A Q&A with Dan Misener about Bumper

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This week, I turned off my air conditioners, opened the windows, and breathed a big sigh of relief.

Let me tell you, it is next to impossible to mix a podcast while a portable AC unit is running right next to you. I’m going to pretend that my downstairs neighbour didn’t reveal that actually, we could have had central air conditioning this whole time. That conversation never happened. I was right to spend all those nights sleeping with wet washcloths on my forehead. 

I have lived in this house for two summers. Anyways. 

Keeping this real short and sweet, since we have an exciting feature Q&A for you this week. I got to talk to Dan Misener, who I have looked up to since Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids aired on CBC Radio one summer. I first listened to that show in the summer of 2014, when I was the only full-time employee at the King’s Co-op Bookstore in Halifax. Carolyn, our manager, would turn it up, and we would spend the whole thirty minutes laughing and not selling any books. When I moved back to Toronto, I signed up to read (my segment starts at ~19:50). 

Anyway, here we are, some years later, and Dan has launched Bumper, a new podcast growth agency with Jonas Woost, another podcast industry vet! You can read our conversation below.

Here’s what we’re reading this week: 

Rob Rosenthal on how to interview shy people for Transom. 

Maribel Quezada Smith on how to use TikTok more effectively to grow your podcast.

Sorry to be a bit meta here. Peter Kafka, for Vox: The newsletter boom is over. What’s next?  

Take a peek into Condé Nast’s recording studio.

Blake Cadwell for The Good Trade: Why (and how) I’m prioritizing my hearing health at age 32. Hot tip from yours truly: if you wear headphones a lot and aren’t doing a Murine flush every time your ears start to feel plugged up, get thee to a Shoppers Drug Mart. You can thank me later.

Hot take if your podcast description includes the following phrases, you might want to reconsider having it at all.
>"Shootin' the shit"
>"Whatever pops into our heads"
>"Anything and everything"
>"Random thoughts"

— Lauren Passell Says No (@laurenpassell) August 7, 2022

This week, Dan Misener and Jonas Woost launched Bumper, a new podcast growth agency. What’s a podcast growth agency, you ask? Dan joined Vocal Fridays to talk about why, as the industry grows and matures, podcast marketing deserves its own special attention.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Bumper is poised to fill a niche gap in the Canadian podcast landscape. Why was now the time to launch a podcast growth company?

I think we're at a point in the podcast industry where we need increased specialization. I have worked in this field for many, many years, and I remember the earliest days of podcasting where it really was a medium where everybody did everything. One person might book a guest, write a script, cut some tape, upload the audio file, publish the blog post that goes along with it, send out the newsletter.  I think as the industry and the medium has evolved both from an artistic and a creative and a technological standpoint, we're at this moment where no one person can do all things well.

We've seen this in other aspects of podcast production. We've seen sound design teams expand and specializations emerge within podcast sound design teams. Some people are really very skilled at music and scoring. Other people are very skilled at dialogue editing or restoring poorly recorded audio. 

We haven't really seen increasing specialization on what you might call the podcast strategy for audience development or marketing and promotion. I think for a certain kind of show and a certain kind of team, there is a real need for specialized work on marketing and promotion.

What do you mean by a certain kind of team/show?

We expect, at Bumper, that we're going to be working mostly with organizations. So that might be large brands, and it might be mission-driven organizations. And most often we expect we're going to work with teams that have more than one show, have a portfolio of podcasts, or need to think more about their own network and cross-pollination within their network. Organizations that are experienced in podcasting that maybe have hit a plateau. They've seen how far they can get on their own, and they need some help getting to where they want to be.

What do you think Canadian podcasts are doing wrong when it comes to marketing and audience growth?

I did a little bit of research into this idea of home grown hits: shows that are not just popular in Canada, but shows that are popular in Canada and also made in Canada. What I found is that there are some very clear content areas that domestic homegrown shows have found success inside and outside our borders: news and current affairs, sports, French language programming, and personal finance and investing.

I think partly because of the geography of our country, partly because of the legacy of public media in our country, and partly because institutionally a lot of big podcasting in Canada isn't well set up to, for instance, sell ads into the United States, there is this worldview that focuses on Canadian success without necessarily having broader ambitions outside of our borders. There is a lot of work that has been done, but more that should be done around expanding the scope of our ambitions and telling Canadian stories to broader global audiences. 

About 10 percent of what's on the Apple Podcasts top charts in Canada was made here. My sincere hope is that companies, individual podcasters, and people investing in this space can help move that number, so that 10 percent isn't the ceiling of what's possible.

What percentage of a show’s budget should be dedicated to marketing or promotion?

I have seen shows on shoestring budgets do a lot of good work with not a lot of money, and I have seen incredibly well-resourced shows throw money down the drain. 

That means I am reluctant to say there's some percentage of your budget that you should allocate because I've seen so much done with so little. And I've seen so little done with so much. Maybe more important than a percentage of your budget is the worldview and the idea that marketing and promotions cannot be an afterthought. It cannot be the thing you do after your show is done. 

I get this question all the time: how do I build an audience for my podcast? And in so many ways, that's the wrong question.

The better question is, how do I build a podcast for my audience? 

You say on your website that “viral success in audio is rare,” which I think can be hard for brands to hear. No one’s going to be the next Serial, because Serial came out in 2014, and the world was a different place. What do you think “success” can look like for a podcast beyond those mammoth viral numbers?

One of my biggest pet peeves in the podcast industry is this singular idea of what success looks like. I have worked with large American financial service companies, mission-driven organizations, small, independent podcasters, and some of the biggest names in the business, and not one of them has had exactly the same goal.

Some people want to increase their numbers so they can sell ads. Other people care about changing people's hearts and minds. Other people care about things like brand favorability. Other people care about getting together with their friends and telling stories and having a good time. 

I know how downloads loom large in the mind of nearly every podcaster. But the download numbers alone do not tell you whether you changed somebody's mind, they don't tell you whether someone liked your show or not. They don't tell you whether they're going to get in touch with you to do business. A download number isn't going to tell you if they recommended the show to their friends or if you ended up on the desk of a very important or influential person. 

My sincere wish for people working in this industry is that, rather than blindly comparing their numbers to other people's numbers, that it be done through the lens of asking: what was our goal? Why does our show exist? And actually using your own yardstick to measure success rather than somebody else's.

You’re giving a talk at Podcast Movement in a few weeks about podcast neighbourhoods… can you give us a sneak peek? What’s a podcast neighbourhood?

A podcast neighbourhood is a way of making a map of podcasts and podcast listeners. And when I say map, I really do mean a visual representation of podcasts and podcast listeners.

It's a tool that I've been working on for the past couple of years to help make smart decisions around editorial. What kinds of guests should we book? What kinds of topics or stories are most resonant with our audience? 

But also marketing and promotion decisions — who should we do cross-promotions with? Who should we book guest slots on? Who should we do paid media with? It’s this really useful tool that can help you take a very large number of shows — hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of shows — and break those shows up into more manageable pieces. 

You can think about a category in Apple Podcasts like Society and Culture. It's massive and it's so broad that it's almost un-useful to talk about a society and culture podcast. But if you take a neighbourhood approach to society and culture, you can break it up into these constituent audiences. That lets you do a competitive set analysis and market your show in much more strategic ways. 

The Globe Content Studio, the revenue arm of the Globe and Mail, is still hiring a podcast producer. We mentioned this one a few weeks ago, so hurry up and apply already if you’ve been thinking about it! 

The Logic is hiring a business operations coordinator. Deadline to apply is August 15.

CBC British Columbia is hiring a permanent, full-time associate producer for current affairs radio in Vancouver, including The Early Edition. Apply by EOD August 17.

CBC News is hiring for two “rare and exciting” opportunities — they’re hiring permanent, full-time senior reporters to join the general assignment team based in Toronto. Apply by EOD August 24.

We rarely include American job postings, but how could I not include a heads up that This American Life is hiring a producer? Their ideal candidate will ideally be based in New York City, but remote is possible. The salary starts at $120,000 (that’s over $150,000 in Canadian dollars). Apply by September 12. 

Spotify is hiring an eagle-eyed night copy editor for The Ringer. It’s a permanent position, and you can be based anywhere in the Americas — but keep in mind that the hours are 1 to 10 p.m. PT/4 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET, so this may be better suited for folks on the west coast.

Spotify is also hiring a supervising editor for the daily news podcast from Gimlet and the Wall Street Journal, The Journal.

And finally, if you’re known for your perfectly balanced playlists, Spotify is hiring an editorial lead for Canada. Make playlists for a living! There are probably other parts of the job but making playlists seems like the important part.

First Create The Media is looking for more freelance podcast producers to join their pool (scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page), especially those with a science background. 

This is a fun one. A real podcaster’s podcast. Fellow fry Kattie Laur recommended Shameless Acquisition Target with a ringing endorsement — “it is SO good for podcast producers.” Laura Mayer, a podcast industry vet, has set herself a goal: make a podcast that gets acquired. She’s seen her peers in the podcast industry get rich — really rich — by selling their startup podcasting companies to giants like Amazon, Sirius XM, iHeartRadio — you name it. All she wants here is “house money.” Isn’t that what we’re all looking for, at the end of the day? 

I have only listened to the first episode (there are two out so far), but one thing that really strikes me is Laura’s willingness to be completely candid about some of her experiences she’s had working at other companies — and then she actually names them. My jaw dropped! Shan’t spoil it for you.

I also felt very seen when she talked about loving podcasts so much — that’s why she went into the industry, after all — but then not being able to listen to them at all after being so burnt out by the work. I noticed a huge change in my listening habits after I started producing podcasts full-time. Sometimes, I used to listen to two or three hours of podcasts a day, and now I’m lucky if I can get that much listening time into a week. Even when I’m working on shows that I love, that are fun and nourishing, that I know will make an impact on listeners — my ears do have a limit to how much they can absorb (see: above article on hearing health). When I’m not producing much, listening to podcasts becomes a treat again.

Alex Sujong Laughlin, who produces another one of our favourite shows, Normal Gossip, wrote about the show in her article about who can afford not to sell out for Poynter. One line really stood out to me: 

We don’t need to change the world during our nine-to-five. It can just be the labor we do to make money to cover necessities so we can use the rest of our energy to actually be members of our communities.

I hope that Shameless Acquisition Target gets acquired, and I’m intrigued to find out what we’ll learn on Laura’s journey. 

Maybe the real acquisition is the friends we made along the way.

We want to hear from you! What are you looking for in your podcast news? Let us know on Twitter, Instagram, or by email at info@vocalfrystudios.com.

Thanks to Emily Latimer for editing this newsletter, and to Katie Jensen for designing it.

We’ll see you again on August 19. Until then, here’s an update from a cat that producer Max Collins saw chilling by the back door of their favourite hip sushi restaurant.
The staff were feeding it fish and the cat was loving it. A guy walked up and said, “I live a few doors down. This is my cat. I appreciate you being so kind to her, but please stop feeding her. She never wants to come home.”

Anyway, here’s the sushi cat:

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