Steve Pratt: Earn It

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound off podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Steve Pratt is someone I've been itching to have on the show for a few years now. Steve was one of the founders of Pacific content, a branded podcast company that was purchased by Rogers in 2019 mothballed in 2024 and then resold a few weeks later to a UK company called lower Street. Now you'll recall I had another former Pacific content person on the show a few weeks ago, Dan Meisner. I did not ask Dan about what he thought about the busyness of all those transactions, but I can tell you today I'm gonna ask Steve. Steve has a new book that is out the very same day this episode is published. If you have found marketing to be complex, confusing or just a chore, his book will simplify it for you. A link is in the show notes of this episode. And now Steve Pratt joins me from Vancouver, British Columbia. So without really knowing it, I guess a lot of people really did grow up with you because you were the producer of the zone, which was on YTV. And for those who don't know that, was like after school for Canadian kids, right?

Steve Pratt  1:16  
Yeah, that's really funny. I had so much fun working there, the mantra at YTV when I worked there was keep it weird. And if you're like a creative person or a content person, and you're doing programming for kids that is supposed to just be entertaining and fun, and the goal is to keep it weird, you can do some really great stuff and have a great time doing it with fun people. It was awesome. It was like in the peak era of Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z and stuff like that. A lot of kids watch that programming block after school, and we

Matt Cundill  1:49  
were just talking about video and video for podcasting. But you've got this extensive background with television, but also TV news and producing news. You did some news. You did the six in the 11, which for those who are young enough to know or to not know, that, that was when the news was shown on television.

Steve Pratt  2:06  
Yeah, it's funny. I did a real mix of things early on in my career, and some of them were like a really, like, you know, kind of cool, fun places like YTV and much music, where I kind of really plugged into pop culture. And then some of it was learning how to tell stories daily in a local news environment, and some of it, I did not fit in very well, because I'm not. I mean, first of all, I'm not a trained journalist, like I didn't go to journalism school. I'm not a journalist. But I remember my first summer job was at a newsroom in Toronto, and basically I got sent to cottage country for the day to try and get a reaction from parents whose child had been killed in a boating accident on a lake the day before. And it's like, we need a clip of the family and try and get a photo of the kid. And I'm like, I don't feel good doing this work. And then I ended up at this place in Vancouver called Vancouver television, where I was an entertainment reporter on the news. And it was a real refreshing change, like they did a lot of stuff very differently, and they let people go out and tell stories on the news, you know, particularly in the entertainment area. And, man, it was just like a boot camp for going out day after day of finding interesting stuff and trying to find a way to make it memorable and pop in some ways. You know, six o'clock news, super disposable. If you remember one story from the show the next day you win. And the guy that was kind of teaching us a lot of this stuff was like, No, you want people to remember your story like, months and years from now every time, which is a super high bar, but great, great training for making stuff that stands out.

Matt Cundill  3:39  
Yeah, I'm going to ask you this one, because I heard that. I heard you on another podcast tell this story, and it was a time you were working with an uncooperative comedian, and I know you were careful not to mention who the comedian was.

Steve Pratt  3:52  
I was very careful not to mention the comedian.

Matt Cundill  3:57  
And I I couldn't really figure I mean, a couple things that I took away from that conversation about the uncooperative comedian, you had set up a very funny joke that the person did not want to participate in, which tells me that Steve Pratt has a twisted sense of humor somewhere inside of him to pull off a stunt for television. And so much of this feels full circle because you're writing, you know you're in the process of writing a book and putting out a book now that is about getting attention. So if I go all the way back in your career to this, like, you're pretty well schooled in television and getting attention, yeah,

Steve Pratt  4:29  
you know what? Honestly, like, I've been obsessed with this idea of, like, I think it's a mix of psychology and creativity in a way, right? Like, what are the things that make people pay attention or remember things you know and talk about them, and how do you craft those things? And, you know, a lot of it is like, what's unexpected or surprising, or what are, you know, the tenets of great storytelling. You know, the things that are funny often break patterns. That's why we find them funny. So, you know, I've been obsessed with comedy for a long time. I've been obsessed with story. Telling and I've been really lucky in my career to work in a lot of different mediums and formats, to be able to do that stuff. And it's almost like I wrapped up at Pacific content a couple years ago, and I was like, I think this is the time where attention matters more than ever, and I can take all the lessons that I have learned and the strategies that I've learned from other smart people and kind of put them into one place as a great guide for why attention matters and how you can actually go about earning it, you know, by making great content that people value, and you've done so

Matt Cundill  5:29  
well with it in the audio side. So that puts me sort of like the time that you spent at CBC when you're doing digital music. Perhaps you were working with CBC three at the time, but what did you learn at CBC about music distribution, audio that, let's say, commercial radio, ignored.

Steve Pratt  5:45  
It's really interesting because there's a lot of you know, a lot of my career has been spent doing the unusual thing or doing the opposite of the normal thing, and CBC Radio three was the best place ever to think about doing the opposite. I was actually hired to come in and figure out how to reach new audiences for the CBC without any traditional broadcasting outlet, so no radio, no TV. Go figure out how to build new audiences and support new Canadian artists that for the most part, people don't know who they are and don't know their music. So we got to lean into a new technologies, which is super interesting. Like, we put out a podcast in 2005 we put out a video podcast, maybe, I don't know, like, 2007 or something like that. There was, like, you know, super weird and fun. We ended up with a podcast network just very, very early. And did it because it was a good experiment, but it was also really fascinating to think about, you know, on the internet. And this is probably very obvious now, but back then, it wasn't, was that if you target a very small, specialized group of people, like a really underserved niche, it makes zero sense to do anything like that on traditional broadcasting. And if you're going to target people who only want to listen to independent Canadian Music across a variety of different genres. There's not enough people in a single market to justify an actual terrestrial station, but there's pockets of people in every single city all over the world that love new music and love a variety of different styles of music. And if you put something out digitally, they will all talk to each other and pass it around, and word will get out because nobody else is doing it. So I think, you know, for me, that was a really great space of getting to experiment and learn about Super serving niches and how to build online communities by doing things very differently, and, you know, almost questioning everything about the normal way of doing things.

Matt Cundill  7:37  
Did you look over your shoulder at maybe what was coming around the same time, which was satellite radio. And I know the CBC had a big role in the launch of satellite radio in Canada, but did you look over and say maybe some of what we're doing here belongs over there, or did you just look at them separately?

Steve Pratt  7:54  
No, we did. We so it's funny, when I got hired, the application process was just being done, and they knew that part of the license requirements would be having a 24/7 station going live to North America, and there need to be a lot of Canadian content stations as part of it. So radio three was when I got hired. We knew we had, like, a year and a half or something like that to prepare for satellite radio. And it led to a lot of really interesting things, again, about thinking about aggregating community across a much larger geographical space than you would in terrestrial radio, and when we kind of layered satellite radio with an online community, we were able to have, you know, our website end up having blog entries and comment sections where a HOST would go on the radio, and can almost have, like a discussion topic for the day, and everyone would just pile into the website and comment on the website, and you could end up with, you know, 1000 1500 comments over a three hour period from people listening on the radio. And it just changed the whole dynamic into this piece, where everybody gathered, you know, almost like appointment listening, not just for the music and the entertainment, but also for the community. And as a result of those things, people would go to festivals together. They would travel across the country and stay in each other's homes. One couple met on our blog and got married. Amazing little stories, when you think about creating things that don't exist, that bring a certain group of people together, that are not being served elsewhere, which sort

Matt Cundill  9:25  
of leads to Pacific content, which came after your time at the CBC, unless I'm missing any parts, why did you want to start Pacific content? What did you see? What did you know, and why didn't you share with the rest of us?

Steve Pratt  9:37  
I saw a whole bunch of stuff. I saw a lot of the traditional media model being broken. I just saw a lot of surprise every year when sales targets were not met and there were budget cuts or layoffs, even though it's fairly obvious that a lot of the money was moving to digital outlets like Facebook and YouTube, and I also saw companies like Red Bull becoming media companies and just bypassing you. Advertising and traditional media entirely, where they decided, you know, we don't need to rent anybody else's audiences. We should just build our own by making awesome programming. No one's stopping us. We can just make awesome stuff, and if it's good, people will follow us, and we get to spend lots of time with them, and they'll get to know who we are without interrupting them. And to me, that was just like, that is an amazing mindset shift, and it made me realize that all those skills and experiences that I had on the media side were suddenly going to be valuable in a new area, which is helping marketers in brands learn to think more like media companies and make things that are audience first, that earn attention, that will actually deliver business results, rather than the just buy ads and that people can skip now, you know?

Matt Cundill  10:49  
Yeah, so I was working in an ecosystem right around that time where companies like Red Bull would come to a commercial radio station, they would say, we would like to spend as much, or maybe $5,000 less. We'd like the same as last year, but we would like a little more added value, and the added value would generally come from the digital side. It might be some of the things that they weren't prepared to do as of yet, but yeah, and I think commercial radio would blame Facebook or other tools for that stuff, but it was really every company becoming a media company, and you recognize that with Red Bull, were there others?

Steve Pratt  11:25  
Well, you know, it's funny, like we saw the potential for this, and it was, I feel like it was pretty early on for us, like, you know, we'd done some, you know, branded content at CBC music. So radio three evolved into this platform called CBC music, and I remember we did grant Lawrence, who was one of our amazing hosts there, did a, like a VW Beatle road trip across the country that was all Canadian musicians and going to different places and having stand, you know, concerts in this new I think it was like a Fender edition of the Beatle, or something like that that had like a guitar amp plug in in the dash. It had, like the fender, you know, the guitar pattern in the in the inside of the car, I was like, Oh, this is interesting, that people are willing to spend money on making content, and that the budgets are good, and that in an era where a lot of the traditional broadcasts are cutting budget on the types of content that you can make, brands have budget to make amazing content if they could get their mindset in the right place, and, you know, seeing snippets of it. And so, you know, when we went out and started talking about this to companies, you could tell there were some that were totally like, you know, progressive, you know, I to call them, like, brave marketers who saw this and understood it, were like, yes, let's try it. And some people were like, Absolutely not. That sounds like an enormous amount of work, and we prefer to just write a check and have a campaign that gives us a reach report. I think we just kind of knew to keep pushing to find these, you know, really progressive, brave marketers, and get them on board to try and do something different. And I know we pitched slack in their early days and their CMOS, this guy named Bill masitis. He was the epitome of a brave marketer who said yes. After two meetings, he totally got it. He understood that, you know, if you gave new people who didn't know what slack was amazing brand experiences that were unexpected and surprising, because they weren't ads, and you could do it over and over and over again, that accelerates people's journey to becoming someone that you know, Slack trusts and build a relationship with them, and eventually, hopefully, they end up becoming a customer. So when we put our first one out, it was really unusual that slack put out a podcast and that it was a good show that wasn't really about Slack, it was about the future of work, but it had all this quirky, weird stuff that was part of what slack is, and that almost just created this rolling ball of other companies being like, oh, look what slack's doing, who's doing that, and how do we do something like that? In our flavor,

Matt Cundill  13:47  
was slack, your first podcast, baby, yes,

Steve Pratt  13:49  
yeah, the first one at Pacific content. And I mean, what a great first client. How like we really, we were very lucky and fortunate. And again, they were out of the gate, very brave creatively, to do something different, even though they were the first people to do it. And it's funny, like, I think, you know, right around the same time, I think it may have come out even, like, a month before slack did, GE did a show called the message, which was like a science fiction show that I think Laura Meyer, who's shameless acquisition same, yeah, Laura Meyer from shameless acquisition target, was part of that, and I think it's part of the early panoply network, maybe yes, in Slate. And that did really, really well, too. I feel like, you know, in an odd way, those two shows were both very brave, bold shows that I you know, you don't see as much of that today, even, like, over a decade into doing this as some of the very first entrance in doing it,

Matt Cundill  14:45  
I think you've been quoted somewhere, probably in pod news, that you're not creating branded podcasts. You're creating brands with stories,

Steve Pratt  14:52  
yeah, or original podcast with brands, or, you know, or something like that. It's the idea that you have to really make a show, and it has to be. From you, but not about you. And I think, you know, there's a process that we developed working with clients of actually spending real time doing strategy work before you kind of get to that program development production piece around who are you? What are your values? Who are you trying to reach? What are the things that you know and that only you know, that are going to be really valuable to that audience, and how can you craft that into a gift that they're going to love spending time with when so much of the stuff that goes out, and I think there's still, you know, regrettably, a ton of this is me first come and talk about my product or my services, or talk about how smart I am or our company is, and no one wants to listen to that. No one is signing up to, you know, voluntarily listen to bad infomercials. So that idea of like, setting a very high bar, that you're kind of like a media company now, and there's a ton of stuff out there vying for attention, that you have to be awesome and really valuable to earn entrance into the attention fortress. That's the bar, and that's kind of where we tried to push everybody to be as brave as they could in that space.

Matt Cundill  16:08  
Yeah. So what you're talking about there are infomercials, which sort of find their way into podcast, and that is learned behavior through traditional radio and television. Television would give up their afternoons for whatever infomercials they would put on, and radio would do the same. They would charge about $1,000 for somebody to come in and a client to essentially talk about themselves for a long period of time. But that is not what the branded podcast specific content did. I'm guessing you had to probably refuse a few clients. I could imagine the conversations that we want to do a podcast. We want to talk about ourselves, and then you ourselves. And then you never say, No, this

Steve Pratt  16:44  
is we need stories. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there was almost like a two way qualification process in every initial call, and one was obviously from the client side, saying, like, are these the people I want to partner with to make my podcast, and are they legitimate, and are they in our budget range, and all those sorts of stuff. But there was equally qualification on our part about, is this client going to be successful? Like, can we actually make something that is going to, you know, a help their business and their marketing goals? Like, what's the job they're hiring the podcast to do? Can we achieve that? And are the audiences going to actually enjoy listening to this show? We didn't really have a lot of interest in making shows. For the sake of making shows, we wanted to give everybody a really good, you know, experience in the podcasting industry, and give them a great experience of being a brand in the podcast industry, to have the opportunity to build up their own audience, and in a way, if they weren't willing to do the hard work to make something that's worth people's time, we knew it was going to be a short kind of one, one and done podcast season. Anyways.

Matt Cundill  17:45  
So how did you garner enough attention so that people would listen to these very successful podcasts? And I'll share a quick story just walking up the street after having dinner with Jeff Fiddler at Signal Hill insights and talking about, how about the difficulty in gaining attention for podcasts? He says, Well, why don't you pay attention to what Steve's doing over at Pacific content, because that's one of the very best things that they do, is getting attention for these stories and these podcasts. So once the podcast is done and the story is written, how did you garner attention?

Steve Pratt  18:20  
Well, it's interesting, like, you mean, for the client shows, or,

Matt Cundill  18:24  
yeah, so like a show, say, like choiceology, or for slack, or for any of the other client ones who did,

Steve Pratt  18:29  
yeah, interesting. And I have to say, I need to give a big chunk of credit to Dan Meisner, who's now at bumper, or with Jonas woost For this kid, you know, he and I worked on this a lot of Pacific content. We had some clients early on that we knew we made really good shows with, and they didn't get as many listeners as they should have, and the people who showed up listened a lot. It was a great show, but we knew that they were not putting in the effort to get the word out effectively, and whether it was, they didn't have any marketing budget. But you know, more often than not, they weren't actually willing to use their own channels to promote something that was really valuable for the people that they were trying to reach. And so Dan and I created this thing called the distribution Task Force, and we sat, you know, for multiple days in a boardroom in Vancouver, and had whiteboards and all sorts of stuff. We also hired a consultant named Rachel Hammerman out of New York, who, I kind of like heard about her and ferociously chased her down because she did all the audience development and communications and PR like everything for the first season of serial and we're like, let's get that awesome, smart brain and to see how she might be able to help us do the same thing for our clients. So, you know, kind of this combination of the three of us, and it grew to be a larger group over time, took this narrative again a little bit further around, like, Okay, well, if you're going to be a media company by making a real show, how do media companies promote shows? And get people to turn on their televisions or turn on the radio or go to the movie theater. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff about if you take HBO as a really good example, they don't, you know, not just have like things like billboards, but they've got earned media where the stars are out doing interviews before the series comes out. There's a whole pre launch teaser campaign. They use all their own real estate, of like promoting it on other HBO shows. There's season level promotion, there's episode level promotion. There's all sorts of different things that HBO does. And kind of thinking about, you know, or any movie company or any network, what do they do, and how can a brand do that, and what are the assets that they have to start marketing shows instead of products and services, and we started doing this, and it really worked, like one of the first ones we did. I remember we invited Rachel to come to a session with Mozilla when we first started working with them. And they are the owners of the Firefox browser, and they used to have this thing right underneath the search bar called a snippet, and it was just like a little promo bar. And when a new episode of of the show IRL, came out, they would put it in a snippet in there, and it converted like crazy, because it's like, these are people who've chosen Firefox. The show is designed for people who have a certain value set around how they think about the internet. And it's like, this. This is free. It's in your back pocket, and it converts like crazy, and it evolved into a lot of pieces where we did almost like a day one, let's think about an audience development strategy while we're developing the show, that these two tracks going in parallel, and not just like we're gonna make a show and then figure out how to market it. Let's design this whole thing for a particular group of people, for a particular outcome we would like and figure out, not just what are we going to make but how are we going to put it in front of them in a way that's really compelling, and how do we take advantage of all the strengths we have in our back pocket that we may not even know about. Transcription

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Matt Cundill  22:24  
as a long time recovering traditional media personality, program director, one of the things I learned was from you and Dan, I think went back to the research that you did for the podcast with the Ford Bronco. What was it called?

Steve Pratt  22:39  
Bring back Bronco.

Matt Cundill  22:40  
Thank you. And I think this is where you really wanted to find where the other podcasts that we're going to be able to link in and grab some audience from, or that would have a shared, common value. And then the concept of podcast neighborhoods was involved, involving lots of technological graphs and other tools that I guess Dan had sort of showed me that really left me understanding that in podcasting, your neighbor is your friend, and it's not like if you got two rock stations in Vancouver, you got, you know, rock 101, and see Fox, and they're going to go head to head and battle like they did for many years. We want to steal from them. No, you want to share. It's about sharing more than

Steve Pratt  23:19  
anything. Because not nice, because of the nice values of generosity and sharing, yeah, which you

Matt Cundill  23:26  
can do, by the way, because this is on demand content. It's not like two things are going live at the same time. And I think, you know, honestly, my biggest takeaway from all that stuff is,

Steve Pratt  23:35  
so Dan did develop that. I mean, he's, he's so smart, and I remember him showing me like, so he kind of go, this is a repeating pattern with Dan. Is he would send me a message being like, I was working on something this weekend. Do you have time for a meeting? And I'm like, oh, Dan's been working on something in the Dan lab. And then we have a meeting, and he shows me something that he's like, literally built over a weekend. And it's just like, your head explodes, being like, this is so smart. And you'll be like, let's put this into practice right away. And I remember that with the podcast neighborhoods where, you know, you could put in a category or a show, and it would take all this data from, you know, I think, like Apple podcasts initially, is like, if you listen to this show, you listen to these other shows, and you could build these little, these little neighborhoods of, like, overlapping listeners, if you listen to this show, hear all the other shows, or the other genres, or the other topics these people also listen to. And it kind of gives you a map to say, if we're going to do promotion, this is where all the people we're trying to reach are hanging out on other podcasts. And we could go and do things with all these people to help raise awareness of our podcast by appearing on their podcast, or buying really interesting, progressive integrations on their podcast or feed swaps or whatever. But it also became valuable in thinking about at a very early strategy stage, let's look at what else is out there before we design something and make sure we're not duplicating something that already exists and make something that is differentiated and is going to stand out for this group of people. So. That it is not just a clone of five other shows that are already doing the exact same thing. And I think that's the interesting thing. When you talk about like the rock stations, it's like, okay, well, let's say there's two classic rock stations in a market and we want to be the third. What's the thing that's going to be different about ours? You may still do a whole bunch of the same things, or you may be targeting the same audience, but if you're just a generic third station doing the same thing, not as exciting as if you figure out something that is uniquely yours and give people a different reason to check out yours instead of the other two.

Matt Cundill  25:29  
What did you learn from the slack one that sort of evolved into choiceology? Because I know when the slack podcast kind of you know it ran its course, but then choiceology came along. I remember listening to it and thinking they're not even talking about Charles Schwab, like the company is mentioned twice over six episodes, and yes, I did count that. That's awesome. But like, nobody thinks like this from the traditional media side. Was that conscious, or were that were you just too busy telling stories? No,

Steve Pratt  26:00  
it was very conscious, because it was, again, like, if I, if I ask you, and I know there's a dumb leading question, we've already talked about it, but like, what's the network that makes Game of Thrones and Curb Your Enthusiasm? And the sopranos HBO, right? It's not called HBO Sopranos. Or, you know, curb HBOs enthusiasm. You don't need the brand in everything. And in fact, for most companies, if the goal is to get you to kind of come in and sample and try something and start listening to it, is adding your brand name into it going to be additive or detrimental? Like, is it going to be something that is an incentive being like, well, now I really want to listen to it, or I don't know that I want to listen to brand X's show about why, or whatever. And I think we knew that if you got in and started listening to the show over and over again, and you're benefiting from it, you know who it's from, and there's almost like an additional Halo surprise benefit to saying, I can't believe they're not selling me something right now, I'm pleasantly surprised that this is a genuine, real show. That kind of emotional reaction is something that is very, very rare and very, very valuable, because it leads you to trust people and be like, I actually want to spend more time with this, and I'm going to tell people about it, because it's surprisingly lightly branded, and yet it is also very, very clear why. You know, so choiceology is a show about how to make better decisions, and a lot of kind of behavioral science and analyzing some of the cognitive blind spots that we have that lead us to make bad decisions. Every single one of those decision making pieces applies to how you manage your money and how you invest things, but there's never a direct correlation to it. But it's obvious why Schwab is making that stuff. They know this stuff, and it's a part of their DNA, and they want to make investors better decision makers. So fundamentally, that is their gift to the audience, is we're going to help you learn how to make better decisions, and it's going to help you in all areas of your life. But of course, it's going to help you with your money and your investment. And we're hopefully, you know, hopefully, you're grateful that we're providing you with really smart insights about how to avoid these, these pitfalls.

Matt Cundill  28:05  
Specific content was sold to Rogers in 2019 and I cedar called you, and I might have been, I was moderator. You are on a panel. I can't remember was 2018 or 19, but it was. It was shortly after we were on stage together that it was sold to, I guess, people in the room at the time. So was it

Steve Pratt  28:23  
hard to let go of yes and no, I will say so. Julie Adam was the champion of that acquisition inside Rogers. She was the head of radio and audio at the time, and went on to bigger and better titles at Rogers while we were there too. She's just like such a wonderful person and a progressive media thinker. And, you know, we're actually talking to a few different companies that year. And ultimately, it was like it was Julie's values and her the way that she wanted to approach an acquisition that made us feel really good about doing it. And, you know, I got to meet with the CEO at the time, again, Joe Natali, who was just, again, just a really nice, smart human. And the advice that they had, you know, at every stage of thing was like, we're going to keep you in a bubble, because if you get integrated into a larger Rogers universe, you're not going to be able to do the thing. That is why we're interested in working with you. You think differently, you have different experiences. You're working with different types of clients. So in some ways, it was almost like a best of both worlds, as we could go into an environment that had a lot of resources that could help us, and a lot of champions inside the organization who understood what we were and wanted to kind of keep it special, and we could kind of keep doing the work we were already doing with a lot of us clients inside that bubble. So yeah, very, very grateful Julie. She's the best. Yeah, the

Matt Cundill  29:42  
other thing I had marked down was say something nice about Julie Adam.

Steve Pratt  29:45  
Not hard. There's lots we could go on for like an hour about that.

Matt Cundill  29:50  
Yeah, and you did, which is great. So and you stayed in the bubble. The bubble was going to be in Vancouver, it was, which is great, because now you're outside of the building in Toronto, and for every media come. In the building in Toronto is a very, very you have to be like Julie Adam in order to to endure and understand and to make all those marriages were inside that so glad you were outside the bubble. And then you leave in 2022 and you start the creativity business. But I guess now's the time I'll just ask the question, when you first heard that Rogers was going to separate from Pacific content, what's your reaction in the 10 seconds after you hear this?

Steve Pratt  30:30  
You know, just gutted for the people number one. Because honestly, and I know I'm biased, but we had the best people like it was one of the great highlights of my life, being able to assemble such a team of talented people on a so wonderful culture of creativity and compassion, and everybody just took care of each other. And so, you know instantly, knowing that all these amazing people are out of a job, that was number one. And the other piece was, you know, to be honest, not 100% surprised that that decision was going to be made inside a $30 billion telecom company where a lot of that leadership that had made the acquisition wasn't there anymore. And I feel like, you know, in some ways, the stuff that made Pacific content special is also the reason why it got shut down, you know, and sold is because it didn't integrate into the rest of the business. In some ways, honestly, I feel like we were teaching brands to become their own media companies inside a media company that was selling ads to those same brands, and that we were very small, even though it's very it was a fairly big and profitable company in the podcast industry for what we were doing relative to radio and television income, and certainly relative to, like, cell phone and internet revenue, it's a drop in the bucket that may not have been worth it. Yeah, there's

Matt Cundill  31:47  
not going to be a lot of 30s and 60s of Tim Horton's ads being sold into that ecosystem. I mean, the fact that it was outside the bubble, and you've got a group of people who are talking to American companies and other companies too about becoming their own. Yeah, I understood it. It took me a few days to understand it, and then I thought to myself, well, nobody called me to offer to sell it to me for $1

Steve Pratt  32:12  
I'm always a very positive, optimistic person. And yeah, I wish, if there's one thing I could, I wish that someone had reached out to me when they were thinking about doing this, because I know there was, like, five or 10 companies instantly that just would have been like, we'll take the whole thing, we'll take all the team, we'll take all the clients, and it didn't happen. And I feel like there are a lot of good things that are happening despite all of that, and people are finding different chances. And, you know, almost, you know, honestly, it feels a little bit like there are a few different Phoenixes rising from the ashes of it, and knowing that people are going on to different adventures coming out of that is still very gratifying. And I feel happy that people are finding new chapters to figure out what they want to do with their careers and all their amazing talents.

Matt Cundill  32:55  
Yeah, well, I'm glad there's Happy Endings all around with this, which I was very, very pleased about. But then yours, you go to start the creativity business, of which I need to know more

Steve Pratt  33:04  
about. Well, it's funny, you know, it's an odd mix of things. Like my my life post specific content has been kind of dabbling in a few different pots, and some of it is consulting. So, you know, do a variety of different consulting stuff with brands, on marketing and content strategy, and some on working with entrepreneurs in the creative industries. But for like, the last bunch of months, I think, you know, for the next chunk going forward, I'm super focused on the book, and it's been such a fun process, like making this book, and it's funny, because I've had, like, I've, I've almost put some of the other stuff, I just dialed it down for the next few months, because, well, I've realized I've written this book that has a very specific process for you know, here's all the things you need to do if you want to have success with a content project. And I'm like, I have to do all of this or I'm going to be the biggest hypocrite on the planet. I've been really like, just doubling down on, like, making Tiktok videos and writing newsletters and doing all the outreach on audience development that Dan and I did, but for myself, it's been a really interesting kind of, like, eat your own dog food experience. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  34:07  
and I'm glad you mentioned this, and I think the book is going to be so so well timed, because from just the parts that have been supplied to me in advance that you know, we're talking about this idea of getting attention. Yet here we are in this wonderful era of look what this AI tool can do for you, and look at all this stuff. Oh, now, and there's video for your podcast as well. And I, as you know, somebody who makes podcasts for people, and now swamped, I've watched my workload triple, and I don't know that I'm marketing smarter if I were to use all these toys that are offered to me. So the example I like to use are the people who go look at this thing. I've got five AI clips, and I'm like, Wow, your show is average, and now you're going to get five AI clips of you talking and. Telling everybody how average it is, and now you're we've created more average. And because we do have a lot of very average stuff, we're now littering the internet with a lot of average. I have never been more bored in my life, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and I just want to be spoken to properly. And if somebody could please Garner my attention in some way that is creative and nice and something I want to engage in.

Steve Pratt  35:22  
This is where I feel we're at. I agree. I think there's never been more crap published in history than where we are right now, and a lot of it is, you know, still, I think, you know, we had a peak clickbait era a number of years ago, but it's almost feeling like all the tactics and techniques of that are in short form video, it's really hard to stand out in a sea of mediocrity and crap. And so, you know, my my sense right now is there's never been a more important time to make awesome stuff, like to really set a high bar for yourself. And the opportunity in, you know, as you said, like just this infinite sea of average is to make stuff that stands out, and to really think about, how can you create real value for people on the other end of this stuff, and how can you do something that is different and originally yours? And to figure out what sustainable looks like for that like I I know the algorithms all reward always on, and I know that podcast business models reward always on. It's hard to be exceptional when you're always on cranking out lots and lots and lots of stuff. And I think one of the counterintuitive things for me is I would far prefer to do fewer things better and have everybody remember it and love it and share it and wait for more because there's scarcity, rather than have a glut of like, 50 podcasts in my queue being like, I'm never gonna listen to those because they're already stale, or none of them stand out or are special. So I don't know to me agree 100% and the answer is, make awesome stuff. There's no other option.

Matt Cundill  36:58  
You know, I began to think back as I was reading the book, and I thought back to that commercial. They make money the old fashioned way. They earn it. Smith Barney, yes. John Houseman, and now you can flip it around, though, and now it can be that can be about attention.

Steve Pratt  37:12  
You earn it. Yeah, it's funny, like anything that is hard to come by has to be earned like it does. You shouldn't have it served up on a plate. Nobody's entitled to it. You don't deserve it. Just because you make a show, it doesn't deserve an audience. I think Tom Webster has said this like, No one deserves an audience. I'm like, Ah, no Truer words have ever been spoken. You have to make something that's worth people's time. And for me, the value, the way you can really tell is if at the end of spending time with you. Are they happy that they did it? Like, is it time? Would they say that is time well spent after they spent time with your thing? That's what we should all be striving for. Because if everybody's like, Oh, this is an amazing use of my time, I'm going to tell people about it because it was great, or I'm going to spend more time with those people, that's the bar we should be striving for. And I don't think that that is top of mind. Like, I don't actually think most creators or marketers start with like an attention strategy. Of like, are we going to do something right off the top that is going to earn people's attention and get them to when they're sampling that they're going to commit to spend the whole episode time with us? And is the whole experience so good that they're going to opt in and want to hear from me over and over and over and over again, and can I keep doing that with each successive episode or piece of content that comes out where they're going to trust me and build a relationship and become an advocate for me, it's hard work, you know, kind of like I was saying it that about that YTV stuff off the top, so much fun when you actually get into that space where you're making something that is really creative and uniquely yours, that stands out, and you get A group of people who are just like, This is awesome. Same with radio three serving an underserved community with something that is better than they're getting anywhere else, you end up with a group of people who are just extremely happy that you're putting this thing out into the world. I remember we did the same thing at Pacific content with Red Hat. Early on, they came and said, We want to make a show for people who are open source enthusiasts and tell all these stories about open source, and I very naively and stupidly thought like, Man, I do not think there's enough of these people in the world that are just gonna be a good podcast. Totally wrong. It is exactly the same as radio three. They're like, all over the place. There are open source enthusiasts, and there were not that many great shows out there for them. And so when Red Hat put out a fabulous show, very generously for open source enthusiasts, massive, massive audience and massive engagement, I don't know there is a path there. I just think more people actually need to lean in and think about it more if they want to find the way to break out from that glut of average. And

Matt Cundill  39:41  
one of the more refreshing things, this is where I get excited, because some of the things that are like, in fact, a lot of the things that you write about in the book have a lot to do with what made radio stations great, or TV stations great. And, you know, would get HBO to a level of, it's not TV, it's HBO. And that's. Just focus on the audience, and maybe don't talk about yourself so much, but really focus on the audience.

Steve Pratt  40:06  
Yes, yeah. And, you know, and there's so many great champions of this in the podcasting industry too. Like, I gotta call out Tom Webster again, as somebody who talks about this. Dan Meisner, we've talked about, you know, a huge advocate. I think both of them would say, I'm paraphrasing here, but you know, don't find an audience for your show. Make a show for your audience. A lot of people mix them up and kind of make their show first, and then figure like, how do we reach this audience? It's like, Well, start with who you want to reach and figure out how you can create unique value for them that they're not getting elsewhere. That audience first mentality is like, almost second nature for a lot of media people. It is not second nature for marketers, and I think that just that flip alone would make a massive difference in most people's marketing effectiveness. Tom

Matt Cundill  40:49  
Webster in his book, because now I've got many, by the way, I don't even read much, and now I've got more reading to do than ever before. Tom's

Steve Pratt  40:57  
book is amazing, by the way, it's so good, it just pearl of wisdom over and over again. I think I actually said this to him as a testimonial, but it's like, you know, the Elements of Style that book from that was like, the, like, the Bible of, like, this super short, tight writing book. For me, his book is that for podcasting. It's amazing.

Matt Cundill  41:16  
I mean, yours that I've, you know, read through, talks a lot about getting attention, but makes it simple up. These are simple things that we don't get to because we think about ourselves or make it about ourselves. And, you know, I think you really do a great job of just trying to push us outside the bubble look elsewhere for you know, whether it's an idea and you I feel like you're giving me permission to go and just try stuff. I'm so glad you say that,

Steve Pratt  41:40  
because, like, in one sense, there's this part of it where it's like, it's harder work to make things that people like, but it's it really is fun and creative to make something that is different and interesting and yours that is a gift for somebody else that they're going to value a lot. And it's almost like at every stage of the process to be like, Oh, how can I do something my way that is going to be valuable for other people. Or how can I do something differently than what's out there? Or how can I pair two odd things to make a really interesting format that doesn't exist yet? When you do all these things, it's like, it leads to some of the most rewarding creative work that you do. It's like, it's not that much fun to just make a carbon copy show of everybody else. But when you figure out the one that's like, Man, this is, like, comes from my DNA, or a company's DNA, and it's like, designed for those people that they're gonna love it. It's really fun. I hope that's what people get out of it. Is permission to go have fun and make something that stands out, yeah. But

Matt Cundill  42:35  
also, you've told me and as well, a little bit in Tom's book too. You know, audience research is available to you. We can do this even before you start your podcast. You can do this and getting feedback like super, super important to do. But you know myself, for instance, I did not seek any of that stuff when I first started, which is why we started on SoundCloud in 2016 and I actually wanted to make all the mistakes in the book in order to write a book that I have not written yet, which you know may come one day, coming soon, coming soon. But tell me a little bit about because this is also an audio form too. So if we don't feel like reading,

Steve Pratt  43:09  
we can listen to you. Yeah, you know what? Ice funny i I knew from the second I decided to do this that, like I had to do an audio book, just from a background in podcasting and radio and music and everything like that. I narrate the audiobook, so if you can't send my voice, maybe it's not the right fit for you, but the book is in my voice, like it is not a host reading an audiobook. It's a real read. And I and I partnered up with two people I used to work with at Pacific content, Pedro Mendez and gay 10 Harris. And Pedro used to direct audiobooks for a major publisher. And when I was telling him, like, the book is about unconventional strategies, so we have to do some unconventional stuff with the audiobook, he just leapt out. And he's like, we are going to do every single thing that I knew I wanted to do, and I was never allowed to do in audiobooks before. And daytime is a brilliant sound designer, so it is produced a lot more like a podcast than an audiobook, and we just had, like, a ton of fun making this thing. And there's, you know, there's some music and some sound effects, and there's some breaking the fourth wall stuff, but genuinely it just it feels like something that comes from me and is in my voice and sensibility and has a sense of playfulness and fun that sounds different than some of the audio books that I've listened to in the past. The end of the day, all these pieces, you know, when you're talking about experimenting earlier, like I've done all sorts of experiments at every stage of the book with different collaborators. And what pays off and what doesn't pay off, I will see what it publishes. But it's been such a fun process working with all these people collaborating on different types of things. I'll give you one more weird one if you want. Oh, I'll take all the weird ones. Okay, so I'll try and describe this for people who aren't watching the video, but, like, I just got the actual physical book last week, and I've been working with this designer at page two, named Peter caulking. Yeah, and there's a story in the book from an author named Dan Heath, who wrote one of my favorite books with his brother called Made to Stick, about what makes ideas stick. And he was talking about the design of that cover and how their publisher had just presented some very generic business covers. And they're like, the book is about making ideas that stick. These are all too boring. And then they came back stuff like post it notes on it. And they're like, post it notes literally do not stick. And so they had this bright orange cover with a piece of duct tape on it, and they put together a PowerPoint of like, here's all the top selling business books and all of your proposals. And the last one was this orange thing with duct tape, and it just popped. And they're like, Okay, you win. That's your cover. And it became this really iconic cover. And the book's an amazing book, but I remember the cover as much as I remember the ideas in the book. Anyway. So Peter and I sat down and I were like, Okay, here's the bar. We need to have something that was, like, interesting enough that it earns attention and it's unconventional. And he came up with so many cool things. And in the end, he's got this one where it's a paperback that actually has flaps in it, and the type is tilted, so it kind of encourages you to tilt it, and then if you unfold the flaps, it actually becomes a vertical poster. And so it's kind of like designed to get people to pick it up off of a bookshelf and start playing with it and touching it and, you know, rotating it and seeing where these little arrows are. And then if you open it, there's no forward, there's no like, you know, whatever it just it starts. The first page is the start of the book. Much like we talk about in the book, about like a cold open in a TV show or a podcast. You got to just jump right in if you want people to do it. He's done it with the design of the book. So there is, like, this weird dog fooding thing of just like, it's been really fun collaborating with all these people to figure out how to do a book or an audio book differently. And interestingly, I

Matt Cundill  46:53  
think I've got some sort of photographic memory, because I think that story about Made to Stick appears on page 168, of the book.

Steve Pratt  47:00  
Oh, look at this.

Matt Cundill  47:04  
I know it's crazy. Anyways, I'm I'm wicked with a highlighter. It's great that way. I love it. Yeah, and by the way, shout out to gay Tay Harris. By the way, I hired him in 2009 at power 97 in Winnipeg. Oh, that's so great,

Steve Pratt  47:18  
Harris in the morning. There you go,

Matt Cundill  47:22  
it was evenings or overnights at the time.

Steve Pratt  47:26  
Yeah, he's the best. He's actually been really wonderful too. Like, I made a, like, a fake book trailer, like a movie trailer for the book, and he's, like the big, booming voiceover guy in it. He's a great guy. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  47:38  
well, congratulations, by the way, on the book. Thanks a lot for doing this. By the way, I've been dying to have you on for eight years now, which is what I tell pretty much every guest now, because we can only do 52 of these a year. Thanks for having me. It's

Steve Pratt  47:49  
a real treat to talk to you. I always love getting to hang out and catch up in this. This is a real treat. So thank you. The

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  47:55  
sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan serminsky, edited by Taylor McLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.