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Podcast Online Ad Age

The BeanCast founder and host Bob Knorpp on podcasting and facilitating conversation through 'infotainment'

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By Stephen Lepitak, -

November 24, 2014 | 5 min read

Podcasting is no longer a new broadcast medium, but it is on the rise once again as the growth in mobile ownership has blown up and internet connectivity is now achievable at scale. People can be entertained anywhere they want from the device they carry in their pocket.

Bob Knorpp

The BeanCast is a seven-year-old marketing podcast founded by host Bob Knorpp, who teaches marketing strategy and execution as an adjunct professor at New York University. Knorpp previously founded the official podcast for Ad Age, a publication he continues to contribute to while running his marketing consultancy, The Cool Beans Group.

Each weekly episode, usually around an hour, features Knorpp leading a conversation based on interesting marketing events from the previous few days, with insight, observation and conviviality.

With around 75,000 unique members, the podcast serves about 70,000 shows a month from its back catalogue of around 330 shows.

As The Drum meets with Knorpp in a noisy New York coffee house off Ninth Avenue, he is exactly as he seems on the programme; friendly, approachable and laughing a great deal during the hour we spend talking. He initially reveals that he wanted to host his own podcast for years but was unconvinced that the world needed "another talking head." He was finally prompted due to his yearning for "the watercooler conversation" after leaving the agency world.

"Suddenly it hit me that I should pull in all these people from my rollerdex and put them on air. People want to hear them – they don't want to hear me," he says. Explaining his thinking, he adds that he wanted to facilitate a "great conversation," simultaneously testing his ideas and thoughts against "some of the brightest people in the world."

Audience numbers weren't his initial concern, with the first six months of the BeanCast being downloaded by a mere 50 people each.

"I did it as if there were a thousand, because I just wanted to deliver the best possible quality conversation and present a product that people on the show could take to other people, or a client, to say they talked about a certain topic."

The show became an addition to the work Knorpp was already undertaking and grew as the years went by. "Suddenly it just became a thing," he says, sounding almost surprised by the programme's success.

He believes that the discussions he was having weren't taking place at conferences or elsewhere. He's still of the contention that no other marketing podcast is diving as deeply into industry issues as his. Meanwhile, the show is listened to regularly by non-professionals and, depending on the topic, can also pick up thousands of 'floating' listeners.

"There is a big difference between a podcast listener and an online content listener. An online content listener is searching for a subject, a subscriber loves podcasts. These are the people who will listen to that programme in their driveway for an extra half hour because they find it fascinating. That's a committed audience and that's the kind of people we see listening to podcasts."

However he denies there is any form of journalism involved in the creation of the podcast, seeing it more as commentary and the delivery of entertainment, which he calls "infotainment."

"It ultimately comes down to the entertainment factor and that's why we laugh so much on the show. I need to enjoy the conversation as much as I want the audience to enjoy the conversation. It's OK to make a joke once in a while and point out the funny things that people say, because that's the way people have conversations," he adds.

As to how he approaches who will feature on the panel for each episode, Korpp reveals that he casts a show a month or more in advance and chooses which contributors will feature based on chemistry. As for new panellists, he says he receives plenty of approaches to feature from across the industry, but that people he includes need to offer more than just intelligence. They must be able to "aggressively" fight their corner, he explains.

"I try to pick four solid topics that will be interesting to discuss. There are sometimes some big stories I pass over completely because they are just not interesting, and then there is the feature at the end of the show – the Ad Fail Five – which is purely about entertainment."

Asked about his ambition for the programme, he says he would love it to be picked up as part of a multichannel network (MCN) to increase the audience reach or even a cable news programme. However the ultimate goal is that it continues to help generate leads for his main consultancy business, which, despite some advertising generating some revenue through the show, is his bread and butter, alongside teaching and speaking engagements.

More about Knorpp's podcast can be found at The BeanCast website.

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