YouSaid · the spoken record

Conal Byrne

lines on the record: 83
first: 2023-02-28
most recent: 2023-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But it's good. A friend told it to me a year or two ago. I didn't know it until then. Once he said it was like, oh my God, that's right, including in myself, all of us do this. If there's principles that I try to sort of remember once a week or so, it's probably those three.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You should start one. But we do. We think we got to do this sequentially. Everything will get better and faster and easier if you parallel path projects. And then the last thing I'd say is more of a human thing. Most of people acting strangely or politicking at work or behaving badly is born out of insecurity. Just insecure. It's not that they're bad people. Just insecure. And if you have that framework when you walk into every meeting, every creator meeting, every partner meeting, every competitor meeting, it changes your whole outlook. I have not mastered this, by the way.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Humans have a predilection for overcomplicating things, and they'll do it for usually one of two reasons they want to do a really good job. And so they have this instinct to do good work actually. And so they will try to overperform and overcomplicate a task or the negative reason. They're covering up bad work. And so they'll overcomplicate in order to do that, to camouflage something they probably shouldn't have done. And we will avoid at almost every turn simplicity. Just simplicity Be as simple as you can in your answers, in your approaches, in your strategies, everything I promise you is simpler than you think. That's the first. The second is parallel pathing. We tend to think and work sequentially. It's that whole sort of waterfall versus agile.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To wrap up with what is actually the decoder question, I ask it of everybody. I feel like you have a very strong conviction, so I feel like I might know how you're going to answer this, but I do ask everybody this. You have to make a lot of decisions. You've had a lot of different kinds of careers. You've had to make structured decisions. You have to make video decisions. What is your framework for making decisions? How do you do it?”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Podcasting is not video, it's an audio medium, and I worry that while some podcasts will make amazing video channels, YouTube channels, Facebook video series, and amazing Netflix series, I worry that that feels like the requirement to sit at the adult table, when I really just keep going back to this notion of it's perfect the way it is. You have a mass reach medium. Do you know how hard it is to make a mass reach medium that 80 million Americans a week are like, I'm going to do that today? And they do it like an hour a day. It's not like a low engagement medium. That's my only fear with video. So we have shows like stuff they don't want you to know has a video channel and it's awesome. You should subscribe to it. It's three guys who are hilarious and fantastic. I just protect a little bit. I get a little defensive even about the other three thousand shows where I'm like, but they don't need to be if they don't want to be. They're just audio podcasts and that's awesome.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Miss selling the IP out a little bit. A little bit. I don't have it candidly on a P&L anywhere. I don't depend on it. I don't predict what we might get. Hollywood is a difficult, complicated industry. It's nothing new to say that. So I don't depend on it. But we've seen some traction there across 10, 12 shows getting optioned, and it's meaningful with huge partners in Hollywood. So it's been fun, if nothing else. What worries me a little bit. That we have this tendency on the internet in digital media overall since I've been working in digital media. We have this belief sometimes that I think is false that everything really needs to be a video when it grows up. That's a really cool medium. If only it were video.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get to market all these shows with your massive terrestrial network, and now your massive podcast network, everyone else in this room is like, we've got to make TikToks because the future of all podcast marketing is TikTok. Sorry, I'm making the TikToks. Go follow Decoder on TikTok. They're great. Are you doing video? Are you open to video? Is this a thing you want to do?”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Standing back and sort of watching how her and the Shondaland audio team work, that seems to be it. It seems to be they want to use this medium to do two things so far. One is really good companion content to a lot of the shows they're making for Netflix. That feels obvious to me. It's good content. And the other is really edgy, innovative audio drama. Like what is the audio drama today? I think the value of that creative playground to a creator that's really free, really permissive cannot be underestimated. I just don't think they get that in a lot of places anymore because of the highly formatted other platforms that they're making content for. So we've won in that sense in podcasting.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not really. If anything we've doubled down on this model of partner with a creator like a Chandra Rhyme's who once Big playground That's long term Who wants to be able to try stuff a lot, make a few mistakes, get it righter and writer, and then hit something big or two or three things.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You think that you're moving sort of the high margin dollars into the longer tail, right? It's probably cheaper to buy those shows. It might be cheaper to produce those shows. Are you doing that math?”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Show out of Alaska where he was one of 20 or 30 people who spoke a dying language and he used his podcast as a way to capture that language and report on how a language dies on the face of the earth, never to come back. And so you have this relic now that is a podcast limited series of what this language means to this guy and why he captured in a podcast. That is technically a long tale show. That got its own set of executive producers out of LA who shepherd the next up program that we call it. So it's a bit of an answer, but hopefully it gives you a sense of like, it's never sort of mutually exclusive for us. It's not like I spend 95% of our time on Will Farrell. Okay, I guess we got some calls to make at the end of the day to the long tail. It's usually one actually continuum or even the same slate.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That no one ever feels like I haven't heard from my heart in a month. Decent example of this is a program we have called Next Up. I think it's the single thing I am most proud of at the iHeart Podcast Network. We basically built an academy where once a year we grab eight or ten people, they apply, they get admitted, we build a bit of a podcast studio at their house. We teach them how to use the gear. We teach them how podcast marketing should work, and most importantly, we teach them what a business deal should look like in podcasting so that they know walking into it. And then if they want to, we launch their podcast with iHeart Podcast Network. This has, you talk about that long tail content. This has borne out some of the most amazing stuff we've made. First of all, it's brought in underrepresented creators like nothing else we've done. I'll give you an example of a show. A guy did a show.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In podcasting, I think he realized I don't have to pick. I can get all three all the time. This is very unique. So we launched a company together. My point in answering you this way is he uses this company to some extent to find new comedic talent that is the long tail you're talking about. Comedic talent like Langston Kerman or Carolina Barlow are right alongside in the Big Money Players Network, folks like Bowen Yang or Nicki Glazer or Eric Andre. That's really cool, but it's not mutually exclusive. The second thing we do is We just spend a lot of time focusing on every show that we have on our network. We try to organize them into slates that have EPs and producers on top of them back a little bit to the org chart so that no one ever feels like the org chart.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason we started this company was because I think genuinely had a blast making the Ron Burgundy podcast. But I think more importantly, he saw the potential of the podcast medium to be a way for him to find, develop, and break new comedic talent in America. I think in video, there's this adage for anybody that's worked in video where it's like fast, cheap, and good. You get to pick two”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of all thumbs up or down library, it's not, I'll give two answers, it's not mutually exclusive, first of all. So we started a company with Will Farrell called Big Money Players.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a great episode with the lead partner for that stuff at Andreessen Horowitz on the decoder feed. It didn't go well for him either. Not great. That's where the VC money went. You launched a lot of new stuff, but I look just before we started, I was just looking at your website. Lots and lots of podcast tiles, lots of celebrities in the format, lots of rewatch podcasts, right? There's these formats that hit, there's things you lead with, but then there is an enormous long tail of stuff, right? Because if you're launching new stuff that you just have built the archive, you've built a library. How do you tend to the things in the library that aren't the celebrity shows? How do you make sure they get attention? How do you make sure they sustain?”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talked about a lot of your shows, we've talked about all the new things you're doing iHeart does like a lot of new things. There's always something new happening. I have a card here that says NFTs on it. I feel like I already know how it went. But there's just always new stuff, right? How to go? How the NFT things go? Lightning round, up or down NFTs.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is no moment where there's surprised a month or two later that such and such an advertiser has been underwriting their entire slate and they hate that brand or something like that. It's not really how it works. I think that's sort of like high attentiveness at scale with partners is what we've been able to maintain so far.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do all kinds of advertising models with Malcolm and his team. We'll do standard straight up quick turn host red ads. We also have an original content series we make with IBM called Smart Talks. That's actually like a podcast we make together. That's actually awesome. And everything in between. NFL, very similar. They had seven or eight podcasts that they were making. We had a good relationship with Roger Goodell in the league. And he was like, I believe in this medium. I think it's really cool. I just don't know that we at the NFL are going to get this as right as you guys might as fast. And we want to part with somebody really big. Very similar model to Pushkin Industries. We pulled in their seven or eight podcasts with the promise that we'd market and monetize them better. We're also co-producing a slate of whole new stuff. I hate to answer it so sort of vaguely. It's incredibly collaborative.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's always collaborative with their approval. Easy example is we have a sort of multi year relationship with, I'll give two examples with Malcolm Gladwell and Pushkin Industries and then with the NFL. Two really different examples. Malcolm Gladwell has an existing slate of shows. Our partnership with him is to monetize his shows better than he thinks he could himself, but also to co-produce a whole new slate of shows and then overlay iHeart Marketing across all of it so we grow the whole thing bigger and are able to make more revenue together.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something you wanted because Yes, that's the core business, fundamental, pretty consistent business model of podcasting as a rev share model. And yes.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, when we sit with Malcolm Gladwell or Shawna Rhimes or Questlove or Charlaman, the God, our own radio DJ, yes, the pitch is I assure you every single episode of what we make will be available to any listener wherever they want to pick it up.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still getting the full ad load. So I've just really struggled to understand why you would do that. Also, subscription models usually come with exclusive or windowing of content, which I think you're starting to see that with creators. Like, I don't think there's a creator on the planet who's interested in literally decimating their audience size. Even for the sake of a big check, that's interesting. But I think that is creator psychology of like actually sometimes it's more important for me to have a large listener pool than it is to have a big check. I think some of the press recently has focused on that and I think it's smart.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just don't see it fixing anything that's broken. It made perfect sense to me as a consumer. 10 years ago, was it when I subscribed to Netflix? It made perfect sense to me the problem it was solving, the price point was undeniable. It made perfect sense to me. I can't find the reason in podcasting. I've never seen a medium move from widely distributed and free and high quality with a low ad load, low to no ad load sometimes, move into a paid medium with exactly the same assets. So when you pay for a subscription on most platforms And you receive a podcast that somebody else is piping into that platform through an RSS feed. Nothing's changed about it.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I don't know that it needs innovation. Like, it's worked for them for 10, 15 years. I think we can do all the innovating with different kinds of marketers from bigger brands, bigger budgets, maybe longer-term multi-year campaigns. When we launched a company like the Black Effect with Charlemagne, we had huge annual sponsors that were deeply ingrained in that company. And we were actually working and trying to make change together, like genuinely. I think that's okay to innovate over here and with the direct response, folks. They innovate in their own way. It's like, you'll be surprised, actually, as much as it may sound nuts, the extent to which you're innovating by iterating many, many different reads at many different lengths and many different placements across a show. I know that sounds like, eh, it's kind of boring. It's not for them. I want to be more part of that.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually, yeah, usually. And it's a great question because it's like, isn't everything direct response at the end of the day? But yeah, you're right. It's redemption codes, URL codes. And it's why those guys initially were the first people to jump into podcasting. Because the only kind of marketer that doesn't need your data is a direct responsibility.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you say direct response in the context of podcasts, these are been performance marketing. These are like the words the ad industry invented to describe very simple concepts. With podcasts, you're talking about promo codes at the ends of the ads, right”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“60, it's like 57 of marketers currently spending in podcasting are going to spend more, not less, more next year. This has made direct response brands lives a little harder because now there's a lot of competition for what was for them the best kept secret in marketing for like five or ten years. What we've actually noticed in the last two or three months It's a very timely question for us at our business is because I feel like we've moved off too fast The direct response business I feel like it's actually a really still a thriving business and there are huge great ad agencies like ad results and veritone and Oxford Road who do great business for performance marketing companies and were if anything were making that more of a focus and paying more attention to it in the last two or three months because I think we moved off it too fast and I think it's a robust business we should still focus on and it's also how we got here”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People trust podcast content more than they trust what they see on social media by like 60% more, 60% of podcast listeners have bought something because they've heard about it on a podcast and therefore it's another 60. This is the only reason I remember these”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We saw a shift from performance marketers or direct response marketers into more bigger brands thanks to ad tech evolving fast in podcasting. Dynamic ad insertion and geotargeting made lots of stuff possible, competitive separation, category exclusivity, share of voice conversation suddenly became possible when you could dynamically insert into ad tags. That wasn't possible prior. So I know I'm sort of recap in the obvious, but this was a inflection point in our whole industry that suddenly you had big brands and sometimes big hold coes swooping in and wanting to invest in podcasting. There were lots of things that moved what was initially”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a super good question. The first five or six years of the podcast industry, I think we can honestly take credit for several companies that are around today, like MailChimp and Blue Apron and probably the mattresses that we all sleep on are because of the podcast industry. I know that sounds crazy, but it's because it's because it”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there's a little bit more of a prioritization of continuing marketing even through a strange economy that there might not have been if the memory of COVID wasn't so fresh that's helping us a little bit. I also think, second thing, there's a new thrust in influencer marketing. Kind of never went away, but now we're back to this again of influencer marketing maybe has something to do with the tools of targeting or getting harder and so people are just sort of cycling back to just humans tell my story on the platforms where you make stuff. Podcasting in particular benefits from this. Simply, simply put, the whole podcast industry in one sense is just the most amazing best storytelling group of influencers to hit media in a really long time, so we benefit from there being new attention on the influencer market.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The short answer is no, we're growing. The longer answer is we're in an odd economy. We're all watching metrics sort of daily, inflation rates, interest rates, unemployment rates, the Ukrainian war. We need certain things to calm down and other things to end. I think marketers in this moment are actually not turning down an advertising as much as you'd expect. I think some of that is because a lot of the folks who are in power at marketing companies were also in power even ten years ago in the last major downturn happened and certainly two or three or four years ago when COVID hit. And I don't think this is wishful thinking. I think it's real. I think they know the effect long term that you have when you stop marketing.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They look at it by geoterritory and depart, they tie it back to the shows that you're listening to on air, and now it's digitally infused, data infused listening that they can target digitally. So they've taken this nine out of ten American adults a month and they've just informed it with a digital listening panel. I only say this to you because that's how we do that sale. Well, like, hey, you should buy podcasting. You should buy streams. Yeah, you should target. Here is your reach extender. If you don't do this, you will never have the reach you need in digital audio. I wish you will, but maybe one day you will. Not today. So that, yes, we do that all the time.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want real reach? There is no way to get real reach in digital audio. As much as I would love this to be the case, there is no way to get real reach in digital audio unless you contend with and purchase broadcast radio to try to help with this, by the way. IHERT, the multi-platform group actually, built a product called Smart Audio that's really cool. They take our panel listening on the iHeart Radio app.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It often is. So you'll walk into a hold code in New York and you'll say, I know we're going to talk about podcasting today. By the way, If you love digital audio, and we all do”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are marketers who are usually really good at this stuff, like really good. This is what they do really well. I know exactly where to find that demographic or that psychographic or that particular male eighteen to twenty four to thirty four who wants to buy a truck in the West Coast, but they've just created this gap between where users are, where ears are, literally, and where their investment is. That's what we're trying to true up. Podcasting is helping us do that because it's grabbing so much of the oxygen in the room in the last, especially a year or two, where people are like, oh, wow, it's a way for us at iHeart candidly to pull them into audio all up through podcasting. It's been cool.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We consume. Like, think about that for a second. We ran this study with Wark. It's a third party research study two years ago. A third of all the media we consume is just audio. By the way, 75% of that third is broadcast radio. It's a massive amount of the stuff we take in and that we call media. I'll end on this, like if you're a marketer and you hear that third stat, you're like, wow, so a third of all the stuff that people take in is marketing. I wonder how much I'm spending on audio marketing. That number is usually 9 or 10% of their overall investment. It's just a disconnect.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'll talk you through why. Some of this is obvious. So, if you're a marketer and this was a well worn, tried and true way to market over the last ten, twenty years, that just got a lot harder. We're starting to use words like cohorts instead of one-to-one targeting, and it's confusing and it's less effective. We haven't even discussed the trust issues that are very real on social media. Folks trusting social media less, influencers having less success on social media because of that, and therefore marketers again being like, I don't know what to do with this. It used to be like a really tried and true my go-to tool, and now it isn't. As that's happened, this thing has come along called audio. In fact, it was always there, but now it's exploded, and all of our attention is on audio now because of podcasting, because you have this new platform that's incredibly cool, and lots of great creators are using it, and it's eighty million Americans a week. But the truth is, audio all up is a third of all the media.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're like, what are you doing? Our marketing team spends, I literally think like 95% of their time thinking about how to deploy house ads, what we'd call house ads, and maybe 5% of their time on paid marketing. Paid marketing is still helpful, but like 95% of that is Facebook marketing for a specific show, if it wants to hit a very specific demographic, 95%, and I think I'm being conservative of their time is spent, how do I deploy Billions of impressions of house ads a month.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have over $100 million a year broadcast radio marketing. We run billions of podcast impressions a month to promote our own shows and our partners shows. We also have a digital marketing team. I forgot that in the org chart. I'm going to get in trouble too, just like you are.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to buy ads somewhere where someone will push the button and download the episode and the number will go up. Hopefully some of them will stay. It's not the kinds of game that is usual in this industry.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We used June Group. We've talked with Ashley a lot about this. June Group is a vendor that drives marketing for podcast companies that's targeting mostly gamers, whether those are gamers playing Subway Surfer or people who have indexed for the metaverse. We have experimented with June Group across the years. It was I think our stats were something like never more than one, two, two and a half percent of our downloads in any given month. We were especially interested recently because we were launching a thing called iHeartland, which was basically iHeart Media as a Roblox map and as an island in fortnight. So we were especially interested in like if we got gamers into our podcast network, could we then bring them into these live shows in iHeartland? We don't use it anymore.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$12 million downloads in January. That was up 12% from the month prior. So do I think we're mature enough to have all of the things that a big, respectable, grown up table business should have? Yes, of course we are. We've earned this. For 20 years, we've worked damn hard everybody in this room to get to this point. For sure we deserve it and need it, yes.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was like a year ago, and so now he's like, whatever, dude. But you take the point business affairs, I didn't think I'd have or need a robust business affairs department even two years ago. Are we mature enough as an industry for every medium-sized network or larger to have one? Sure we are. This is a we've arrived. Podcasting is a mass reach media. 80 million Americans a week listen to podcasts. 120 million a month? 80 million a week is the more interesting stat to me. We are a mass reach medium. I sat in Chicago in front of OMD the day before I was with publicis. Next week I'm with Universal McCann. All I say to them is this is no longer an experimental bucket of marketing. This is a must buy bucket of marketing. You just saw it happen. The newest mass reach media just happened. And it's called podcasting. And by the way, it's not slowing down. Our downloads are hundreds.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The oldest one is 17. His name is Pierce. And he's going to start this journey now of trying to get into college and go to college. And I'll answer it this way. He's sort of like, he's like, you know, how did you decide what you're going to do? And I said, all I can tell you is, and he rolls his eyes and stuff. But I say, you know, I literally, the job I have, the industry I work in didn't exist when I went to college. There was no digital media when I went to college, let alone podcasting. And so I said, all I can tell you is just have your aperture be wide open, man. Like, just be wide open to new industries and new things inside that industry. When I told him this, I was like, you know, like the blockchain.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes and no. I mean, So I have like four kids. And all I can tell you is I'll answer it this way when my 17-year-old one of your”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. The reason I ask that question all the time is one, I'm always curious, and I think every CEO has but one tool, and it's shuffling the orange chart to solve problems. And sometimes you just shuffle it to create change. I know you do. Everyone does it. But if you listen to this room over the course of the day, right? We've probably said podcasting is in its infancy a hundred times on this stage in the breakout rooms. You are describing a mature company, right? A company that's like a lot of action is in business affairs is a company that has figured out a bunch of stuff. It's just like life, right? Like a Hollywood studio is at peak is like a bunch of studios and then like a room full of accountants doing billing on syndication across companies. Do you think the industry is mature enough to be like actually what you all need is a business affairs group?”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Duke University Doran Room, he found it in, and now he's found his way into podcasting. So similar trajectory. There are iHeart radio streaming channels that show up on your electronic programming guide on Roku. And we also co-own a company with Will Farrell. And so our business affairs team is busy and accounts for a lot of our growth. But that's loosely how it's orged out.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know that we'll have like a big reveal, but there's a product lead Udanam line is our chief product officer. There's an engineering team. That's maybe a hundred people. An engineering team that's sort of the back end of all of our digital products. We have obviously a podcast team run by our president of the iHeart podcast network, Will Pearson, who's fantastic, came similar trajectory to me, came from MentalFloss.com 20 years ago.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT