Meet The Podcasters: Jeremy Sinon, Hubbard Radio

Meet The Podcasters is a special 9-week series created in partnership with Point to Point Marketing. Our first feature is on Hubbard Radio VP of Digital Strategy, Jeremy Sinon. Follow along with the series, and revisit former conversations by checking out the entire category.

Jeremy Sinon is one of the brightest minds in all of digital broadcasting.  Starting from a humble background in graphic and website design, Sinon has elevated himself from the mind behind the “Rube Chat” with Clear Channel to overseeing Hubbard Radio’s continued digital transformation as an industry leader.  

As we kick off our ‘Meet The Podcasters’ series, we dove into the strategy of how Sinon guided several success stories for Hubbard Radio’s transition to a more digital approach. Jeremy also discussed the challenges of attaching revenue to podcasts that many radio brands still face. He also shares where he sees podcasting’s growth potential in the video space.

Jeremy Sinon is the 2022 winner of the National Association of Broadcasting’s Digital Leadership Award. He spoke with Barrett Media from his office in Minnesota. 

*Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.*

John Mamola:  You have a background in graphic design, so speak about your journey, how you started, and to where you’re at now with Hubbard.  

Jeremy Sinon:  I’m a creative guy. That’s where I started, drawing and sketching. Eventually computers and designing on computers.  I came out of the digital agency world in Minneapolis, before I was in radio. Just designing websites and digital solutions for companies. I ended up at Clear Channel and was doing work on their websites for I think three or four years I was there, and then eventually ended up at Hubbard.   

I never thought I’d be in radio as long as I have been. I’ve been at Hubbard almost 20 years now, which is crazy. The evolution went from designing interfaces and caring about how they looked (UI) to really caring about how they worked (UX) to eventually caring about how these products were making a difference for the business holistically. It’s crazy to think that I’ve been in the industry this long, but it’s been an awesome ride.

John Mamola: Speaking of your time at Clear Channel. I used to work for Clear Channel (now iHeart) for 13 years, and KFAN was always kind of like the beacon when it comes to digital traffic, digital growth. Chad Abbott (program director) still runs a really good ship up there. The way I was actually introduced to you was through the origins of ‘Rube Chat’, which was as you know for the company a really big deal.   

It was the standard for what everyone should be aiming for as far as driving traffic, getting that listener interaction going on an owned website. Obviously times have changed, and since ‘Rube Chat,’ in my opinion radio stations have lost that opportunity to interact on homegrown real estate.  

Jeremy Sinon: For sure.

John Mamola: I think it plays to the social space now. So what is something as it relates to podcasting, that creators can learn from that ‘Rube Chat’ model that maybe traditional radio stations, traditional radio talent, have either forgotten or just haven’t grasped yet.  

Jeremy Sinon: There’s a lot there. I mean, you’ve got to remember the ‘Rube Chat’ days were before Facebook. That was before social media.

The quick story of what made me create that when I was there was there.

When I came into radio, I didn’t know anything about radio. I would listen to KFAN throughout the day, and I would hear these callers call in and they’d have these weird monikers. They’d have these made up nicknames that they would use on the air. It would remind me of message boards. At the time I was using message boards like Deviant Art, a popular design message board, and I thought, we should have a message board for KFAN.

I went to my boss one day and said, I want to create a message board for KFAN. And she asked, What’s that? Eventually, they were like, if you want to build it, then you’re in charge of it. 

That was before social media, and I think that’s when everything changed. You know that it was a magical minute there before Facebook came along, where you could build a direct relationship with the user—literally a direct connection with no middleman. 

All that activity was on our website. We had first-party data before we even knew what first-party data was. People were creating accounts and giving us their email addresses, and we didn’t even realize how valuable it was. We were just thrilled with the page views—getting tons of them. Looking back now, all the registered users, all the interaction and all of the first-party data we had—was incredibly valuable. 

Then social comes along and it’s the classic tale in the tech world that we live in, where you have big tech companies that create solutions that sit in the middle between us and the consumer. That’s what social turned into. It’s like, ‘Well, everybody’s on Facebook. Let’s just do it on Facebook. Let’s just talk to them there. We’ll talk to them on Twitter or whatever it is’.

The magic of podcasting—and why I’m so drawn to it—is that you have that direct connection. There’s no middleman getting in the way between you and the listener. They just subscribe to an RSS feed. That’s it. They might listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, but that direct connection is still there.

And that’s the magic, right? If we sell advertising in our podcast, we keep all the money. There’s no middleman blocking us off, no ad tech getting in the way. No algorithm throttling our reach. That’s the magic. 

John Mamola:  I was a programmer for 13 years, and one of the difficulties that I always had was getting old dogs to do new tricks. In your estimation, what are some top-of-mind approaches that traditional radio broadcasters should have when it comes to crafting podcasts for a new way that people and consumers are consuming content?  

Jeremy Sinon:  The simple answer is, just do it. You know, Nike. We just have to be there, right? If you’re not doing the low-hanging fruit—taking content from on-air and putting it online—that’s almost criminal. We create these great moments on the air, and if they are heard once, just disappear, and there’s never another chance for people to consume them on demand. That’s crazy.

Podcasting provides the potential to be more niche—to package conversations into topics, buckets, and themes. That’s the real draw of podcasting. When you go to listen to a podcast, you’re usually looking for a specific topic.

In radio, we have these two-to-three-hour chat shows, where we talk about sports, but it’s all spread across that window. That’s harder for a consumer online. It’s hard to pick up a two- or three-hour podcast and dig around for the content they you care about. 

That’s the opportunity. That’s what we’ve done so well with SKOR North—packaging conversations into team-centric content. That opportunity extends beyond sports—literally any topic under the sun has an audience. 

John Mamola: It’s an interesting thing that Hubbard has done with SKOR, because as I look at it from afar SKOR is more of a podcast success story as opposed to a traditional radio broadcast story.   

But when you’re working with sales people, it’s the education on how to get them to put focus on this area where the dollar is going, right?. How would you say sales teams, at least in your experience, have transitioned from the traditional way to the more digital route with revenue?   

Jeremy Sinon: I’d say it’s all over the board. I mean, it’s like any team. You’ve got players that have totally figured it out, and are succeeding and doing really well with it. There are others that are still figuring it out, and there’s everything in between. 

Education doesn’t end with just the sales people either. I hear from our sales teams all the time how hard it is to educate the clients. Obviously the agencies have long figured it out, but the local small to medium sized business, there is an education process there. You have to teach them and show them the value of a podcast audience. What a CPM is sometimes.   

So I think it’s across the board. Every year that goes by, the closer we get to everybody kind of gets this and it starts to get wind in its sails, and we start to move. It’s a good thing that we’ve been doing it for as long as we have, because you kind of inch along in that education process.  

John Mamola: As far as the growth of SKOR North, is it more about doing social right? Is it about doing SEO right? Is it more about how you just market it with the personalities? It’s kind of an all-in equation, but just talk maybe the focus on SEO and search. For podcasts, how does that weigh with everything else, and how you optimize for discoverability?  

Jeremy Sinon: It’s all of the above, obviously. Social is very important. Search is very important. Titling and thumbnails and descriptions are very important. Taking advantage of the flamethrower radio stations, we have is very important. That audience that is consuming live, make sure they know that you have podcasts. You can say the reverse for people that are consuming podcasts. Make sure that they know they can listen to you live.   

You need to be really good at taking advantage of all the tools that are out there and marketing when you can, when you have a budget. Social media can be incredibly powerful if you get it right, though it’s not always easy. 

SKOR has done a great job in that arena. Honestly, the biggest thing that propelled them was their focus on YouTube. Purple Daily was a podcast before there was SKOR North. Back in the old 1500 ESPN days, Phil Mackey and team were doing the same daily Vikings podcast. It was doing well and it was growing. But it was not growing astronomically, it was just it was doing well.   

Shortly after we rebranded as SKOR, the pandemic hit, and we suffered some setbacks. Trying to figure out how keep this thing going that we believed in, Phil and the team kind of looked at each other and said “if we had to go all in on something, what would it be?” And they picked YouTube.   

They decided that instead of just putting some stuff on YouTube like we had been doing, to instead go all in. They started creating the content for YouTube first, and then using the audio for the pure podcast, and then started going live to YouTube. People that consume on YouTube really appreciate content that is created for YouTube.

You ask about all these tools. You kind of have to play the game everywhere. But these discovery engines like YouTube and now TikTok, are really important if you can do it right.  

John Mamola: YouTube put out that they had one billion monthly podcast users a couple of weeks ago. All these broadcast companies, they got their own apps. They’re pushing their apps because they want to get people to listen there. Do you see a day where maybe video consumption, as far as podcast, just completely outweighs the demand for maybe an audio product?  

Jeremy Sinon: I don’t know if I do see that day. I think audio is always going to have its place, and I think video is always going to have its place. Think of your own consumption habits – there are times when I just want to put my earbuds in and go for a walk, or listen to audio in my car. But there are times you want to sit down on your computer or curl up on the couch and watch a screen.   

So I think video is always going to have its place, and audio is always going to have its place. So I think the best approach, if you can, when you create content is to create it for both.   

It’s not up to us to choose how the consumer consumes us. We just need to create the content and make it available in all of the places and forms that it can be consumed. 

The trick is trying to figure out how to monetize it. Like I said, part of the magic of podcasting is there’s no middleman in the monetization efforts. You can do direct sales, place the ads on your product and keep the revenue. You don’t have to share revenue with Google or whoever. 

But when you’re doing video on YouTube, you’re putting a middleman between you and the consumer. YouTube dictates how ads get served, and you are just beholden to their monetization.  

To me, YouTube is a double-edged sword. It’s a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that pretty much the entire world is there. For that reason, you should probably be there. It’s maybe the best discovery tool in the world. But, it’s also a curse because the danger is if you actually get consumed there, you’re giving up a lot of that control for how you monetize your product.

John Mamola: You’re standing next to somebody in the subway and they’re asking you what is podcasting? How would you define it today to somebody that’s never tried it? And secondly as a person in your position, what’s the one thing that concerns you about podcast growth today?  

Jeremy Sinon: If I’m standing next to a person they asked me what a podcast is. Simple answer is it’s a radio show on the internet, but I guess it doesn’t necessarily have to be a radio show.  

It’s just a show on the internet, because it’s either audio or video, right?   

I think the funny thing about those YouTube numbers that you shared is that there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors there. And I think a lot of it comes from people not knowing how to define a podcast. A lot of people call a YouTube show a podcast. There’s a lot of creators that we talk to that create YouTube content, and they don’t create audio content. But they call their show a podcast. And I’m always like ‘where’s the actual podcast’?  

So, the lines are blurring completely and there’s a lot opportunity for people that produce audio to start producing video, and people that produce video to produce audio.   

I think my biggest worry in this space is that there’s just so much content. There’s only so much time in the day that everybody has to consume audio or video, and so the numbers get smaller as consumption is spread thin across all of this content. I think eventually that’ll bounce back, because then people will jump out if it’s doesn’t work for them.   

That’s my biggest concern, there’s so much competition. That kind of brings us back to the ‘Rube Chat’ conversation.

I think it’s so important to create community around this content. It’s not enough to just produce a show and release it and that’s it. I think you’ve got to connect with your consumers and have a relationship with them. Provide listener interaction, chat boards, events, social groups, etc. Have some sort of way to create community around your content. I think if you can do that, I don’t know how you lose.  

As long as we have super fans, we’ll always be successful. We’ve used these techniques in radio for ages and frankly we should be better at it than content creators that are just starting to figure it out.  If we lean on our strengths and continue to do those community building tactics in the podcast space, I think we’ll be just fine.  

John Mamola: Last question for you. Tell me about Hubbard’s newest addition John Goforth, new VP/GM of Podcasts. What has his addition meant for you guys in this space? Can you share anything about what you’re building there?

Jeremy Sinon: John has been such a fantastic addition for us. He’s somebody who’s been in the industry a long time, has built podcast networks, and has been there, and done that in terms of everything that goes into monetizing them.

John and I became friends through different industry events like Podcast Movement. When the opportunity to bring him in became available I’m just so thankful for Ginny and Dave for seeing the same potential that I did and for embracing the opportunity.

Working alongside him has been a treat as we both share a strong vision of where we can go and what’s possible. It’s been 6 months and we’ve already got some really interesting things cooking behind the scenes. I’m excited to be able to show the world what we’ve been working on soon.

To learn more about Point-To-Point Marketing’s Podcast and Broadcast Audience Development Marketing strategies, contact Tim Bronsil at tim@ptpmarketing.com or 513-702-5072.