If you are going to podcast, be original or don’t bother.
Podcasting is not for everyone.
If you are going to podcast, be original or don’t bother. That is the advice of Dusty Weis, whose podcast Lead Balloon was selected by Adweek as 2020 “Marketing Podcast of the Year.”
Creating another boring, ho-hum podcast is a dusty road to failure.
“We have a failure problem in the fields of PR and marketing,” says Weis. “Not the act of failure, but the fear of it. Failure has become so stigmatized, that many operations would rather embrace formulaic mediocrity than risk trying something new because of the fear that it might fail.”
Should you not do a podcast because it might fail? Perhaps. In a podcast world with more than 1.75 million shows, Weis says you’re not going to make waves doing what’s already been done a thousand times before.
Be original. Be bold. Be interesting. As the late advertising great David Ogilvy said, you can’t bore people into buying. Podcasting might not be expensive to do, but the opportunity cost of your time and energy is huge if you are podcasting to attract high-paying clients.
“When I launched the Lead Balloon podcast, I was putting my content-marketing-money-where-my -mouth-is on that imperative,” says Weis. “My customers are PR and marketing practitioners, so I needed to make a show that appealed to them.”
As he started to research the other shows in the PR and marketing genre, he was dumbfounded by the seemingly formulaic nature of so many of them. But why, he wondered, since this a creative field and it’s full of creative people.
“So, I turned hard into the imperative, ‘Be Original, or Don’t Bother,’” says Weis. “Where other marketing podcasters focus on quantity of content, I focus on quality. Where others do thought leadership, I do storytelling. Where others focus on accelerating their cadence, I spend 40-50 hours getting an episode just right.”
And above all, Lead Balloon celebrates learning through failure.
He knew Lead Balloon was finding an audience. Two-thirds of his revenue currently comes from clients who found him through Lead Balloon.
Being selected as Adweek’s Marketing Podcast of the Year was a game changer for Weis. He beat out agencies from around the world for that honor and he did it as a startup, working from a home studio during Covid, in complete defiance of fear of failure.
“There are more outlets for your listeners’ time and attention than there have ever been in human history,” says Weis. “They give you their time and attention for free, and you owe it to them to provide them content that doesn’t suck. You owe them the modest investment of money and expertise that it takes to make your podcast sound professional, and you owe them the time and the effort that it takes to come up with an original idea.”
