Podcast award winners are mostly narrative style
Almost all podcast winners of the 2022 Australian Podcast Awards are either narrative or interview style.
A narrative podcast typically involves a narrator or a host guiding the listener through a story, with dialogue, music, and sound effects added to create an auditory experience that draws the listener in and keeps their attention.
Compared with most interview-style podcasts, narrative takes considerably more time and resources to produce. Unless you’re multitalented, a range of people are needed with expertise in the roles of executive producer, producer, host, writer, researcher, sound editor and sound engineer.
To cover the costs, narrative podcasts are typically produced by audio agencies, commercial media companies, public broadcasters, educational institutions, etc.; and they’re often funded by government, charities, universities, or commercial platforms like Spotify or Audible.
There’s a noticeable professional quality narrative-style podcast possesses versus other styles.
After analysing all 26 podcast categories of the 2022 Australian Podcast Awards, almost all the winners were either narrative (16) or interview (7).
Two of those seven interview-styled podcasts are borderline narrative: Schwarz Media’s 7am, and the ABC’s Parental as Anything. Both these podcasts combine straight interviews with narrative-like elements, such as music, news grabs and sound effects.
Interestingly, the winner of the Listeners’ Choice – the only category NOT decided by official judges – was Life Uncut, a podcast which explores relationships and dating. This is one of only three category winners that is neither purely narrative or interview-style. (The others included Baby Brain with two co-hosts chatting; and Girls Night Out, a drama-style for Best Fiction, which kind of makes sense.)
In most episodes of Life Uncut, co-hosts Britt and Laura (former finalists from Channel 10’s The Bachelor) discuss topics between themselves covering, “love, life, lust, and a bunch of other stuff.”
From time-to-time, Britt and Laura do interview other guests, but the bulk of most episodes from what I heard involve their riffing off one another. They also have “live” episodes, like a radio show, where listeners ring in to ask questions or a chat.
With episode titles like “ASK UNCUT - Feeling DICKappointed”, or “Your best ever dating disaster stories”, perhaps it’s no wonder this podcast has won Listener’s Choice category three years in a row.
What the mass market decide to consume, versus what judges consider “the best”, can perhaps be best illustrated by Academy Award-winning films and highest-grossing films for each year in the United States.
Only two films been both highest-grossing (US) and Oscar winners in the last 30 years.
1994: Forest Gump.
1997: Titanic
That’s it!
The last seven highest-grossing films in the US have been
Star Wars Episode VII (2015)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) (2016)
Star Wars Episode VIII (2016)
Black Panther (2017)
Avengers: Endgame (2018)
Bad Boys For Life (2020)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Could you imagine any of them winning a best-picture Oscar? (The Academy has yet to decide on Maverick, but I’m not holding my breath.)
What’s popular versus what’s considered quality are two different things, evidently.
The winners of the podcast awards, whether they be the Aussie, British, or American, are increasingly produced by professional agencies or public broadcasters like the ABC and SBS.
The winner of the APA’s 2022 iHeart Podcast of the Year was The Last Outlaws, an intriguing, well-researched and high-quality podcast by Impact Studios, funded by the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).
The credits for this brilliantly woven narrative would compete with a Hollywood movie (okay, I’m slightly exaggerating) with several producers, sound engineers, researchers, writers, investigators, and so on.
How do you compete for a podcast award without the resources and money behind you?
Well, my advice is that unless you’re an agency or media organisation, don’t bother. Branded podcasts can still pack a punch with interview-style content. We are voyeuristic by nature and enjoy listening in to a good chat.
Interview-style podcasts punch well above their weight in terms of engagement, without the costs associated with narrative.
If you’re a brand, think of your target market. What information do they crave? How can you best serve them with what you know? Can you produce a regular interview-style podcast for your audience, one that doesn’t cost too much or take too much time?
You might not win an award, but you may just have an audience craving for the information and inspiration only you can provide.