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Hello Must Readers 👋
Welcome to August’s drop of Must Reads aka 0824.
It’s the end of a humid and sweaty August here in London which means the autumn is about to kick in and work life will ramp back up for most.
Prefer Audio? You can listen to this newsletter by clicking listen online at the top of this email.
In this drop:
I have 6x must-read stories
I offer you 4x 🆓 company clinics / free power hour for Must Readers
I go deep into podcasting and the recent mega deals and why it matters
The 6 Must Reads
→1 /// Adidas Proving How To Launch A Product ⚽️- How sporting giant Adidas excelled with the launch of their top tier clubs and their third kit launches with brilliant examples from both Arsenal & Man Utd and then across Europe with Juventus, Bayern Munich & Real Madrid.
Why so smart? Bringing back club legends, leveraging nostalgia and putting the club at the heart of the community.
→2 F1 Control 🏎️ - F1 is notoriously controlling from what drivers and teams can say in interviews to who and what are allowed to attend the races.
F1 have taken the questionable decision and steps in reaching out to F1 “influencers” and demanding they change their handle and remove F1 from it. Something I have learnt across my career is that once you over police and control you lose respect for your audience and the ability to easily collaborate when someone loves the thing you try to control.
Reputation matters but reputation management is harder to fix when you muck it up yourself.
→3 Where There Is Search - There Are Ads - Where There Are Ads There Is Money Spent 📲- I have said this time and time again on Must Reads, where there is a search box, there will be advertising. From new answers engine Perplexity starting to sell ads in Q4 and Uber smashing $1b ad revenue in the last year. If you are a brand with demand you can and should leverage search results to include relevant ads, where you have a service and update screens to serve relevant ads. In the near future when advertising gets harder and less targeted (thanks Apple?) we will see brands become ad engines and serve large company ads inside of their services and ads. We won’t be able to get away from it.
The question is will brands continue to advertise when they realise the low % of actions taken by users being served their ads or will they be happy enough to know it’s a frequency play?
My 2c is: In this performance world it’s ads that drive clicks and attributed revenue that win out.
→4 AI Vs Code 🧐 - AWS CEO has suggested that code will likely go away in the next 2 or so years due to AI and advancements in AI. This was from an internal fireside chat and was leaked, the context might have been missed but often these aren’t actually what they mean. Yes, anything that is formulaic might be negatively impacted more quickly, however, we have seen only a handful of professions meaningfully impacted and if you know anything about developers they are actually creative problem solvers with code so most will be fine and likely move into other areas of businesses.
» Related: Here are my favourite AI tools I currently use.
A lot has been made about AI & the latest rush for a big wave of tech change, funny thing here the largest companies still haven’t mentioned it publicly…
But here is a good video showing how AI is making strides in medicine ↓
→5 How The Michelin Star Guide Works 🍣 - Started as content marketing for their tyres, the Michelin Guide is famous for making and breaking many chefs, from the pressure, to the secrecy to the rumours. This is a great reminder of how something well over 100 years old is still incredibly powerful today and will be for a long time yet.
→6 New Sea Species Found 🐙 - An exciting new development, 20 species have been spotted including a flying spaghetti monster. NASA started by exploring the sea vs space and we are again learning great new things about our planet exploring the seas.
» Talking of mentorship and helping further - Here’s something to ponder about mentoring and the impact of hybrid and remote & why you have to be deliberate in engineering the right sort of mentoring.
🎙️HUGE Podcast Deals 🎧
There have been 4 huge deals worth over $100m this year for popular podcasts:
This week; The Kelce brothers (NFL players) have signed a 3-year $100m deal with Wondery (part of Amazon).
Last month; Call Her Daddy co-creator Alex Cooper signed a new 3-year deal worth $125 million with SiriusXM (for her podcast and her new network of podcasts) leaving Spotify.
In February; Joe Rogan renewed his Spotify contract for another 4 years for $250 million.
In January; SmartLess (with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett) left Wondery for a 3-year deal worth $100 million with SiriusXM (Warren Buffet famously invested heavily earlier this summer in SiriusXM).
So What? Why is this important?
There are now millions of podcasts but very few are independent and make money
Celebrity fronted Podcasts (in-built audience and superfans) have become incredibly popular, especially a-list podcasts, celebrity pods dominate the podcast rankings and hold typically huge bi-weekly audiences, so much so these podcasts charge 5 to high 6-digit rates for ads, some smartly charge huge figures to advertise on the back catalogue.
These stars have the option to go out and create a podcast with a team and a network behind them or go and join YouTube like Ronaldo and Tom Brady have in the last few weeks
The influence celebrity podcasts have is far-reaching, especially what is being shared and the stories being told (untold elsewhere), these are then being flipped into news stories and creating headline stories in mainstream media who struggle to build relationships with stars like they used to.
Many smart PR firms are pushing their clients to host and cohost and paying large sums of money to appear on tier 1 podcasts and vodcasts (video podcasts)
Podcasts are the new way to build audiences, host & control debates and are being used to rebuild careers, recent examples include: the 2 hours of Candace Owens interviewing Andrew Tate, President Trump on Theo Von podcast was something else, Peter Thiel on Joe Rogan was painful to watch — all leading to huge listenership/views and driving huge awareness to brands sponsoring
Big ad & media networks back the majority of the top 200 podcasts and have big talent fronting the pod - stars come with an existing audience and advertisers will invest massively into these pods
Sponsors demand ad reads by the hosts and are charged a premium for doing so as feels less like an ad and more like an endorsement
Acquired a popular long-form podcast on how companies were built and the strategy behind them charges $500k for 4-episode midroll sponsorship or $750k for presenting sponsor
This is why SiriusXM, Spotify and Amazon are investing millions in 3-year+ deals on these podcast advertising deals. They are moving away from exclusive rights and moving towards owning the ads inside the pods (and connected to the pods) and inserting ads across the feeds onto Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
Brands are looking for the best possible advertising options, whether that’s brand side to find a new audience or creators looking for ad partners to monetise their latest moves. Brands are looking for reach, celebrities have them, ad networks can insert more ads (ad load aka the number of ads is up and increasing)
So the TLDR, brands will open up their budgets for popular podcasts and being associated with huge reach. Celebrities love the format as do their PRs and the ad-exclusive deals are huge and will continue to be while celebrity podcasters attract their celeb friends and major names to tell stories while brands can piggyback from an ad inserted into it.
Want to see more about rankings and pod ad networks? Podtrac and chartable (for rankings) are great first steps
» If you would like to see my favourite podcast - I share them here
Thanks for reading Must-Reads this month, remember to hit reply for a free session.
Have a great weekend ahead,