British Podcast Awards 2018
Massive congratulations to all the winner's of the British Podcast Awards on Saturday - the thrill of seeing these podcasters celebrated for their work will never get old.
We had a policy of no speeches, but Cariad Lloyd's third win of the night for Griefcast gave us a good excuse to break the rules. And if anyone is going to deliver a cracking speech off the cuff, it's the country's leading improviser.
Other highlights for me included Olly Mann's opening monologue (which I'm pretty sure featured a heckle from one Alix Fox) - and, of course, the free bottles of champagne, generously supplied by sponsor Sony Music's 4th Floor Creative.
Our fridge looking swish after the British podcast awards 🍾 pic.twitter.com/bQrFADauME
— Dani Black (@DanielleKBlack) May 20, 2018
Behind The Scenes
Ah, that difficult second album. Matt Deegan and I put the first show on in just three months, yet this one took twice as long. Why?
Partly it was that we'd burnt out all our favours in 2017. No more in-kind support: we needed to pay people. To do this, we invited more sponsors and introduced a new price for publishers earning larger revenues. That way, we kept prices low for the independent podcasters (of which I am one).
That said, we had some amazing voluntary support. Nish Kumar launched the awards in January - handpicking ten new ears to hear those entries - and Lina Prestwood took charge of the judges. Those changes, plus a new entry system, made the prospect of handling over 700 hours of audio that much more manageable.
Goody Bags & Other Perks
We had a whole bunch of prizes simply for entering this year.
In addition to free booze, 4th Floor Creative offered free studio time to all entrants, and Hindenburg gave free trials of their editing software. Winners were treated to free passes for ipDTL and year-long licences for Hindenburg.
The PR team at Carver pushed the event out to almost 4m eyeballs in traditional media, with coverage in the Guardian, Mail Online, Metro, The Times, The Observer, Daily Star, and the Radio Times.
The Listener Choice Award got people focused on the event, with over 110,000 votes by the time we closed the polls on Thursday night. Many of those joined our Podwatch mailing list, and received word of all the winners on Sunday morning.
There was also great coverage on podcast platforms, with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast, Entale, Stitcher and Pocket Casts all running features showcasing the winners.
Nice to see @ApplePodcasts featuring The Tip Off and other @britpodawards winners on their front-page (loads of fascinating shows to get hooked on!) pic.twitter.com/Gq04LDIUi2
— The Tip Off podcast (@TipOffPodcast) May 21, 2018
And, of course, there were plenty of podcasts covering the event as well: from BBC 4Extra's Podcast Hour to Radio Today, The Radio Audio Week Podcast, The Media Podcast and the Guardian's Culture podcast, which played clips from every single nominee over five different episodes.
All of which had some immediate impact for our winners: Griefcast shot to the top of the Apple Podcast charts (which ranks shows by volume of new subscribers) with almost all our Gold winners entering the top 50.
More To Come
We did a little survey of podcaster's backgrounds as part of entries this year, which we're hoping to start a conversation with soon. We'll also be contributing to a forthcoming RIG Train workshop and the next podcast day for Radio Days Europe. AND we hope to be getting involved in this year's London Podcast Festival too.
Next year's going to take even longer to produce, isn't it? If you have feedback, or would like to help us put on an even bigger show next year, let me know using the contact form.