Forging Our Way Through the COVID-19 Era as an Independent Podcast Network

 When we look back at 2020, how will we remember it? 

We were already facing global warming when COVID-19 hit. In the US, society’s fractures were exacerbated by the pandemic and a lack of effective leadership. The scars of racism, misogyny, political chaos and widespread unrest are raw. 

The past six months have challenged us beyond imagination. We believe in our purpose and are doing everything we can to keep our community strong through this global crisis. 

At TWiT.tv, we produce 20 weekly podcasts for an engaged community of tech enthusiasts. We are one of the longest-running independent tech podcasting networks. We haven’t missed a single episode since the pandemic began. 

But the impact of COVID-19 on our network has been significant, and we’ve had to pivot, be flexible, find new solutions, and remember who we are as a team. 

We see fluctuations in our downloads because of news cycles and changes in listening habits under work-from-home and shelter-in-place. We have fearful clients who are worried about continuing advertising campaigns because of economic uncertainty. Ninety-percent of our staff work from home, so we face a whole unique set of challenges. On top of that, online harassment has intensified. Because I am a female CEO of a tech podcast network, misogyny has always been an issue. Now, the trolls are doubling down, trying to disrupt our business in a time where hatred is thriving. These anonymous attacks also target our public support of Black Lives Matter and other social causes. We know trolling is par for the course if you’re in the public eye. 

So, what do we do? We focus on positives and keep our eyes on our purpose.

In business, now is the time to be bold, take risks, and be proactive. We immediately reached out to our clients to offer additional value and provide cutbacks to those impacted the most. We did everything we could to help support our business partners to raise brand awareness. Every business we work with stepped up and gave back to their community. The outreach has been incredible, a bright spot in humanity, and we will continue to be part of it.

In the 15 years since inception, TWiT.tv has seen its fair share of ups and downs. 

The network began when Leo Laporte decided to capture the magic he discovered working at TechTV, serving a niche audience. A couple of years in, I joined the network, and Leo and I started our bootstrapped journey together. Few knew what a podcast was, let alone what TWiT stood for. We’ve come a long way, and we are not about to stop. 

The pandemic has allowed us to reevaluate what’s truly important. For us, that's community, equality, diversity, social justice, awareness, kindness, and honesty. 

Artisanal Agency - How We Vet TWiT.tv Clients

Lisa Laporte:  Leo Laporte, Founder TWiT.tv

You may think, as an advertising agency, that we’d automatically take the next sponsor that comes our way.  For Artisanal Agency, however, nothing could be further from the truth. We represent TWiT.tv, a journalist podcast network that strives to report important tech news, help, how-tos, reviews, and more.  Therefore, we heavily vet all potential clients because TWiT values its reputation and only signs advertisers who have high-integrity products/services that benefit the TWiT audience. Based on our 2020 survey, 86% of the TWiT audience made a purchase base on an ad they heard on our network.   

A product/service that does not have an outstanding track record could damage us in a multitude of ways, including viewership, host reputation, and our bottom line. We aren’t interested in lying or have subpar products/services on our network because it will ruin the trust and reputation the TWiT audience has for our hosts and the entire network.  Our listeners are the most important aspect of our business, and we only cater to them. Looking at prospective clients needs to be done with a critical eye, and we are very selective.

One of the ways in which we accomplish this is with our vetting process that starts with a one-sheet, which includes:

A link to the website.
The date it’s prepared - we want to when it was prepared.
Who the founder/CEO is - we want to represent companies with high integrity people and reputable services/products. 
Audience Focus - it’s important to find out if the services/products are geared toward the TWiT audience.
Talking points - this is a short paragraph to provide details of the potential client’s products/services, including pricing, if available.
Reviews - preferably we would like reviews from reputable journalist entities. We do not want information from a publisher who uses sponsored content, we want trusted tech review websites, articles, online reviews, Amazon reviews, etc. 
Who their competitors are because we want to avoid conflicts with existing advertisers.

We take pride in finding the right fit for the TWiT network. Taking on a sponsor is a relationship that we want to cultivate and respect. The only way we can do this is by vetting our clients so that we can be confident that our choice is a good choice.

Three Reasons Why Host Ad Reads Are So Effective

Photo by Masako:  Mikah & Matthew

For many companies, the bread and butter of their business rely solely on the support of their sponsors. So, it should come as no surprise how important a host-ad-read can be within a podcast that can make or break the audience’s interest in a product or service. Here are three reasons why Host Ad Reads are so effective.

Trust has already been established
Podcast subscribers don’t show up to tune in as if they were flipping through different TV channels. There is something about that podcast that they connect to and which speaks to them on a deeper level, keeping them coming back for more. But it pertains more to a who rather than what. Podcasters generate their following with personality, intellect, and expertise ultimately becoming someone who people feel they know and who they can rely on. This trust is part of the success with Host Ad Reads. If you trust your host, you can trust what they are selling to you.

Customization
Each company is more than just its one-liners. A host can explain different products and services that their sponsors offer. Perhaps the first read didn’t pertain to someone’s needs, but the next one pinpoints something they have lived without and need now. This can also help with flow. If a host puts in their own knowledge of a product, they can tailor the information to meet the advertiser’s requirements with their own voice, where it comes across more naturally.

Testimonials Speak Volumes
Testimonials are a huge part of getting the sponsor heard. Remember that trust? Hosts have the ability to highlight their own personal experience with using a product, that isn’t something a company can provide from a commercial on tv. It’s the intimate sharing that the audience can connect with. Why would you use something a person you trust does not? Positive product reflection can only benefit everyone involved.

Don’t underestimate the power of a host ad-read. They are trusted and can tailor an ad-read to really speak to their fans.

5 Ways AI is Advertising’s New Guru

Like many other industries, the advertising and media worlds are experiencing major disruptions caused by artificial intelligence (AI). While there remain many challenges when it comes to advertising with AI, there are also many benefits to this emerging tool. Using research and data on current trends, we highlight five essential ways AI can harness consumer data, engagement tools, and employee skills to help transform how the advertising world informs and reaches consumers.

When people hear the phrase “artificial intelligence,” consumers and advertisers alike have a variety of reactions to it. Some people envision robots taking over the world, or at least much of the workforce, which means forfeiting some jobs. Some advertisers may picture hackers and disruptors working on fake ads. The reality is that although there are definitely challenges to integrating and working with AI, advertisers are already using it to their advantage and will only continue to further integrate AI applications to more effectively reach a target audience in an increasingly fragmented consumer space. For those advertisers who are still wary of using AI, there are lots of benefits.

In 2019, most people are aware of the controversy surrounding Facebook, when it was discovered the tech company has been sharing user data to allow other companies to target users in very specific ways, often through utilizing AI. We have all seen the ads that pop up in our Instagram feeds for things we were thinking about buying and wondered - “how did they know?”, or gotten emails from Netflix suggesting shows we knew we wanted to watch, but just hadn’t gotten around to doing so. While sometimes this form of advertising can feel invasive, it makes it easier to find products, services, and entertainment tailored to your needs and interests thanks to AI. Facebook’s methods of sharing information with advertisers may be a bit extreme, but it led to the type of advertising that’s becoming more and more common today.

Through analyzing massive, almost inconceivable, amounts of data, AI can track your habits and guess at what you might want to watch, buy, or read. Surveys of media buyers and advertisers show that a majority of marketers are incorporating AI research into their creative planning and marketing strategies; even more are planning to add it into their methods in 2019. The advertising industry is gathering and harnessing user data and then turning that information into smarter ways to reach consumers. The following five areas highlight some of the innovations in the use of AI; most advertisers believe this is only the beginning.

Data Science

The $100 billion ad industry has always done its best to reach you where you want to be reached, such as advertising clothing in a fashion magazine because they know their target audience is likely reading those magazines. The challenge for advertisers is that consumers have more choices than ever before. Another challenge is that even though breaking down user data means advertisers can make smart, data-driven decisions, the amount of data across different systems can be hard to process. AI technology makes gathering this data and analyzing it for trends more accurate and less expensive than previously seen in advertising, allowing advertisers to more efficiently use this data. AI can also tackle the data across all available platforms to create better marketing analytics.

As finely tuned AI capabilities are further integrated into marketing data collection, the worry that staff will have to become more technically educated, or even that humans could possibly be phased out of the process altogether, isn’t the case. AI technology serves advertisers, saving them time and effort, but it still needs a human eye to decode and apply it to various tasks. The efficiency that AI provides creates more time for creative thought, direct consumer relations, and decision-making that could benefit the entire advertising cycle.

Machine Learning

The systemic integration of AI into digital marketing strategies means that consumers may not even realize decisions are being made based on their preferences and usage of platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. For example, if you click on and buy clothing shown to you on Instagram, an algorithm very likely chose it. Consumers, while still wary of sharing too much with companies or of big tech being too invasive in their lives, are becoming more comfortable with AI’s ability to learn from them and serve up content that fits their needs.

The greater audience understanding that marketers garner from experience-based self-learning algorithms can help business strategy, marketing choices, and content creation be more tailored, cost-effective, and achieve a better return on investment. Connecting with consumers where they want to be met means consumer response is generally positive, since using these models ensures the content they want is what they get.

These AI capabilities are projected to grow quickly and include futuristic initiatives such as machine vision, the ability to take a photo of a product and have your phone or computer find it for you, and interactive programming, which then changes outcomes based on your known preferences when it comes to the advertisements you see.

Targeted Advertising

The average click-thru rate for advertisements is often so small that it's leading to limited ROI for many advertisers. Consumers respond to personalized advertising for the content of their choice, which means highly targeted ads help consumers get more information about what speaks to them and the response rate is much higher for businesses.

The data analyzed to help advertisers choose where to place their spots can even predict demand or problems in content supply in real time as consumers click on what they want to look at or buy.

Advertisers have learned that context and content are everything. There is even a movement to tie ads and messaging to a particular moment, so companies don’t appear to be ad blind, or not in touch with what is happening at any given time. You wouldn’t want to run a bubbly spot showcasing positive interactions during coverage of a tragic event, for example. Utilizing AI to identify when is or isn’t an appropriate time to run a certain ad can help companies avoid embarrassing situations.

Next Generation Automation

As AI continues to advance, the things we are already growing used to will evolve and add capabilities that once seemed the stuff of science fiction. Speech recognition already means that your Alexa device can order pizza, paper towels, or even play a song like the ones you’ve already listened to; voice commands will continue to be used in more applications. Image recognition and speech-to-text transcription lead to even closer direct consumer relationships across channels and interactive entertainment; these developments are on their way to our daily lives.

Social media is where a lot of innovative technologies first appear and go through consumer tests. Facebook is still the source of most data that advertisers utilize and which then often influences what you see on other social media platforms, such as Instagram. Twitter already crops photos to be most appealing based on eye-tracking, pinpointing where a person will look first. Companies that do the best on social media are those that use data science to analyze and act upon findings to change messaging or products as needed. AI can help with this quickly and cheaply.

Other products already being used, but with increased development and applications, are chatbots and dynamic pricing. Chatbots appear on sites and can handle routine customer questions and issues, dynamic pricing analyses pricing across the web, and make sure a company’s pricing of products is relevant.

Content Curation and Creation

While a real person wrote this article, you’ve probably read one that was written by a computer. Clearly most things still need human oversight, but AI “writers” are growing more intelligent about the pieces they can put together. At Forbes, for example, staff members use Bertie - kind of a “writer’s companion” that studies what a writer most often writes about, how they write, and then makes suggestions about stories, areas of interest, and writing styles.

AI can also suggest headlines based on what works best for SEO purposes. If you’ve ever been drawn in by a headline such as “Top 10 Places to Go on Spring Break,” it may have been written by AI. AI is even used to analyze behavior and see what you might want to do next and make suggestions. Eventually, it’s likely AI will be involved in content creation and immersive content experiences, studying and then suggesting what content viewers are most likely to watch. This direct consumer relationship is possible through the use of AI.

The keys to successful advertising in the AI age are to know your brand, invest in understanding context and content, and then use that targeted content across channels to develop messaging that has a human touch. Because no matter how much data you have, you still need to disrupt the massive amounts of information each consumer interacts with each day to strike a nerve and capture or change behavior in order to draw attention to your product or service.

How to Improve Your Confidence at Work

No matter where you are in your career path, you could likely use a little extra confidence. This feeling is especially real for young professionals or those who are starting at a new company. Learning to have confidence in your work and position can help you go a long way at any company. We’re often far too critical of ourselves and need to acknowledge that we probably know more than we think we do and are capable of a lot. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help at work, but you also need to learn to feel confident in your own abilities. Here are some ways you can improve your confidence at work.

Stick to your word

By staying true to what you say at work, you’ll gain more confidence in yourself and also see your coworkers gain more confidence in you. If you say you’re going to get a project done by a specific deadline, get it done. If you offer to help out someone, help them when they ask for it. Proving to yourself and others that you’re honest and reliable can significantly increase your confidence.

Improve your knowledge

If there’s a specific area that you do not feel confident in at work, improve your knowledge in that area. Listen to podcasts, read books and articles, or take courses that can help you master that skill.

Stand up for yourself

To have true confidence at work, you need to learn to stand up for yourself. There are going to be times when people may try to take credit for your work or push ahead of you to benefit in the workplace. If you feel like you’re not assertive enough when it comes to the work you do and possible promotions or other benefits, learn to speak up for yourself.

Be friendly

Being friendly to the people around you and learning to smile and greet others, even when you’re busy or stressed out, helps you seem like a more confident person. You’ll come across as relaxed and in control instead of harried and unfriendly.

Talk about achievements

While there’s a fine line between bragging and rightfully talking about your accomplishments, there is a difference. If you accomplish something at work, go ahead and mention it to your supervisor. You need to feel comfortable talking about what you’ve done well; knowing these items can be vitally important when you’re interviewing for a new position or going through a review.

Find a support system

If you have a strong support system at work, you’ll find that it helps your confidence immensely. Having others, you can go to for advice or run an idea past is incredibly valuable. Having a support system outside of work is great too since you can talk to someone who’s removed from the environment. Surround yourself with people who are encouraging and positive.

Five Tips for Using Google Ads to Promote a Business

Google Ads, formerly branded as AdWords, is a robust advertising service that entrepreneurs can use to promote their business. It features a web-based interface from which entrepreneurs can create ads for Google’s search results, YouTube, Blogger, and millions of partner websites. And because it’s a pay-per-click (PPC) service, Google Ads only charges entrepreneurs when a qualified user clicks their ad.

Choose relevant, long-tail target keywords

When creating ads for the search network, entrepreneurs must specify the words or phrases that will trigger ad impressions. Known as target keywords, they can make or break a Google Ads campaign. Short, generic target keywords may generate lots of impressions and even clicks, but they’ll quickly consume an entrepreneur’s advertising budget while yielding few conversions in the process. For a higher return on investment (ROI), entrepreneurs should choose long-tail target keywords that are relevant to their ads.

Optimize landing page for keyword relevancy

The landing page associated with an ad should also be highly relevant to the ad’s target keywords. Using the target keyword “baseball bats for sale” with a landing page displaying golf clubs for sale doesn’t make much sense. Instead, entrepreneurs should create several small ad groups, each of which with a relevant landing page that corresponds to the ad group’s target keywords.

Use remarketing to target website visitors

In 2010, Google launched a new advertising feature that specifically targets users who’ve visited an entrepreneur’s website. Known as remarketing, it’s a highly effective way to promote a business since it only reaches users who’ve visited the website. Entrepreneurs can expect fewer clicks with remarketing, but those clicks will likely drive more conversions.

Increase ad visibility and functionality with extensions

Entrepreneurs aren’t required to use extensions with their ads, but doing so is well worth the nominal time and effort it needs. Extensions increase the visibility of ads by adding new information or functionality. The call extension, for instance, allows entrepreneurs to include their business’s phone number in their ads whereas the site links extension displays clickable links to the entrepreneur’s desired web pages.

Experiment with the display network

Some entrepreneurs are reluctant to target the display network, believing that the quality of traffic is lower than that of the search network. While the display network typically yields a lower conversion rate than its search network counterpart, it’s able to reach a broader audience. According to WordStream, the display network reaches more than nine in 10 of all internet users worldwide.

There’s a reason over 1 million entrepreneurs use Google Ads to promote their business: It’s a cost-effective service that gives entrepreneurs full control over their ads. To succeed, however, entrepreneurs should follow these five tips when creating campaigns.

How to Strengthen Your Brand

Entrepreneurs with small businesses are often eager to expand their brands to help grow their consumer base and their bottom line. There are several benefits to strengthening one’s business by way of extending their brand. Having a strong brand helps you establish yourself as an expert in your industry; a consistent brand also makes a company more appealing to potential clients or consumers. However, any brand extensions require adequate research and forethought if you want to do the best job possible.

A small business doesn’t become an expansive company overnight. Building a lasting brand is a long-term process that requires a concentrated effort and the right strategies. Read on for four various brand extensions to consider when trying to expand a brand.

Expand your products

Starting a business from the ground up is incredibly challenging. This obstacle is why it’s tempting to stick with what works once a company finds success with a product. However, no business will succeed if they refuse to change and adapt to market demands and advances.

To keep one’s brand relevant for the long term, it helps to consider extending their current line of products. With a line extension, brands work to add other branded products within an already existing product line. This improvement allows the brand to keep their current customers interested while attracting new consumers with other products.

New categories of projects

Category extensions allow a brand to introduce their company to consumers in a separate category. These category extensions are more successful for brands that have an established reputation in their industry. This expansion allows the brand to branch out into an entirely different category of a product without alienating their customers while beginning to offer a more extensive array of categories within their industry.

Try a new niche

Market extensions can be a trickier endeavor for brands. However, when done successfully, market extensions attract consumers from a totally different niche. The most active market extensions introduce consumers to a brand that they may have never heard of otherwise and help that business move into a new industry.

New location

A brand that is looking to expand outside of their current locale should consider geographic extensions. While considered the most expensive method of strengthening one’s brand, the use of online marketing campaigns makes geographic expansions more effective. While introducing products to a completely different region presents a considerable risk, the opportunity of tapping into a totally different set of consumers is worth it.

There is a multitude of ways a business can strengthen their brand. With the right research and strategies, brands can apply these various extensions to their business plan to help expand into a new market and draw in a new audience.