Smith Douglass Associates

The Golden Age of Podcasting

I fell in love with podcasts three years ago due to a confluence of a new job with an hour commute each way and an unexpected interest in professional hockey (Go Pens!). I started with several hours of hockey podcasts, then expanded on to other productions (Welcome to Night Vale, Serial, This American Life, etc..).

It was only a matter of time before I started producing podcasts myself. Being a marketing professional, I saw the inherent power of sharing a brand’s story through the medium of a podcast.

You have thirty seconds to tell your story in an elevator pitch. What would you say if you had thirty minutes?

Check out this article discussing why podcasts have become so incredibly popular over the past few years, and why they have such power to engage an audience…

Attempts to rationalize the advent of the golden age of the podcast frequently miss the mark. Mechanistic explanations that attribute the popularity of podcasts to the availability of listening technologies simply do not capture the appeal in a meaningful way. At least one plausible explanation is that humans inherently desire to hear, engage with, and receive stories, and that podcasts, because of their auditory nature, fulfill this desire in a way that alternative modes of storytelling do not. When we listen to podcasts, then, we are participants in a tradition that stretches back for millennia and just happens to reach audiences through the innovative means of Internet radio.