Founder’s Note

I am back from the OMR Festival in Hamburg. For anyone who does not know it. It is the biggest digital marketing and tech conference/festival in Germany. In last week’s edition I mentioned that we organized an activation with a mobile podcast studio powered by roadsurfer and Acast. We had a lot of fun and it was a great success, recording 13 episodes over the two days, generating some buzz around our ‘podcast van’ and somehow really pissing of some people from OMR.

Apparently, they were not super happy with our location and setup of our mobile podcast studio right across the street from one of the main entrances of the conference. From complaining, minor intimidation attempts, and sending over 5 cops to question the legitimacy of our activation, and apparently sending requests to remove us from the grounds to the mayor of Hamburg (the guy running Germany’s second largest city probably doesn’t have anything better to do 😄 ) the team from OMR really tried everything to make it difficult for us. Of course, everything we did was official and on the books, so better luck next time. We still like you guys

We had an amazing time recording podcasts for Business Punk, New Work Chat, and my new podcast AMPLIFY, a monthly conversation with the leading voices of the podcast and audio industry, supported by DMEXCO.

Besides all the craziness and podcast productions we handled over the course of the festival, I had a number of really interesting conversations with people from the industry and got some insights into a few of the latest innovations and trends currently happening in the industry. But before we get into all those trends, we have recognize that podcasts are finally hitting the big stage with the Golden Globes announcement to add a category for podcasts. Maybe I have an idea for our next mobile podcast studio activation. 😉

The Big Topic

So... what even is a podcast? Is it a format? A channel? A medium? A content container? It is the age-old question that people from the industry try to answer. I think is it super obvious. The answer to all of the above questions is YES - and also, maybe none of those.

The question sounds almost annoyingly philosophical, but it’s becoming a serious head-scratcher for creators, platforms, and advertisers alike. We’ve long used “podcast” as shorthand for “an audio file distributed via RSS,” but that’s starting to feel like describing Netflix as “a DVD rental service.” It was true. It just isn’t anymore.