Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Canadaland Goes Under The Influence

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

Jesse Brown, founder of Canadaland Podcast Network, and Terry O'Reilly have a fun conversation about the business of podcasting, the line between journalism and advertising and how Terry had to get used to being touched by strangers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.

Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. From the Apostrophe Podcast Network. This week, we bring you a bonus episode. Jesse Brown is the founder of the Canada Land Podcast Network. While our podcasts are very different in nature, Jesse's show tackled the news issues of the day, and our apostrophe shows are mostly narrative in nature,

but what we have in common is the fact we both run independent podcast networks in Canada. While there are many podcasts in this country, there aren't many Canadian podcast networks. Join us as we chat about what it takes to exist in an American-dominated podcast world. We talk about podcast advertising, what we'll accept and what we won't, why podcast advertising is a lot like the golden era of 1940s radio, and why I had to get used to being touched by strangers.

Ha ha. Hope you enjoy it. I want to get into a fight with you about which one of us was the first to start a podcast company in Canada. I think maybe you'll win. Was it me? Yeah.

I don't know because you had a company called Pirate that made your first show? Yes, but Pirate was a commercial entity. In other words, our biggest clients were advertising agencies. So what Pirate did was we created radio campaigns from the ground up, and we directed the voiceover, sound, and music for television commercials. It was all advertising. So when in 2005, when we pitched the show to CBC, I had studios, audio was my skill set. So I just thought I'm going to do it at our studios. So for the first, probably till about 20, I want to say 2011, maybe, or 2012, I did it at Pirate. And then I built my own studio and did it from there.

You built Apostrophe and you built Apostrophe as a podcast studio. I started podcasting under the influence in 2011. I wanted to podcast earlier than that. I was ready to go probably three years earlier than that. But I kept waiting for CBC to clear music rights. I figured out the first time we spoke. I misremembered it as when I was setting up Canada Land, but that's not the case.

It was after my first series with CBC. I had sold them on the idea for a second series, but I didn't really trust them. And I was wondering, like, do I have to go back to work there to make a CBC radio show? Is there another way to do it? Right. And I thought, well, Terry O'Reilly has a CBC radio show, but doesn't work at the CBC. And you were nice enough to speak with me and let

me know that you had this pirate radio company and that you had your own team of people and you independently produced this thing and then you sold it to the CBC. And that sounded terribly complicated to me at the time. So I went back to work for the CBC. You know, that part of my story is so funny because when myself and Mike Tennant, who's another radio guy, when we pitched my radio show idea to CBC, not thinking CBC would ever buy it because why would the advertising-free CBC take a show on advertising? Yeah. They took it, which was shocking to us. And then we had to figure out how to mount a national radio show. But in the negotiations, we negotiated to own the show and license it to CBC. Not that we were such savvy negotiators, Jesse, because I thought that's the way it's done.

It was just naivete. But now I own my show, which is fantastic. But it was not a grand plan. I mean, it's an incredible thing, whether it happened by luck or by strategy. And I remember one of my bosses at CBC talking to me once and saying, they'll never do that again. Not with reference to you, but we were talking about Stuart McLean. And I said, what? And she said, this guy negotiated ownership of his show and the intellectual property thereof. And he went to them and said, I want to have the rights to do live shows and put out CDs.

And they thought, well, no one's ever done that. Like, you can have those rights. They're worthless to us because they weren't exploiting those rights. And what ended up was he built, and here the pun is intended, a cottage industry. And he was an industry. Yeah. You make a podcast about marketing. Let's talk about podcasts as marketing because, I mean, at that time it was a radio show.

But I can't believe that the CBC was paying him to make a show that they broadcast across the country. And then he goes from town to town doing big live shows, selling out, selling his books there. CDs, everything. He took a busload of people across the country, and then he would swing through the northern states. He had an audience in the states, too. If they had flipped it on him and said,

from now on, you've got to pay us to keep the Vinyl Cafe, it probably would have made business sense. Yeah, he might have done it. It's sort of like the Star Wars story, isn't it? When George Lucas, nobody wanted Star Wars. Everybody knows his story. But the interesting part of that story to me is he really wanted the licensing part of the deal. Like he saw the future that he could do a lot of toys and things coming out of the show.

And the studio just laughed their heads off and said, take it. Yeah. Thinking it was worthless. And you have a similar thing going. Yeah. I would take that. Like if CBC said, we're not going to pay you a dime. We couldn't do it with Candleland because we cover the CBC.

But we like Commons, let's say. We're going to air it on CBC Radio 1 to every community in the country. That would spike our podcast downloads. They could have it for free. I probably would even pay them something for that. So you got a sweet deal. Your model is the Stuart McLean model. And I don't know, maybe there's a couple other people who sell content to CBC that way, but- I don't think there's many though.

That's a wonderful deal. It is a wonderful deal. And as I said, just sheer serendipity luck of not knowing any better. Because what do you know about marketing? What do I know? Exactly right. Getting back to the content and the culture clash of your work, which I think takes an explainer and an insider explainer and a curious approach to advertising and marketing. And I don't know, you're on 12th season of this series and then there was this series. All told, this is our 18th season since we started. 18 seasons of examining commercial culture. Right.

On the CBC. On the CBC. I once did a documentary about marketing when I worked at the CBC. And I was told like, there's not enough of the negative effects on culture and on society. If you're going to talk about marketing, you can't seem this positive about marketing. You know, I appreciate it. Like we live in a very commercialized marketing-heavy society. And I see value in having one place that considers itself a bit of a temple free from the pernicious influence of advertising and marketing, which is an interesting contrast to their podcast today, which are filled with ads.

But we can leave that aside for a second. But there was a real moralizing like you can't even talk about this. Which is why I was very surprised they took our show. Yeah, me too. I thought going up the elevator that day, our pitch was basically this, Jesse. It was really simple. We basically said, most people hate advertising. And it's like architecture.

It's everywhere in your life. But actually when you dig down into it, advertising is a fascinating industry because it's the study of human nature. And nobody studies human nature like the advertising industry. And I said, Mike and I are not pundits and we're not journalists.

We're actually working at men in the trenches. We have access and we have stories. And we want to take people, we want to take average Canadians, not marketers, on a backstage cooks tour of what really happens in the boardrooms and the recording studios. That was the whole pitch. Going up the elevator that day, Mike and I looked at each other and I

thought they're going to say very interesting, not for us, but very interesting. Maybe we could do something else down the road. That would have been a great meeting. But instead, Chris Boyce, who was in charge of radio at the time, he leaned back in his chair and said, we'll take it. And then we had to figure out how to do it. That was 18 years ago. It's an interesting way of thinking about creativity and creative people because we're obsessed with artists and writers and people who look at communication as a way of like personal expression. And here you've got people with very similar skill sets. Right.

And a very purpose-oriented. We're trying to solve this thing. Solving business problems. Solving business problems with images and feelings and emotion. And I don't know, something about taking any kind of like moral judgment out of it allows you to, well, first understand what they're doing. I sometimes get left with like, I admire these people. And I think a lot of people got into this. I mean, you started before Mad Men.

But with Mad Men, people, it became kind of like fun to think about how these people work. I think we got a big updraft from Mad Men, believe it or not. I believe that. I think people just got into – you're right. They got into the whole fun of Madison Avenue and that was era-specific. But I'll say this about that show. Matthew Weiner had somebody on that staff that had worked in the business, which is very rare because most advertising-related TV shows and movies have no relation to real life. And they get it wrong, and if you're on the inside, you know it.

It's like Bewitched. It's Darren Stevens, and nothing about it is right. That show, the dynamics of advertising, meaning the client relationships, the dynamics inside an agency, the pressures, the deadlines, getting fired by – all of that was real. So that was a real uptick for people getting interested in the industry, which helped us. Maybe this is a little bit of a digression, but I always wonder this when I'm listening to your show. You're talking about the creative minds who are coming up with the campaigns. Yeah. But you're doing that from Canada.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that a lot of the time that creative work is done in the States. They come to Canada and then they just make a media buy. Yes. There's still a lot of highly functioning Canadian advertising agencies putting out work. The toughest thing for me in my show is finding the stories about Canadian campaigns. The US keeps everything. I can find the first radio ad done in 1923 with three clicks of a mouse. I can't find anything in Canada. There's no archive. It's really frustrating for me. I mean, because I spent my career in the business, I can call up ad people and say, tell me about that campaign you did, or I can call up retired creative directors and say, remember that

campaign you did in 1983? Tell me that story. But it's really frustrating for me because there's no archive in this country. In the States, there's the Duke archives at Duke University that are endless. And there's all, anyway, there's a ton of archives there. The US has kept everything. They really bought into Marshall McLuhan's line that advertising is the cave art of any era. And here it's not the case. So it's an ongoing struggle for me to find Canadian stories, which I'm always looking for. I've never thought about that once. That's so fascinating.

And it's true. When you look back, you find like an old dusty magazine at somebody's grandmother's house or in their cottage or something. It's the ads that tell you so much. Pirate donated a portion of our archives to McMaster University. We donated 50,000 commercials, which was only probably a third of our archive. Of what you made? Of what we made, yeah. You made 50,000 commercials at Pirate? We made way more than that. That was a third of our archive was 50,000. But why McMaster was interested in it was because inside that archive was the first cellular phone advertising. There was Olympic advertising. There were federal election advertising, the first AIDS PSAs. Like all of that was reflected in that archive because advertising is the great mirror of any era. Like you said, you look through a magazine, you can tell what clothes someone's wearing, you know exactly what decade that is. Wow. But in Canada, we've lost our heritage. Yeah. There's just no hunger, no desire to archive at all yet.

I listened to your show recently and you tried to sell me weed. Yeah. No judgment. Yeah, yeah. I sell mattresses. I sell supplements. I once sold a monthly meat box subscription. There you go. How do you think about podcast advertising? Well, we're trying to monetize our podcast the best we can because it keeps our company healthy and it allows me to pay people what they're worth. So it's important to us. And I'm in the

advertising business, so I'm a big fan of advertising. The interesting question about cannabis and even gambling casinos is there are new categories, right? What we do is we take a look at everything that comes across our table and we decide whether it feels right to us. Cannabis, I don't have a problem with. It's legal. There's stores. There's retailers. I don't have a problem with it.

Casino stuff is starting to come in. We'll have to see how that goes. That kind of talks about the comfort question and the like, is this, you know, do I want to put my name on this? What do you think about the industry that we're kind of, you know, I'll say it, we're pioneering the podcast industry. We were in it a long time ago, and it's amazing to watch an industry go from nothing to a multibillion-dollar industry and to kind of try to navigate that. And it feels very new and fresh. At the same time, there are strains within it which feel like it's a return to like 1920s radio or something. So true. When hosts are asked to read ads, it feels like it's the 1940 radio.

And that's what everybody wants. They really don't want a slick presentation and they're not really looking for conceptual ideas. They really, which is interesting to me because I came out of an entire career of trying to add a conceptual selling idea to an ad. Advertisers don't seem to want that. They're hoping for endorsements, which I don't really do. But what's also interesting about podcasting, I was reading this week, Jesse, I don't know if you saw it, podcasting is reaching 18 to 49, I think it is, age group,

almost on par with AM, FM radio and linear TV this year. That's huge, right? That almost makes podcasting a mass medium. That's incredible. We'll be right back, but first a word from the good sponsors who support our podcast. And radio is something

that doesn't get talked about as mass media, but in the early years of podcasting, it was always like, wow, we're 3% of radio? Like radio has been so resilient. It's like a tank.

Just this really- It cannot be killed by conventional weapons. That's resilient. It's like a tank. Just this really- It cannot be killed by conventional weapons. That's right. It really stays. Like it survived everything, right? It survived television and movies and the internet. And the numbers are still pretty good for radio. Yeah, it's still very much mass media and millions and millions of people.

Will we kill it? I love the transition from radio to podcasting personally because I could tell stories. I had no time factor. Even our podcast version of our show is usually longer than our CBC version of the show because I don't have to be 2730. So the storytelling gets better with podcasting for me. My first media job was as a co-op student at Q107. And the most sort of beleaguered member of that staff was the copywriter for their ads. And it was so old school that you just have some hack kind of, I don't mean to put the guy down,

but he just looked like such a sad sack. You know, those radio ads, like the quality of the experience of listening to FM radio. And then you get that block of ads. And it was interesting because these days you think about the tight brand controls that companies have. And here was this guy who was just like, you think about the tight brand controls that companies have. And here was this guy who was just like, you know, the radio ads like, hey, Jan. Yes, Jim. Let's head down to the Honda dealership. And he just had to pump these things out.

And I'd get pulled into the studio because they need like four people to laugh or yell at a certain point or say one line. And the guy was just – he was a machine. I started that way, Jesse. So my first job was at FM 108 Radio in Burlington, 1981. It was the only 50s and 60s radio station in Canada at the time because oldies were just becoming oldies, right? I was the sole copywriter and production guy for the entire radio station. So we had about 150 ongoing retail clients and it's all local advertising, right? Some days I'd write 25 or 30 commercials a day.

I would then need someone to voice them. So I'd stand outside the morning jock's door at 9 o'clock when he finished and drag him into the studio to record. And if we needed a second voice, I would do that second voice. And if I needed a third voice, I'd record that voice too, put my finger on the spindle, tape days, slow my voice down so it sounded like there were three of us in the room, like all of that. But I had to pump them out so fast, Jesse, that that's why they don't sound so great because the volume is crippling. I think that's a big factor,

but to the kind of complaint, the listener complaint of just how corny they can sound, there's a reason for that on FM radio. Like to try to just grab people's attention in the first second, you know, and I was kind of given a crash course in this stuff. It's interesting to contrast that with the podcast ad format and the kind of fork in the road we're at right now. Cause I'll admit something here. I like reading ads. I kind of feel connected to like George Burns, like what's Gracie getting up to next? Well, first, a message from Lucky Strike.

I love the flavor of my Lucky Strikes. I understand that what a podcast is doing is taking a listener into a conversation. There's an intimacy and you're saying, hey, sit down with me and this other person and you get a seat on the couch while we have an interesting conversation. And to have some other message come in and be like today, you know, Sunday, Sunday is to absolutely, it's severing that. And we kind of specialize, we're probably the only news podcaster where news personalities will read ad copy. And that's a bit of a killer feature of, and our – all advertised for our ads, we hear from our advertisers like, wow, your stuff converts two or three times. Right.

As well as when we have our fanciest marketers put together a beautiful, polished, pre-recorded ad. With actors. Yeah. With trained actors. Yeah. Because now they're dynamically inserting ads and podcasts. Yeah. And we do a little bit of that for unsold inventory.

And as a listener, like, it's a very different experience. You mean the run of schedule stuff that is pre-produced that gets dropped in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's, that's an interesting notion. You know, it's in the advertising world, you try and not sound like the station you're on. In other words, you purposely try and leap out of the radio sounding so different from the environment you're in. When I talked to radio station owners and programming chiefs over there, they always told me, which is very interesting, we give preference to ads that sound like us. So we were kind of working at odds.

It took me deep into my career before I realized that, that they actually would give preferential positioning, meaning first ad out of the programming in a break, right? That's the best place to be, to ads that sound almost like their format. I spent my whole career trying not to do that. You were fighting them. I was fighting them. I think that tells you something about the difference in the listening experience that

radio is ambient and becomes wallpaper and an ad needs to somehow- It has to. Poke you in the ear and get your attention. Whereas I think a good podcast, there are some podcasts that I think kind of play the ambient thing. Like a three-hour rambling Joe Rogan thing. Throw it on, forget about it. But if you're producing and you specialize in highly produced, scripted narrative radio, it's the kind of radio where you want people to like, if they got home and there's still five minutes left.

Stay in the driveway. That's it. Yep. So why break that spell when it's time to deliver? I know, I know. I even wrestle with the transition going from our show to our commercials, what that bridge should be,

or should there be a bridge? Like, you know, I think we're both on ACAST. ACAST has a little mnemonic they use when they go to, and I wonder if that should even be in there. Like, I'm just constantly just thinking about that. Should we burst the bubble, as you say, or should we just transition right into the commercial so you don't take somebody by the collar

and say, we'll be back in five minutes, you know? We have different priorities because we, as a newsroom, want there to be like absolute clarity as to when you're listening to our editorial content and when you're listening to an ad. And there are things that we'll do that the other guys won't do and they'll consider it. Like the idea of, again, having a news personality

read an ad is anathema. I've had senior CBC colleagues tell me like, I've been at this for 35 years and I've never read a goddamn ad. Very proud. Badge of honor. Yeah. Yeah. Unless we have an objection to an advertiser or unless there's a conflict of interest, I'm into it. You know, like I'll give the personal endorsement if there is a personal endorsement to be made.

Right. I have to be careful of that the way you have to be careful. You probably don't take on any media advertising, right? You wouldn't take on global. That's right. On the Canada Land Show, we cover them. And so we can't take that ad. I have to be careful too with endorsements

because I may be doing a story on that brand two months from now. Right, you've got your lines in the sand. Yeah, because if I say something great about that brand and I've endorsed it two months ago, even though it's legitimate and there is no funny business going on, it may not seem that way to them. Well, you don't want the listener wondering if you're doing a half hour looking into Nestle's great campaign because they also bought a big block of ads on it. Right.

Yeah. So that's the same thing. I'm for sale when it comes to ads, but the listener absolutely can never wonder, is this an ad that I'm listening to? And they can never wonder, is his coverage influenced by the ad? So that's where we kind of set those. It feels quaint in a certain way, talking about these lines because we live in a culture where those lines- Well, Google blurred that, don't you think? I mean, there was always church and state in my business. So, you know, you would never put an ad or the publisher of a magazine would never put an ad beside a story that had something to do with that advertiser. Like they would put you further into the magazine.

That was advertising from the 1920s to whenever Google showed up. And then Google makes a multi-billion dollar business of putting ads right beside content. Like it's kind of interesting to me. Like, if you're searching something from Canadian Tire, right beside it might be stories about Canadian Tire on Google, right? That's true. That's interesting. You know, and that's-

And that was their model. It's also another way of thinking about conflict of interest because newspapers were protecting conflict of interest from the advertiser's point of view. If we're taking Canadian Tire's money, it would not be fair to put their ad next to a story that was negative about them. But we have to be able to report on them. So, you know, there was always a newsroom concern of like, you know, and sometimes they would miss it and there's some funny instances where you'd have like an ad for a raincoat next to, I don't know, the raincoat factory is just burned down. Child labor. Yeah.

Yeah. There we go. You got it. And for the advertiser's sake, you would down. Child labor. Yeah. There we go. You got it. And for the advertiser's sake, you would put that somewhere else. Right. But I never thought about that, that Google, there's no such. And it's all done algorithmically. It is.

And the next story down from Canadian Tire might be a story about how someone hates Canadian Tire. Like they've really blurred that church and state thing completely, made a business model of it, and probably has one of the biggest businesses in the world as a result. I wonder if it's a question of blurring it to the point where people don't notice, or if it's a question of like, people are smart. They're smarter than they're often given credit for. And it's kind of funny to see the Nike ad next to a article that's exposing child labor and sweatshops. And you might take a screenshot of that and there's an irony there.

But it doesn't have the same ironic quality if you search for Nike and then there's like sponsored links at the top for Nike and then there's some articles. It's just like, that's just what Google gave you. Right. And I think that people understand that. Yeah. You know, we talk about this in our coverage of this ongoing debate about how, you know, the big tech stole the ads. They stole the ads from the news. And I've never been able to feel terribly injured by having the ads stolen from the news because, like, I kind of know that the news and ads was always a bit of a tortured relationship to begin with.

It wasn't the greatest way to say it. And advertisers never wanted to be next to real news. They never wanted to be next to war and conflict and people getting killed or, like like real social issues or politicians being scandalized. That was never a great place. In network television, CBS, NBC, ABC, the news programs were the highest rated programs, therefore the most desirable for advertisers, right? But ironically, you don't want to be too near a war story, yet the most eyeballs are on that war story. It's a good point.

And that's this strange cognitive dissonance of having, you know, the world's going to hell, now go buy something. So this struggle to determine where lines should be and what's fair game, some of those arguments are like settled. And it's almost strange to tell my kids like, yeah, actually, when they first started putting ads before movies, that was a big deal and people were really upset. You know why? I have a theory about that. There is a great unwritten contract in advertising. And that is, if you'll sit through this ad, Jesse, I will do something for you in return. So, you know, the ads in a magazine pay for the editorial. The ads in a newspaper pay for the reporters. The ads in a television show pays for the production of the sitcoms.

Even a bus shelter is a return because you've got ads in the bus shelter, but it's keeping you out of the rain. Movie ads gave you nothing. The price of tickets didn't come down. Yeah. They broke the unwritten contract. That's why people were so angry at that. I was furious. You know, not only are you not giving me something,

but you're taking something, and you're not taking just a minute. Those ad blocks became 20 minutes long. I know. Nothing in return. And that was how I, as a struggling student at the time, justified sneaking into the movies. I was like, all right. Okay, you can play that game. I'll play this game. We're going to even the scales. But we used to have these debates about a million things, you know, and it was

egregious the first time you would hear the singer songwriter who you love, Bob Dylan song on an ad or an ad in a video game was a really big deal. Yeah. Or when sponsored content first became a thing. Are you kidding me? This article is a paid article? It was scandalous. And bit by bit, we've eroded that outrage to the point where it would be hard to explain to a kid why we were even upset about that. Because they accept that we are in a completely commercialized world. Right. What do you mean?

A band is trying to make money. Right. I don't want to get all CBC moralizing on you in the way that I was moralized when I wanted to look at marketing on a documentary. But after 18 years of really removing any kind of like judgment right or wrong and just trying to understand advertising and marketing, do you, Terry O'Reilly, look around the world as it has become increasingly brand-focused, corporatized, commercialized, and say, enough with the goddamn ads already. I do. I do feel that way. I feel that way even when I watch a hockey game. If I could wiggle my nose, I'd take all the ads off the boards.

I'd take all the ads off the ice, leave the playing surface clean. There's a lot of instances where I think it's just gone too far and too much, and advertising becomes its own worst enemy. Even the algorithms I have always railed against, which makes me sound rather like an old ad guy. But I never like the ad algorithms because it's kind of like a submarine chasing you. Like you don't see it. And you don't know that it's charting all of your online buying activity. Or if you're looking at car dealership ads and you're looking for a car, and then when you go to financing, then all of a sudden you'll get all these offers from Ford

because they've been waiting for that moment to send you that algorithm. I think that is terrible for advertising. And you're sort of seeing it now. Apple has privacy, things kicking in now, and they're not going to allow a lot of tracking. And I think that was inevitable because it was terrible. It was a terrible idea. I understand why marketers loved it, why advertisers loved it, because you're getting all this free information and be able to track people in the buying process. But it gave advertising a black eye. Are you a philosophical guy? Like there's a whole conversation about how the culture of ultra commercialization gets into people's identities. And, you know, and it's interesting under the influence, which it's

interesting that actually, you know, the phrase itself is about being drunk, you know, but being intoxicated. But now of course, influence has a different connotation because everyone's an influence or we live in the age of the influencer. That's why a part of the reason why we changed the name of our show. So the show was agent persuasion in the early days. I mean, our show started before there was an iPhone before there was YouTube before there was Twitter. All of that didn't exist in 2005. It was still a persuasive industry. I had to persuade you to buy something. It was, let me just shovel all of this onto you as an advertiser. Then when the digital world came in, it really became a lot more subtle. Algorithms, influencers.

So really, in 2012, we changed the whole format of our show to reflect that. Yeah, it's a broader category and a more current one because to persuade someone, yes, it's salesy, but you're having a conversation with them and you're making an argument. Influence is not necessarily a conversation.

Influence is pervasive and we surround you with values and images and little signals to slowly influence how you feel about things. But in one way, it is a conversation because in the old days of persuasion, it was a one-way conversation. You really couldn't talk back to an advertiser. Right. In this day and age of social media, couldn't talk back to an advertiser. In this day and age of social media, you can talk back to an advertiser. You can get the president of a company's attention as a 12-year-old girl on Twitter

if you had the right message. So there has to be a lot more transparency now, not that there's total transparency, but you can see someone who has a problem with a marketer puts it out on Twitter, for example, then we get a front row seat to see how they react to that. I think it's a valid point that the people have a bit more of a voice and we've seen, you know, funny stories of brands that get it wrong and somebody, they just become a laughingstock and people take turns dunking on them. But, you know,

there's always a period where there's a bit of chaos and the power gets unsettled and then the empire strikes back and they figure out and Wendy's gets funny and starts making fun of McDonald's. And they kind of co-opt, you know, the rebel voice. Yeah. And the predominant theme is very different than like as a Gen Xer when we used to say, oh, that band sold out. And now I look at the YouTubers who my kids are watching and it's like everyone wants to sell. Like that's the dream. It's like, wow, this guy is's the dream it's like wow this guy

is an influencer all he does is he gets stuff for free yeah and it's we don't care that he's getting it for free or why he's getting it for free and oh my god they're paying him yeah and um well is he only saying that because they're paying like that no like the cool thing is that he's getting paid right and in a wider sense what is like i don't know instagram culture but everybody advertising a version of their lifestyle. So like the way in which we've internalized brand and everybody is a brand now. Everybody is a brand that is to a certain perspective. Hell.

Well, it is if you if you're going to buy right into it, because then you have to cultivate and curate your life. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot of that going on. There's no doubt about that. I mean, you know, we hear interviews and stories all the time about how it's negatively affecting a lot of, especially younger people, that they feel they look at those wonderful lives and think my life is nothing like that. And then can suffer depression and things could get worse. So there's a lot of downsides to it. Do you think it's like we need better regulation? I don't know how you would regulate that.

Like when you ask me that, what do you think when you say that? Is there a way? Well, they're trying. They're trying with really broad strokes to just basically take kids off of social media, you know. Good luck with that. Yeah. Opt-outs and parents having total access to their kids' account. That's the, you know, was it Ohio has a rule now? And there's a really strong reason to be worried about that. You know, you talk about, let's say, a kid who's come out to a community of friends as queer and their parents don't know about it yet and you've legislated that the parents have access to every one of their accounts or you cut off somebody's access to a community that's actually helping

them and not like there's a very reductive view that right it's only negative and in knocking every kid off and then of course like you say good luck they're going to find some other way so no i i tend to agree i like in government doesn't tend to be super good at this. I don't know. It's not a topic I know a tremendous amount about. I know there are laws around disclosing sponsorship. Yeah. And I know there are. That is a big law.

If you're an influencer, you're supposed to disclose that you're being paid for that. Yeah. There's big fines in the U.S. I'm not sure how much it's done in Canada. But if you don't disclose that you're being paid or you've gotten product in lieu of the endorsement, it can be a big problem. Some people find big amounts of money. Yeah. So, you know, there's a place for regulation there. And then when it comes to kids, I know there's like all kinds of little, you know, specific things. And

of course, when you get to dangerous products, there's, you know. Right. I don't know. I guess they can do something. I don't want to just say, oh, yeah, forget it. But I guess I tend to feel like we have to work this out in the culture. I know the ad industry, like every other industry where there's been a moral panic, turns to self-regulation to get ahead of the regulators. Right. So you've got all these ad boards and internal mechanisms, you know. But the technology has moved so much faster than people's understanding of it or these regulatory bodies. That is so true. I mean, think about all the changes that we've seen in just the last few years in the digital world.

I go back to the era, Jesse, where my first radio job, I was telling you about all the sound effects were on vinyl records. Like I'd have bird chirps, door barks, pull them out, put them down, drop the needle, find the right doorbell, ring, run to the studio, transfer to tape. Like all of that was gone. Yeah. It's all gone now. Right.

Editing with a razor blade and a wax pencil. I mean, it's moving so fast now that you almost can't keep up. Like, look at the TikTok thing that's going on now with the government's suspecting that TikTok is really this very sticky, addictive app to gain information, right? Is the accusation, yeah. Is the accusation, yeah. That's right. And, I mean, it would be fascinating to do a – under the influence on this stuff,

but I don't know that we can or, you know, I challenge you to do so. No, I know. When we're talking about things like, you know, your show is so much about getting into the creative human process of people who are, you know, artists in their way, creators, how they're shaping these things and having fun conversations about how to reach people and looking at the market. And that is a process that is rapidly getting automated and subjected to automated A-B testing where, you know, the question of should we go with this message or should we go with that message, the machine is giving us the answer. It runs both messages and it tells you which one won. And then their generation of the messages themselves is increasingly going to be automated by artificial

intelligence. And we're getting to a place where, how do you tell the story of an algorithm's rapid fire decision making? I know, it's it makes it tough on me. And where's the creativity too? Like with all that automation, is there going to be creativity? Is creativity going to become a thing of the past? Is advertising not even going to want creativity anymore? Is it the math men

are not the mad men anymore? Like what's that going to turn into? It's very hazy. The AI itself, I don't think can be considered creative because it is just shuffling existing materials. But the creation of the AI is the act of creativity. And the writing of the algorithm, which we increasingly talk about as if it's just sort of like handed down from the mount. No, somebody actually said, this is what this line of code should do. So the focus shifts. As much as we pat ourselves on the back in this conversation, or, you know, it's my fault, as pioneers of a new digital media, I kind of feel like we have something that has a lot more in common with the past than with where things are going. And everything from the host read ad to simply asking people to sit down with us for 20, 30, 40 minutes and listen to a

conversation or a story. I love how quaint and anachronistic that is. Like attention spans are getting divided and subdivided and subdivided. In some mediums, right? Or the holdout. I can't think of anywhere else. I know. And that's the one thing that we- Movies maybe.

I mean, movies are still two hours long. Movies are the closest. And that's actually the answer I get when talking about podcast advertising. I say, listen, we price our ads accordingly because where else can you get 60 seconds of a person's time to hear about your product? Totally. 60s were the yachts of advertising and disappeared in the 80s. Advertising went from probably two minutes back in the day being embedded in Jack Benny's show where he talked probably for four or five minutes, down to 60 seconds, down to 30 seconds, down to 15 seconds, down to 10 seconds,

down to six second YouTube ads, where I never really bought that. I understand that it's more efficient as a media buying. You can buy a lot more small chunks than big ones, but there's no creativity. There's no brand building in that. And it's not enjoyable. It's like brand building in that. And it's not enjoyable. It's like getting a slap across the face really quickly. There's no real creativity.

There's no interesting, you know, I always say connect the dots when you have a brand that every little touch point is an opportunity. All of that goes away in that scenario, which I think is terrible. And it's not just advertising the, the. The notion that you have a split second to grab somebody's attention or else it goes somewhere else, they're making movies that way. You know, the Marvel movie format, the pace of these things is like they're just slapping you in the face again and again and again. They can't build tension. They can't like create any like the quiet moments that make the loud moments work. Because it's just pummeling you constantly. Really. And if you want to, you know, carbon date that, that's really loud moments work. Right. Because it's just pummeling you constantly. Really.

And if you want to, you know, carbon date that, that's really as a result of MTV. Because all that fast cut editing when MTV showed up, I mean, that totally influenced my industry. Like once we saw that you can get 30 cuts in 30 seconds, which we'd never even thought of before, we started doing that. And then you can see that ball rolling down the hill and affecting advertising and movies and television shows and Miami Vice and all of that, right? So I'm a cranky old man because I feel like I found this little lonely island of podcasting that it's still this immersive long-form experience. Well, I wouldn't call you a lonely old man. I think it's a wonderful thing. I think the very fact, as you said, that you can spend time with somebody. It's a funny thing. When I would do what they're called up fronts with CBC, and for those who don't know what that is, that's when they parade out all the hosts for all the shows in front of advertisers or in front of an audience, and they get to talk about all their shows, and then the public gets to meet you. So it'll be held in the Eaton Center or something like that.

I would watch people come up to the television hosts and they'd be very tentative and they would sort of back away and be afraid to talk to them. And when they came to talk to us radio hosts, they were always touching me. And I was really uncomfortable with it at first. Like I'd always shake hands but not let go or hold my hand and my elbow

or put their arm around. It was a strange thing that I was really uncomfortable with. And what I came to realize was it was that thing about audio, Jesse, that people feel connected to the hosts, personally connected to the hosts because we spend time with them, because it's a voice in their ear. It's not really a communal event. It's really a one-on-one. Television has a lot of awe, but audio has this real sense of connection. And that's why they were always touching. You've heard the term parasocial relationship? No. That's what people have with their favorite. I have it with my favorite podcast hosts. I mean, you bring them into your home, you bring them in as you're washing the dishes,

or as you're driving in your car by yourself. It's one-on-one, as you say. And it's like a pretty regular thing. It's like once a week or something. So, yeah, people feel like they know you. I mean, people have been – you have been in people's homes for 18 years. That's right. That's right. That's right. And I came to realize that it was an incredible compliment that when people had that kind of,

that familiarity with you, that they could cross that line and come right into your zone, you know, and I actually got to like it after a while. I really, truly did. Touch Terry O'Reilly.

Yeah, touch me. Terry, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you. Thanks, Jesse. That was terrific. I enjoyed it that was my conversation with Jesse Brown

founder of the Canada Land Podcast Network check out Jesse's podcasts you'll find them on your favorite podcast app