TRANSCRIPT Become a Podmaster S2E1 – Mastering Podcasting: Dive Deep into Formats and Genres!

[00:00:00] Hendrik Baird: Well, Ethan, this year’s really flown past, eh? 

[00:00:03] Ethan Baird: Okay, it’s April, but, you know? 

[00:00:04] Hendrik Baird: No, but, like, the last 12 months felt like only nine. Yeah, but come to think of it, nine months really isn’t that long. To some, it can feel like a maternity.

[00:00:17] Ethan Baird: Actually, it took me a while. I was like, what are you talking about?

Dusting off the rust of season one, getting back into season two of this podcast. 

[00:00:31] Hendrik Baird: Last night I was thinking we’re going to say, we’re back, like back from way back, from the dead. 

[00:00:35] Ethan Baird: It feels like, because it was like a year ago or something that we recorded. I don’t know. It feels like a year ago that we recorded the previous season.

[00:00:41] Hendrik Baird: It’s probably. But the big difference is we’re in a professional studio today, not in the back room with a Mickey Mouse mic. 

[00:00:48] Ethan Baird: Yeah, we’ve leveled up as podcasters severely. Thank you to Ultimate Media for sponsoring or giving us a space to record here. Because yeah, we’re sitting here, Pro Tools is open. We’ve got 20, 000 rands worth of the microphone sitting in between us. It feels good. 

[00:01:02] Hendrik Baird: We are scripted this time. 

[00:01:04] Ethan Baird: We are scripted. 

[00:01:04] Hendrik Baird: There’s no busking. We actually know what we’re going to do. Yeah. And uh, yeah, a great series ahead. We might cover some of the things we’ve covered before, but I mean, you can always learn something new when you look at these things again.

And we’ve also spoken to some really interesting people. 

[00:01:18] Ethan Baird: Yeah. Yeah. And asked them some of the same questions we asked in season one as well. So there’s definitely going to be some backtracking of things we’ve already spoken about, but ultimately I think in this season we’ve got some really, really interesting insights from the podcast as we interviewed.

[00:01:32] Hendrik Baird: And today, what are we doing today? 

[00:01:34] Ethan Baird: Genres and formats. 

[00:01:35] Hendrik Baird: Genres and formats. Now I just want to know, Ethan, what is the difference between the two? What is a genre and what is a format? 

[00:01:41] Ethan Baird: So the format is the physical structure of your podcast. How is it conveyed? Is it interview, documentary, all these different ways of actually producing and putting the show together. Whereas the genre is more about the topic that you cover. So for example, a genre could be true crime. The format could be panel discussion, interview, documentary style. There’s many different ways to, you know, produce it, but the genre is typically what it’s about. And this also ties into the Apple podcasts and their platform. When ever you’re on your podcasting host, you have to choose your two genres, health and spirituality, all those there’s that long list.

[00:02:20] Hendrik Baird: Which is the most popular genre in podcasting.

[00:02:24] Ethan Baird: So in my experience, Especially from when I was doing podcast editing for all different kinds of podcasts. I was one of those lackeys that you would send a podcast to and they’d edit it for you. We had entrepreneurship and wellness slash spirituality being super, super high on the list. 80 percent of the podcasts I edited at that company with those kinds of podcasts.

But I’ll also say anecdotally, true crime seems to be very far out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. True crime podcasts are in my mind, like one of the biggest genres for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I’d say, yeah, definitely true crime, entrepreneurship, health and spirituality seem to be the bigger genres to me. 

[00:03:03] Hendrik Baird: Okay. And, and then formats from what I can see, the format that most people think of when they think of a podcast is an interview style. 

[00:03:13] Ethan Baird: Absolutely. And I think a lot of people assume that that’s what a podcast is. As in a podcast is me sitting on Zoom, recording a video of me interviewing somebody, which is a fraction of the actual reality of the podcasting world. But a lot of people we’ve spoken to are like, I want to start a podcast. Who am I interviewing? Like those are the questions. 

[00:03:32] Hendrik Baird: It seems to be the easy way into podcasting. 

[00:03:35] Ethan Baird: I definitely would say so. Because doing a podcast solely by yourself is a huge undertaking scripting and you have no one else to rely on. You know, perhaps getting a co host on board isn’t necessarily the easiest thing either, especially if you’re the one with the concept.

So a lot of people, I think default to, I’m going to interview people as my podcast. And I think it’s also got to do with maybe the goals of their podcast. Perhaps if you want to be meeting people, then it’s a good thing, but yeah, it does seem to be people’s default. 

[00:04:03] Hendrik Baird: So what is the format that we’re using here today?

[00:04:06] Ethan Baird: It’s actually interesting. We have a combination kind of format because of the way that this is produced. What we’re recording right now is, I would say, perhaps a discussion, just a two person discussion. 

[00:04:15] Hendrik Baird: Oh, like co hosted? 

[00:04:17] Ethan Baird: Co hosted, for sure. Co-hosted. I almost want to say documentary style, but it’s not.

[00:04:22] Hendrik Baird: No, it’s not quite a documentary.

[00:04:23] Ethan Baird: But it uses some of the same techniques that a documentary would, in that we’ve got clips that we play, interview snippets specifically, interspersed between a broader kind of quote unquote narration. 

[00:04:35] Hendrik Baird: But it’s also interview style because we have interviews. We’ve interviewed quite a lot of very interesting people. 

[00:04:40] Ethan Baird: Yeah, but if I was to tell somebody that this is an interview podcast, in their mind, it’s an hour of.

[00:04:45] Hendrik Baird: Hi, how are you? I’m so and so. Welcome and tell us a little bit about yourself and all of that sort of nonsense. I must say, I’m a little bit fed up, and I’m sure this is going to be controversial.

I’m fed up with all these interviews, because it takes so long to get to the point. I’ve got to listen to their whole backstory, and like, who are you anyway? You know, if you were some famous actor, maybe I’d listen to the whole thing, because I might find you interesting. But you’re just somebody, somebody.

I’m not sure that I want to sit through a whole hour’s worth of listening to you babbling on about, you know, How great your life has been and all your challenges. I don’t know. What do you think? 

[00:05:19] Ethan Baird: So I think this comes down to interview technique and the concept of the show. I think too many people, including myself in the past, think a good interview is, okay, tell me a bit about yourself. What do you do? Tell me your life story. Whereas in my experience, all the most interesting interviews are ones that either have a theme. So today we’re going to talk about your first crush. And that’s the interview. Even if I’m talking to Tom Cruise, I’m not going to ask him his life story. 

[00:05:50] Hendrik Baird: Because everybody knows that really.

[00:05:51] Ethan Baird: Exactly. I’m not actually adding anything new. I’m not creating anything new. So I think where interviews are interesting is when you have a real clear theme to your interview and you’re going to ask questions that nobody’s ever asked before or that nobody’s done in that style before, or if you’re just a genuinely good listener and interviewer slash conversationalist, then I’ve heard incredible interviews. Like Rick Rubin, for example, famous music producer, has a show and in his podcast, he has like the most in depth, high level discussions with these musicians that he’s worked with.

So it’s not just like any random person, someone whose album he just produced, and then they sit down and unpack everything and go into such interesting detail that the conversation by itself is just so interesting. But I don’t think most podcasters have developed that skill of being a great conversationalist, of being a great interviewer, or they haven’t niched down or narrowed down their podcast enough to make it an interesting interview.

So ultimately just comes across as one long, boring ad for somebody that you’re interviewing. 

[00:06:54] Hendrik Baird: Talking about an ad and niching and all these technical terms you’re talking about. Remember, I’ve written a book about this. It’s called Become a Podmaster: everything you need to know to master the art of podcasting.

Available on our website bear. media or on Takealot or on Amazon or wherever you buy books online. So, um, Steve Ramona, he does interview style podcasts and he delves into the personal stories of people. But I think his accent is more on their journeys of overcoming challenges and turning them into success stories.

So that’s a very specific kind of focus like you were saying. 

[00:07:28] Steve Ramona: Yeah. My name is Steve Ramona. I’m in Northern California. My podcast is Doing Business with a Servant’s Heart

[00:07:34] Ethan Baird: brilliant. So what exactly do you cover in your show? 

[00:07:37] Steve Ramona: Three things I mentioned are motivation, education, inspiration. Great stories, overcame obstacles, great comebacks from business people, and it could have been physical, mental, or something that happened to somebody else, uh, that affected their lives. And they were able to learn how to overcome them by serving. The other side of my show is learning to serve instead of sell. We’re all in business for products and services.

Our goal is to get to know somebody. Let’s serve them. Let’s bring them value. Let’s give it to them first and then ask for the sale later. 

[00:08:12] Ethan Baird: When you submit your podcast feed, you know, you have to figure out what kind of categories you’re tagged in. Like what did you kind of eventually figure out for yours?

[00:08:19] Steve Ramona: You know, I just did business because it could be business marketing. It could be business, uh, lead generation. It could be business tech. I kind of fall in different categories. So I’m really a little more general than most. But it’s, it’s really business. That’s who I want to help. And then of course, non business people may listen and go, well, I love this lady. She was awesome. She started her own business and look what she’s doing. So, but my real niche is probably business. If you want to say business strategy would be if you want to niche it out a little bit. 

[00:08:51] Ethan Baird: How is your podcast constructed? So what is the actual format of your show? 

[00:08:56] Steve Ramona: Yeah, it’s an interview. I usually do one person interviews. I’ve done two. They’ve worked out very well. Well, I may have two co-founders or two partners in a business in it. We just talk about them. I focus on, like I said, motivation, inspiration and education. I want to know their background. I have at least one story. And usually it’s a story of how they’ve overcome something.

Talk about any books they’ve written. If they’re an author, a nonprofit they’re part of, things they’re passionate about because they overcame this struggle and now they’re like, Hey, I’m focusing on these wounded warriors or, uh, cancer or whatever, whatever, maybe it’s their family or whatever. But again, to show the audience this, this hope, this, this motivation to do something like this.

[00:09:40] Ethan Baird: So another format that I don’t think a lot of people actually are doing is kind of the panel discussion format because it requires a bit more work and a lot more people than your typical show. The easiest way to imagine it is if you’ve ever been to a conference, you’ve probably seen one where there’s a moderator, some kind of host who then moderates a discussion between a group of people with various opinions ideally. It’s a format that’s honestly a little harder to do than an interview podcast or solo hosted ones. Purely because you have to get a whole bunch of people together. And then as the host, your job isn’t necessarily to have that much of an opinion, depending on how you want to do it. It’s more about facilitating a discussion.

[00:10:21] Hendrik Baird: So are you saying anything more than two people would become a panel discussion? 

[00:10:26] Ethan Baird: If you are running it like a panel discussion, you can have six people just having a conversation. Yeah, that’s it. That’s different.

[00:10:33] Hendrik Baird: That sounds like a party. 

[00:10:34] Ethan Baird: Yeah. Yeah. Um, you can have four podcasters having a chat. Which is not really a panel discussion in my mind. Panel discussion involves very carefully making sure that people have a chance to speak. This is the broad topic we’re talking about. Okay, you, what’s your opinion? You, what’s your opinion? Can we get some questions from the rest of the group? It’s a lot more structured than just a four person co hosted podcast.

[00:11:00] Hendrik Baird: So, what would the benefits be of having a panel discussion. How would that, how would that deepen the content or how would that make it more interesting to listen to? 

[00:11:10] Ethan Baird: I think the thing with the panel discussion that makes it interesting is the idea of having many diverse voices on a topic.

Instead of just two people discussing something, you could have like eight. Because you’re moderating it so you can make sure that everybody has a chance to speak. Eight different people all voicing their opinion and having their own expertise kind of shine through. So it creates a really dynamic show because you have a lot of different voices, a lot of different opinions, you get to get the kinds of insights that you wouldn’t necessarily normally have because people go so in depth on the topics. 

[00:11:43] Hendrik Baird: So you’re saying a host for a panel discussion needs a special skill and I think Kenny’s got that kind of skill because he has a way of drawing personal stories out of, um, his panel members that are experiences that they may not typically share.

And he gets it because he makes them feel safe and he creates a comfortable experience or a comfortable zone where they can then safely share these experiences. So yeah, let’s meet Kenny and let’s listen a little bit about how he runs things. 

[00:12:16] Kenny Archer: I’m Kenny Archer. We’ve got a podcast that we call Weekly Chat with Kenny. It’s been going for over three years now. It started during the first week of lockdown and it’s developed and grown since then. What happened was I got a couple of my clients together because none of us knew what to do during COVID and we got together on a Friday morning. And it was a joke as we are laughing about it now because we all said you’re on this thing called zoom because none of us ever used it. And now it’s what everybody uses. And it slowly developed and they started saying, Oh, can I bring a friend? Can I bring a friend? And eventually we had 20 to 30 people coming every Friday morning. And it became a very strong support base for business owners not knowing what to do. So there were a lot of emotions and a lot of quite a bit of life coaching got involved in that as well.

And then we started steering it back in the business direction. And then towards the end of lockdown, people started saying, well, we’re going back to the office and we can’t make the session. Can you perhaps record it for us? And we started recording and sending to different people all the time, myself and my marketing lady, Michelle, we said, we put our heads together and said, well, let’s just turn it into a podcast.

[00:13:35] Ethan Baird: So if somebody hasn’t heard the podcast before, could you describe what it sounds like? 

[00:13:39] Kenny Archer: We work on a theme per month. So for example, let’s say we were, we were looking at themes around sales. Um, so the whole month would be questions around sales. So a question would come up like, who’s your ideal client that you find sales are so easy for?

And then people will share those win-win situations where they’ve had good closures on sales, and they’ve managed to close it well. And each person shares their own experience with it. And in that process, the others learn from them too. So they’re not just getting one directional story. They’re getting stories from various different people.

And then they walk away with what resonates the most with them. I think that’s what the whole thing is. So everybody has the opportunity to answer that question. Once everybody’s gone, I’ll do a summary of what the final results are of everybody’s input. And then from there, each person then has a turn to actually share their one thing that they’re taking away from that session.

And that’s what’s powerful. And if you go and listen to the intros, Of all the different podcasts, we take one person’s takeaway, and that becomes the intro for that episode of the podcast. And then the following week, we’ll do a question that’s related to the previous week. However, if you listen to it on its own, it’s strong enough on its own.

[00:15:07] Ethan Baird: So Kenny is a coach that gets a huge amount of value and gives back to his coaching group by recording this podcast with them. But in terms of genres, again, business slash entrepreneurship, as I said, one of the most popular genres, especially the kinds of people we speak to. 

[00:15:20] Hendrik Baird: Next up, we’re going to get into a format that we don’t really see that often, and this is investigative journalism.

So this is a very specialized kind of podcast, run by a very specialized kind of person, an investigative journalist, and this one is called Cape of Cocaine. Now, this seems to be such an interesting story. It’s also a four part podcast, And it investigates, uh, the Bulgarian mafia’s presence in South Africa.

That sounds truly intriguing. 

[00:15:47] Ethan Baird: I don’t think this format is investigative journalism. I believe that the genre is investigative journalism. So the format of this is, in my mind, more around a documentary style podcast because it’s got narration, it’s got other kinds of content in it together to Put together this broader story.

I think then the genre of which would be investigative journalism, perhaps even true crime, depending on how you want to swing it, but this is also where things start to get blurry because the difference between a genre and a format with something so specialized like this, it might even be a bit of a moot point.

[00:16:21] Paige Muller: Hi everybody. I am Paige Muller and I am a podcast manager at the Founders Factory. I also do a lot of freelance podcasting work in and around South Africa and globally, just generally. 

[00:16:32] Ethan Baird: Can you talk a bit about some of the podcasts that either you’re currently working on or that you have worked on?

[00:16:37] Paige Muller: Great. So I’ll start off with one of my absolute favorite podcasts I’ve been involved in, and it was known as Cape of Cocaine. This podcast was a creative and investigative podcast done with the Times Live investigative team in South Africa, and was based on the investigations of the Bulgarian Mafia’s cocaine rings off of South Africa’s coasts.

I’ve also worked on one called Justice for Kopano, which was about a small girl who was hit by a car, as well as several others, including Sunday Times Politics Weekly, Eusebio Sontag’s Live, to today where I’m working on projects such as Founded with the Founder Factory and a whole bunch of other corporate podcasts, which unfortunately I’m not supposed to be chatting about too much, but that’s just a brief idea of what I can do from investigative all the way through to your general corporate podcasting.

[00:17:27] Ethan Baird: Let’s talk about Cap of Cocaine. What was your role in it? And, you know, let’s kind of dive into the production process. 

[00:17:33] Paige Muller: So the reason I love the Cape of Cocaine so much was because it actually took us far longer than it ever should have. It was just a four piece series based on the work of an investigative journalist, a very good investigative journalist, in my opinion, AAaron Hyman, based in Cape Town.

And he had been following the Bulgarian mafia in South Africa for a very long time, for a couple of years. And every once in a while, he’d write these groundbreaking stories on it. And they just, it wasn’t getting traction. It wasn’t getting any attention, mainly because people just don’t read anymore. So he came to me as an investigative journalist.

And at this moment, I was working in the newsroom as their podcast producer. So I was doing all of the talk shows. All of their corporate content, um, and all of that kind of thing. And he said, listen, I’ve been following the story, but I feel like more can be done with it. And from there we had to take, and you know, as it goes with print journalists, they have so much to say all of the time. And when you’re working with an audio medium, what you really want to do is simplify the story. So that you’re not missing anything, uh, when you’re listening to that spoken word the first time. So we took all of his research, and he had photos and sound clips and all of the rest of it, and we took all of that research and started to siphon through it to find main characters and main story arcs that we could turn into a story.

And from there, between Aaron and I, we began scripting. So Aaron wrote, I simplified down again. Aaron wrote and I simplified down again. We gave it through to editors, and they simplified that even further and pulled out areas that they found of concern. From there, I recruited one of our fellow journalists to be our voiceover artist.

I selected elements where we could do certain elements of sound design and get Aaron to explain some of his journalism to really bring the audience in. And what you landed up getting at the end of all of that was an interactive experience where those who listen to the story could actually feel it.

They could live it. You close your eyes and you’re in the middle of the police raid on a boat where, you know, the police are pulling cocaine out of the waves. You can feel it. Because we’ve got the sound effects from that. He also had little clips of videos which we eventually started to incorporate into the article pages to give you more of an interactive multimedia feel.

And it really just brought the journalism, the incredible journalism that Aaron was already doing into a new medium and brought it a little bit more to life to tell the story in a way that because, you know, mafias by their very nature are very complex, the links are never ending, it narrowed it down to a character that could be followed, someone relatable to the ear, you know, someone that everyone can kind of understand, okay, why are they here? What’s going on? 

Let’s say that we didn’t encounter a couple of issues along the way of that project we did. In fact, we had a lot of mafiosos calling us when they’d heard when we started promoting the project saying that, listen, we’ve heard episode one, am I going to be in episode two? And that’s when investigative podcasts become a bit more interesting when you start releasing and these characters realize they’re being portrayed in this medium. That’s when it becomes a bit more interesting. 

[00:20:50] Hendrik Baird: I think one of the big things that you need to do when you produce something like this is you’ve got to do extensive research. It’s not just Getting a guest, sitting down and having a discussion. This is, this is real digging deep and finding the facts and the stories and really making it engaging in that way.

[00:21:08] Ethan Baird: Yeah. This is one of those kinds of podcasts that requires a massive amount of production and not just technical production, although the technical requirements with these podcasts are immense. You’ve got so many moving parts, so many voices. Music, all these different things that you have to put together., But the other production is like the content production for this is a huge amount of work, because what you’re doing is you create, its new content, you’re exposing something, you’re a journalist, you’re investigating, you’re literally going out and being an investigator, compiling all this information together. And then putting something completely new out to the world or exposing something to the whole world. 

So there’s also a whole bunch of stuff around ethics, around clearance, about getting permission for people to actually let you use the content. So yeah, this is something you would not do lightly, but to be honest, you are most likely already a journalist if you’re considering doing something like this.

[00:22:02] Hendrik Baird: The other thing I find interesting is, when you say podcast, people think it’s going to be weekly for the rest of your life until you die. You know, it becomes a full time occupation. Before you know it, it’s taken over your whole life. And this is just a four part series. And like us, we’re doing a six part series here.

We, we’re doing little Netflix specials, if you want. Uh, you know, a little series and it’s, it’s done and it’s dusted and we take a break and we come back in a year’s time and do another six episodes. So I think people also fall into that trap of like, I start a podcast, every Friday it’s got to go out. Um, and they don’t think in terms of seasons or shorter kind of bursts of, of episodes.

[00:22:40] Ethan Baird: One thing that I’ve never really understood is that if you look online, you can see a whole lot of DJ mixes, like hour long mixes of music being described as a podcast. And there’s like really big producers who put out a weekly quote unquote podcast that is just the music mix. So I thought, you know, we really have to reach out to somebody who actually does this and find out Why do they call it a podcast?

Is it even technically a podcast? But if you think about it, it’s audio on demand and that’s ultimately what podcasting is. 

[00:23:11] Hendrik Baird: It’s such a broad term, isn’t it? It’s like movies on demand. Audio on demand is basically a podcast as long as it comes through an RSS feed. That’s a podcast. So, and I think this is what we were saying earlier. People want to put podcasting into an interview style. That’s what I’m doing, is an interview, especially in South Africa. I’m not sure about the rest of the world. What was the inspiration for this music podcast? Is it just to, to share music or is it from a personal thing? Is he trying to promote certain artists?

[00:23:41] Ethan Baird: Yeah, he’s building a brand. That’s a big thing. He’s a DJ. He knows other DJs. He’s putting together a bit of a community around his music. It’s got a website and everything. And yeah, we can, we can delve into Lulama’s podcast. 

[00:23:54] Lulama: My name is Lulama. I go by the alias LJ, of which I host a podcast called Deep Digger Installments, which is a house music type of podcast which is catered in three hours. I’m in the first hour. The second hour is a recited mix by DJ Colin all the way from New York city. Uh, the third hour is by any guest mix from any corner of house music. I decided to call it a podcast only because I do not have access to airplay and also because I found it easier because podcasts can be pre recorded.

So I found that it would be easier for me to get it out there at a planned approach and also at a scheduled approach. 

[00:24:47] Hendrik Baird: So that’s really interesting. Uh, and it’s again, not a format that you see very often in the genre, perhaps music, because I think when we spoke previously about, I want to play some music on my, uh, my podcast, you’ve got to get licensing rights for that. You can’t just play anything. 

[00:25:02] Ethan Baird: That’s the other big thing. There are some platforms where a lot of these like music mixes do go, where they have built in licensing for it. And you can submit the list of songs, but yeah, don’t think that just because this guy has it. DJ Mix is a podcast where you can put an Ed Sheeran song in your show. It’s not going to work that way. 

[00:25:21] Hendrik Baird: Now, Ethan, news and, and, and actuality and current affairs is, is there space for that kind of genre in podcasting or, you know, we keep on saying your content has to be evergreen and in five years time, people must still be able to, uh, to understand it when they listen to it.

But when you do current affairs, it’s obviously news of the day and You know, in a week’s time, that’s all old news. So where does that fit into our greater scheme of things? 

[00:25:48] Ethan Baird: It all comes down to the goal of the show. If you are, like us, putting together a podcast that you want to be evergreen, we need this to be evergreen because we would like prospective mentorship clients and prospective production clients to be able to listen to this and get a good understanding of podcasting, right?

So we want the content to be reasonably evergreen, but that’s not true for every show. By no means. Remember, podcasting is just radio on demand. Genuinely, that’s what it is. And radio is a medium that is literally dictated by the minute. Things are old news in an hour. So there’s definitely a space for it.

And I think there’s a lot of companies and news outlets, a lot of Newspapers and a lot of those kinds of companies who started creating these podcasts as a way to disseminate their news content in another format that people can listen to in the car, you know, on the way to work. So yeah, there’s definitely a space for it.

Not all podcasts have to be evergreen. It really just depends on what you want to do with it. 

[00:26:45] Hendrik Baird: And I think Aphiwe also has a really interesting approach to the format. 

[00:26:48] Aphiwe Mame: Hi, I am Aphiwe Mame. I am the producer and host for Digify Africa Unplugged Conversations. The platform is really about looking at the issues that are in the digital economy on the continent.

Also, not only the issues, but also the opportunities that are there for young people and different communities. We talk about issues that look at, you know, access. We talk about infrastructure on the continent and also just the emerging opportunities That young people can find in terms of their AIs, in terms of new technologies that are coming up in the digital economy space. 

[00:27:23] Ethan Baird: In terms of actual production of your podcast, what is your genre and then how is the production process for it?

[00:27:29] Aphiwe Mame: It’s a long form. We tend to borrow a lot from a more current affairs style. We obviously try to make it as casual as possible. I’ve always loved, um, hard to talk. Um, I’ve always been a current affairs person, but, uh, because My personality is not entirely current affairs, I’m able to bring in a little bit of that color to it that would not necessarily live on tradition.

Right. And so I think that long form becomes a little bit more playful, you know, a little bit of jokes here and there just to make it more relatable and to make it a little bit more casual. But yeah, so it’s long form. After we record, um, obviously there’s the editing process and taking out some parts of the conversation.

We have an intro. Sometimes I incorporate some soundbites in there. Um, so I’ll have, let’s say for instance, there was one episode where actually it was a compilation of soundbites. I just turned it into almost like a radio documentary format where there would be narratives in between the soundbites.

And so we try to use different styles to make the content more engaging. Our post production process is different for each and every, depending on what kind of field we want, we’re trying to achieve for that specific episode, but for the most part, it’s quite straightforward. It’s obviously sticking.

We try by all means to stick to the 30 minute at 20 minute conversation timeframe. And in between that, if there’s need, if I feel the need to bring in a little bit of soundbites and packages in there, I’ll gooi them in there. 

[00:29:00] Hendrik Baird: Now we’re going to talk about a format that really is close to my heart. And something that I’m very passionate about.

So I come from the theater. I was, um, trained as an actor and I worked in community arts for many, many years. I’ve been in movies and, uh, television shows and, uh, radio dramas and all those sorts of things. And, um, audio drama is, for me, One of the more interesting genres of a podcast, have I got that right?

[00:29:27] Ethan Baird: No, it is a format. 

[00:29:29] Hendrik Baird: Is a format. So what genre would it be? It would be fiction because usually it’s fiction or it’s nonfiction or it’s narrative. 

[00:29:37] Ethan Baird: Or it’s comedy or comedy. 

[00:29:39] Hendrik Baird: Or tragedy or true life, you know, based on real events. But I think it boils down to, and this is true for any podcast, is that you need to tell a story. When you do audio drama, obviously, it’s a very specific story. It’s like a radio play or like a movie. I like to think of audio dramas in the podcast field as mind movies, because it’s theater of the mind. You just hear the sounds, which are the actors performing or the sound effects or the music, and you have to build all those pictures in your own mind.

And Vijay is particularly passionate about that, as am I. So, um, he talks about the power of storytelling.

[00:30:19] Vije Vijendranath: I think there are way too many podcasts out there doing the basic minimum. They’re just talking, they’re having a conversation, which is fine. But then that’s like every other podcast. like every other person, whether it’s a business category, whether it’s an art category, etc. It doesn’t matter. 

Unless you’re very famous and have a major marketing budget behind you, like the kind of money Barbie spent on their movies, like if you’ve got that kind of budget, you can do standard podcasts and then rely on the numbers to, to get you through. But podcasts can be really powerful because one of the things I love is in the 1930s. Have you heard of mystery theater, right?

People didn’t have television. Television wasn’t really mainstream then. So if you wanted to have a story, you had to listen on the radio and there would be actors and there would be live musicians and sound effect artists putting things together doing a story. And one of the stories was things like Welcome to Nightmare in. Here Comes Mrs. Elms. You are late. Mrs. Elms. Your booking was only three hours ago. What are you doing so late? My husband. My husband, he, I found him outside. He was killed. I had to go to the police. Oh my God. Are you okay? That’s the kind of stuff that you can do with multiple actors, sound effects and music.

And I created some with my favorite genre, which is science fiction, a detective noir mix of stories where I played an Indian detective in the year 2052, or between that and 2100, and he is a cybernetic Indian detective trying to solve an ungodly murder of a robot killing another human. And I have to find out what the motives were. Were they alive? Were they conscious? Did they make the choice to kill another human? And I would talk about that while he’s investigating and uncovering conspiracies of why it happened. 

That’s the power of podcasting. You can do stories like this and you can really expand it instead of simply talking into a camera or just having a conversation, which is fine, but then that’s 99 percent of podcasts.

But if you bring in actors, sound effects, people, themes and music, of course, doesn’t have to be live. You can, you can pre record it. You can actually create something that people can enjoy. Because for me, part of serendipity is a joyous experience. Is it a joyful experience to listen to this? And if it’s joyful and if it’s humorous, in my opinion, that is the highest form of retention.

For people to actually absorb what you’re saying .To get people’s attention to get them to actually absorb what you’re saying is having those two elements in place. So I use that to get people to understand what I’m saying and that’s why storytelling podcasting is powerful. There is a place for it. I think there are so many voice actors out there who can play roles and it could be a lot of fun. I’m doing it right now and it’s had great feedback.

[00:33:19] Hendrik Baird: And of course, uh, here at Baird Media, we are, as we are recording this, busy producing South Africa’s very first full length, feature length, audio drama. It’s a 90 minute audio drama based on real events that happened in 1971. The play is called Stripped, and it deals with the story of a friend of mine, or friend of ours, really, Thomas Budge, who in 1971, as a Jehovah’s Witness, was a conscientious objector, who refused to be conscripted in the apartheid military and uh, they put him in jail. So our story involves 17 actors, sound design, which Ethan is doing, loads of sound effects, and music. It’s going to be quite spectacular. So keep your ear out for that. Go to our website Baird.Media and you’ll find it there.

There’s also storytelling in business and again, VJ is at the forefront of that. His advice for business podcasters is to move away from conventional corporate presentations and rather get into the storytelling and Ethan, we are also changing our company logo. We used to call ourselves the podcast people, but we’re moving away from that.

And uh, the new, what do we call it? What do I, what do you call that? The slogan. Okay. Slogan. Skip the ads. Tell the story. So let’s skip the ads for my book, Become a Podmaster and get straight into the story from Vijay. 

So how can a business podcaster, somebody who runs a business and is doing a podcast to get content and to get sort of authority and to stand out from the crowd.

How does that sort of person use what we’re talking about, this kind of storytelling theater kind of podcasting, to perhaps illustrate points of, or, you know, show aspects of their business, or I don’t know, integrate storytelling into their podcast structure. So there’s not just another boring presentation of here’s my business, but it’s engaging.

[00:35:14] Vije Vijendranath: That is so essential. The problem is a lot of companies who are using Podcasting or social media as a marketing tool are just taking their presentations, their corporate language and just putting it online. We don’t want to see your corporate boring ass presentation. Your presentations are there, even your employees and your investors and your stakeholders find it boring and they are part of your business.

So imagine an external customer. It’s even worse. If you’re going to tell a story, it doesn’t have to be fiction, of course. Fictitious stories are beautiful. But if you’re running an ad, an ad is a fiction because you have a hypothetical actor doing a hypothetical action, showing them they have a hypothetical problem and your product solves that problem.

So instead of saying we are the features and we are number one, don’t. Say, show it through an action of what your product does. Through audio that says, you know what, these guys can solve my problem too, you know, let me connect with that character, use a real character that would, that would have a problem that you’re trying to solve.

So storytelling again is very important. What can they do? Number one, no presentations, no boring bullet points. Don’t just read out your list of features and functions and why you are number one at what you do. Play the character, tell us why it’s great. through action. For example, what’s a good one? I think Nike had some good ads, even though it was visual, but I can picture it as an audio form where they weren’t just showing you that they were using the latest and greatest sole technology where the rubber gives you the smoothest running speed or whatever.

No, they didn’t do any of that. They didn’t say it is structured in such a way that you can run 50, 000 miles. They weren’t even saying that. All they said was, We gave these shoes to that guy and he won that marathon. You know, they showed the picture of a Kenyan super strength runner who used to run barefoot, but for some reason, these shoes are so good, he wore it and he broke the record.

In fact, it was so good, it was illegal. They had to disqualify him because the shoes were that good. That is the story. That gets people to say, I want those shoes. I don’t care if it’s illegal. I want those shoes. That’s the whole point. And you can do it that way. And that’s why it’s great. 

[00:37:26] Hendrik Baird: Right.

That brings us to the end of this. Let’s do a quick wrap up, Ethan. Um, interviews, very popular. 

[00:37:32] Ethan Baird: Yeah. 

[00:37:32] Hendrik Baird: Are they overcrowded? Are there too many of them? 

[00:37:35] Ethan Baird: Yeah, probably. Or at the very least, if you want to do an interview podcast, really take some time to think about what’s going to make your interview podcast stand out.

There’s ways to do it. No one’s saying don’t make an interview podcast, but don’t just interview people and ask them about their lives. We’ve done that. 

[00:37:53] Hendrik Baird: Yeah. And of course you’ve got to play to your strengths. You know, what are you really good at? If you are really good at facilitating a group discussion, then panel discussions might be the thing for you.

Or if you’re really good at telling a, uh, ripping yarn. You might want to do an audio drama. 

[00:38:07] Ethan Baird: Ultimately, I think the point here is that there’s a lot more to podcasting than a lot of people think. It’s not just, I’m going to record into a microphone by myself, or I’m going to do an interview, or I’m going to talk nonsense with my friend.

Those are all completely valid. It’s just a medium. And it’s ultimately a canvas for your art. So, What is it that you want to do? What excites you the most? Do that. 

[00:38:30] Hendrik Baird: And explore, try different things, uh, test things and see what works. And then ultimately it’s about having fun. If you’re sitting here and it’s boring as hell, then you’re not doing it the right way.

Find another way of doing it. That brings us to the end of this episode about formats and genres. If you want to find out more, please go to our website, Baird.Media. Or you can get the book, Become a Podmaster: Everything You Need to Know to Master the Art of Podcasting, available on our website, Takealot. com, on Amazon. com, on Barnes & Noble, uh, you name it, if there’s an online bookshop, it’s there.