keep our eyeballs on the future of this personalization. I think we podcasters are in a unique situation to take advantage of it where not a lot of other broadcast-style media can.

So this is something that we're thinking about. How would you modify your content? What do you think that your listeners might want from a personalized experience from you? I encourage you, as I often do, to share the content here with your other podcasting buddies and see what thoughts they have, to see what you collectively come up with. How you and your peer group might rise up to this coming wave of personalization in a very non-creepy and all-benefiting listener way.

And if you got any value out of this whatsoever, please go to buymeacoffee.com/evoterra, and, well, buy me a virtual coffee. That's always nice.

That's it. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!