As media changes, so too do the approaches of some of the most talented voices. Phil Mackey has never been afraid to lean into a topic and micro-target an audience. It is how he and Judd Zulgad have built Purple Daily into the success that it is.
What started out as a podcast spinoff of a radio show has turned into the flagship of a forward thinking local media brand that was built to survive the ups and downs of not just the industry, but of the world in general. That is why after the pandemic and the uncertainty that changed Hubbard Radio’s plans for Skor North in 2020, Purple Daily is still going strong.
In today’s column as part of our Meet the Podcasters series with Point to Point Marketing, Phil Mackey touches on what has worked for he and Zulgad and what he has learned doesn’t really work for anyone.
Demetri Ravanos: Now that Purple Daily is solely a podcast, what is the difference in the ceiling for the show versus when it was on both radio and podcast and you still had to think of it in terms of radio?
Phil Mackey: Purple Daily is a lot bigger than any of our radio audiences in any of our show time slots in the thirteen years I’ve been doing daily radio. And that is not an indictment on radio, it’s a credit to the power of podcasting.
I think, when we set out five years ago now, in 2018, Hubbard Radio made the decision that we need to create something for the next 10 to 15 years that isn’t AM radio exclusive. We can still use AM radio as a tool, but we need to build something for the next 10 to 15 years that has a growth trajectory as opposed to something that’s declining. We sat in a room, a bunch of us, numerous different times trying to figure out what does the model look like, trying to project what could the audiences look like.
I would say that I’m a pretty big dreamer when it comes to just what’s possible building audiences and what we can do in local and national media. What we’ve built five years later has blown away any of our expectations or projections.
Back in 2018, when we were trying to figure out what is the ceiling for this. So it’s been awesome, man. I think it’s been 18 straight months Purple Daly has charted among Apple’s top 15 national football podcasts. So that’s a team specific niche that continues month after month to hit top 15 on the Apple charts. It’s been as high as seventh multiple times in the past year and a half, too. So the fact that it’s punching with some of these big national podcasts, it just shows you if you commit to this platform and you commit to podcasting and YouTube and social media, and you commit to a powerful niche, which in our case is passionate Vikings fans, and you do it well or well enough, They will repay you by building a community for you.
That’s kind of what’s happened. We put this out there and the fans have responded by making a community.
DR: So that actually leads into my next question. Certainly there are passionate Jaguars and Texans out there, but there does have to be something advantageous about this particular fan base. Outside of Cleveland, I don’t know a lot of fan bases with the prolonged misery and paranoia of Vikings fans.
PM: Oh, yes. I think it’s a little bit like Cubs fans in some ways. The identity of Vikings fans is one of misery and it’s just generations of grandpa down to dad or mom down to the kids lamenting their era of Vikings football. You know, if you grew up in the seventies and it’s like, ‘Oh man, you weren’t around when we blew four Super Bowls.’ It’s literally like a therapy session for fans to get together, whether it’s on a podcast or whether it’s just over beers or at a stadium.
So yeah, I think when you have that sort of checkered history as a sports team, and I don’t know how well known nationally Minnesota sports’ current playoff futility is, but like, the Twins haven’t won a playoff game in 18 straight tries. The Vikings, I think I saw a graphic somewhere on social media that showed all of the NFL franchises and how many division titles they’ve won. Then the next column was how many Super Bowl championships they have. The Vikings are like top three in Division Championships, but they’re the only team in the top ten that has never won a Super Bowl.
The power of that misery and coping combined with people wanting to commiserate together and be part of a community. And then we are just sort of like the bar that they meet at, you know? That’s what Purple Daily is – the bar where we lament all of our Vikings misery together.We’re just sort of the organizers of this big giant therapy session.
DR: Is the goal of every episode to entertain, or in the publishing schedule does each day have a different goal in mind for you and Judd when you’re putting the show together?
PM: So kind of both. It is a 365 day per year show, and so we do make sure, especially from like, May 10th until training camp starts, we do have specific benchmarks and bits and pillars that we like to hit on. They kind of change seasonally. During the season there’s a lot more of them. There are sometimes multiple shows per day. So we do have, like a radio show, we do have planned bits, benchmarks, segments, guests or whatever it may be.
In terms of like an overarching macro theme, we start every single show by telling people specifically what the show is and why we’re here. “This is Purple Daily. It’s daily Vikings entertainment, and we just want the Vikings to win a Super Bowl before we die.”
I’ll never forget a few years ago, Judd and I started getting backlash over why we’re being so negative. “The Vikings went to the playoffs last year and you guys are just being negative” and “why are you why are you so harsh on this team” from the people that may be new to the show or maybe didn’t listen to us on the radio. So we got together one day and we said, “Okay, let’s reflect on this. Are we being too negative?” If so, maybe we have to explain. Or maybe we’re not. But we just have to explain to the audience where our perspective comes from. So we literally opened a show one day and said, “Hey, we’ve been reading the comments on YouTube lately and we’ve been reading the comments on Apple, Spotify or whatever social media and we feel like we need to explain why we’re sometimes negative when it comes to our coverage of this team. It’s because they’ve done everything there is to do in 60 plus years as a franchise except win a Super Bowl. So we hold them to a standard. It’s it’s time after a half century plus to win a Super Bowl.” Once we sort of put that rallying cry on the top of the show, whether people agreed, disagreed, thought we were idiots for saying this or that, at the end of the day, we can all come together and say, “Hey, let’s forget about us disagreeing on Kirk Cousins or us disagreeing on the coach. We’re all here because we want the Vikings to win a Super Bowl before we die at some point.” I think it has clarified what the community is and and it probably helps explain why it’s become so powerful.
DR: You guys have leaned hard into social video for for as long as Skor North has been a brand, if not longer. When did you learn that made a real difference for not just how people consume the show, but how many people consume it?
PM: So, 2019 was kind of the first year of Skor North. We knew we still needed to produce a certain level of radio because ultimately, Hubbard Radio is a 100 year old broadcasting company, and that is our core business now with an eye on the future of building something digitally. So our plan going into the first year of Skor North was we don’t really know what’s going to stick and what’s not so let’s just capture as much video as possible. Let’s clip as much video as possible. Let’s put stuff out there and then let’s sort of gauge what works and what doesn’t.
The pandemic hits, everyone sort of feels the belt tightening, and we had to then after the first year and a half, really figure out what did we learn in the first year. What is working? How can we narrow our focus and really double down? And we found that in addition to podcasting, YouTube was the most powerful place for people to discover our content. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world behind Google, which obviously owns YouTube. When you do a radio segment, there’s not like a search function for your radio dial. You can’t like being you’re going to type in like, “I want to hear I want to hear Carolina Panthers talk in Charlotte right now.” You can’t type that into your car dashboard. Well, that’s the beauty of YouTube.
We wanted to make sure that if people are typing in Kirk Cousins or Vikings or whatever topic they wanted to hear, that they might have a chance to run into our content. We kind of learned through the first year, “Oh, some of this stuff is popping! I wonder why. Let’s look under the hood,” and you know, lo and behold, four or five years later, I believe YouTube is now the the biggest podcast consumption platform.
We can we can debate what is the best podcast business is in terms of video, audio, where you might get the best ad rates and all that stuff, but in terms of pure discovery and lean-in listening, YouTube has become a massive shopping mall for podcast listeners.
What we’ve learned is YouTube and podcasting as sort of one big entity for your full shows, and then wherever you can put clips so that people might stumble into something that you’re creating. Even that is sometimes like, you’re just at the mercy of the algorithm. But the more you can clip stuff, just play that game as much as you can.
DR: I notice you guys have not done a guest in a long, long time. There was a time I think podcasters viewed guests as part of the viral marketing plan. How important have you learned that is or is not?
PM: On a macro level, I think guests can be really important for podcasts looking to create discovery openings. If you see a guest that’s on a podcast that you’ve never heard of, but all you want to do is hear what so-and-so has to say, it can absolutely be a huge discovery tool.
I think we have found we’re probably guilty of not having enough guests on, to be honest with you. But we have found that just looking at analytics and just getting feedback from the audience, for whatever reason, people just like to hear us idiots blab about their favorite team, more than they want to hear an outsider. Now, we will bring on once or twice a year the Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell. We’ve kind of made a joke of he’s become a friend of the show now. He kind of he kind of understands the jokes and the vernacular and stuff. People will walk up to him at Home Depot, he says, and say, “Hey, just one before I die, coach” and he and he knows what that means.
Especially if you’re a headliner, that moves the needle and then we have some strategic contributors. Alex Boone is a former Viking. He played in the Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers. He does film breakdowns for us on YouTube. He still lives in Minnesota, so he’s a recurring guest that moves the needle. We have some other contributors that do a great job sort of covering the draft for us.
I guess we have just kind of found, for whatever reason, that if we’re leaning on guests as a crutch, we’re probably doing it wrong and we don’t really need to kill time in podcasting like you might if you’re doing 16 radio segments. So if a guest doesn’t meet the threshold of headline enough, entertaining enough or understands the fabric of the show enough, then we know that our audience would just rather listen to us argue about something.
DR: Anyone that has come from radio has an opinion about podcasters making a big deal our of doing a live show. I can’t tell you how many dudes I’ve heard go, “Oh, so you mean sports radio?”
Why do those things matter? How does a live show work with a podcast audience different than the way just turning on the radio would for that kind of experience?
PM: Man, there’s such a long conversation about the differences in radio and podcasting. I still love and appreciate live sports radio, even though I’m not really doing it anymore. Maybe at some point I will do live sports radio in some capacity again, but I think, if I could just be super candid as someone who literally spent 10 to 15 years doing live radio, now I would say 90% of what we do is more on-demand podcasting. We do some live streams and whatnot. But in radio, oftentimes if you’re being tasked with a three or four hour timeslot, I would venture to say if you were to ask almost any radio host in the country, even like Colin Cowherd, you probably don’t feel like you’re throwing your fastball for every single segment, every single day. Because you are you are trying to fill a certain amount of time and a certain amount of segments and a certain amount of the headlines.
If you have twelve segments to fill, those are twelve headlines. Are you using guests purely as entertainment or are you using them to get from twelve open segments down to nine? In podcasting, I feel like that feeling goes away where it’s just less pressure. We know that Vikings content drives audience more than anything else, so we don’t necessarily feel pressure to also mix in some other topics. I’ll never forget one of the BSM Summits two or three years ago, I was moderating a panel and Carl Scott from Meadowlark Media was on it and I asked, how do you how do you cut through the noise of the current sports media landscape and get something that sort of stands above and without hesitation he said “niches get the riches.”
So many people launch a sports podcast thinking “we’ve got to talk about everything,” right? Okay. Well, there’s TV, radio, podcasting, and social media. If you’re just going to talk about everything, now you’re competing with Stephen A. Smith and you’re competing with Colin Cowherd. But if you just talk about like Jacksonville Jaguars football or you just talk about college quarterbacks, you’re probably going to have a better chance of standing out and being the big fish/small pond, and then you can kind of strategically go from there.
Sometimes on the radio, I know there’s been examples of radio stations that have said, “we’re only going to talk Denver Broncos football” or whatever it is, but there is a pressure to just sort of have a wide portfolio of what you’re going to talk about to try and hit as many people in that mass audience pool as you can. In podcasting, the deeper you can go and the more niche you can go oftentimes is the better play. So that’s like one of probably a million differences between radio and podcasting. But niches get the riches. I do believe in what what Carl said.
DR: So this might that actually might be the answer to my last question here. And it’s something that I think about a lot as the format matures. What are some of the wrong lessons you think podcasters can pick up from studying what made like the original stars of this format popular? The Joe Rogans, the Bill Simmons, the Marc Marons? What are some of the things that might have worked because the format itself was so new or maybe just because of who they are that cannot be copied and pasted for everyone?
PM: To use Joe Rogan and Bill Simmons specifically, see, those guys kind of can talk about anything they want because they’re Joe Rogan and Bill Simmons. So I think the mistake a lot of people make when they get into podcasting is they look at Joe Rogan and Bill Simmons and some of the other big time podcasts. They say, “oh, man, okay, I have to get a guest on every show and go and do an hour and a half with them and smoke a cigar with them and drink scotch,” whatever it is. It’s going to be really hard to replicate what those guys have done.
I think what we can learn from Bill Simmons is Bill Simmons started off as the Boston Sports Guy. He started off as a niche and he dominated that niche as a writer and then eventually started podcasting. And then the ESPN thing kind of broadened out for him. Even so, like. Bill doesn’t sit there now and talk about baseball for an hour and a half on his podcast. He’ll talk a little bit of baseball, especially if like the Red Sox are relevant. Bill talks basketball and Bill talks football. He might do a little segment on like the Stanley Cup Finals or something, but for him, he’s dominating niches. He’s dominating pop culture with The Ringer and even with his podcast, basketball and football. But he started off as Boston Sports Guy.
Joe Rogan started off as the UFC guy, right? That was his niche. Now we know who he is and now we can kind of go from there and he becomes this uber celebrity.
So many people want to start where those guys are now. “Oh, Joe Rogan interviews people and does three hour things and does psychedelics.” Those guys started by dominating a niche first, and then they and then they grew their brand over time. If we’re talking about a ten story building and those guys around the penthouse floor, you can’t start on the sixth floor. You just start on the first or second floor.
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.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
