Spotify is testing a new way for podcast listeners to skip past ads, and some prominent voices in podcasting are already predicting disaster.

Neil thinks they may be worrying about the wrong problem.

This episode goes back nearly 30 years to Howard Stern, detours through the Super Bowl, Guns N’ Roses, Bud Light, Rick Moranis and some of the most successful radio commercials ever made — all in search of a lesson podcasters might want to remember before declaring war on the “Skip” button.

What’s the difference between a guru and a coach?

A few years ago, I learned the answer the hard way.

I had a successful podcast I loved making. Then I took a piece of advice that sounded completely reasonable — especially coming from someone who supposedly knew better.

Five episodes later, the show was dead.

This episode is about what happened, why I listened, and the lesson I took from it about gurus, coaches, “best practices,” and advice that sounds universal until you actually apply it to a real human being.

Links:

The Snooze Button

20 Ways to Make Your Next Show Better

Show Coaching with Neil Hedley

Most producers are trained to fix the mistake, cut the pause, redo the line, and polish away anything that sounds imperfect. Sometimes that’s exactly how you destroy the best part.

In this week's episode, Neil uses a legendary Gary Owens Preparation H spot, a live radiothon moment, and a couple of famous records to make the case for knowing when to leave the rough edge alone.

Not every imperfection is a mistake. Sometimes it’s the thing people remember.

McDonald's has a summer promotion built around a beautifully simple idea: one coin, one cone.

It's cheap. It's memorable. And it contains the seeds of something much bigger.

The problem? They stopped one step too soon.

In Episode 42 of The Voice In My HED, Neil looks at the missed opportunity hiding inside a billion-dollar-company's promotion - and the simple idea that some random guy on an island thought of, that McDonald's apparently didn't.

After 10,000 - 12,000 interviews over the course of a career, I'll share with you one of the most important things I learned about how to immediately improve the quality of your interviews.

Everybody is "niching down", and it's a sound strategy for everything from your podcast to your audio repair shop.

Nope, we're not going to teach you how to do that twirly thing with the mic on the end of the cord. And we're not going to make you a fretboard wizard. But Van Halen did leave a teachable moment in their decades of success that many of us failed to pick up on.

There's a valuable lesson to be learned in some Hollywood drama. Let's spend a few minutes chewing the fat on this one.

I unwittingly participated in a little experiment today, and I felt I had no choice but to share it with you and get a couple of things off my chest.

They knew what they were doing all along. We fell for it. And now, it might be too late to stop it. Even now, they tell us that “the AI revolution is coming”. No, the AI revolution started a long, long time ago. And like a science fiction movie where the bad guys have infiltrated and permeated every aspect of our lives until there’s no way to fully remove them from the system, we’re trapped. 

Humans love bonuses. We love to feel special. So what's the biscotti in the project you're working on right now?

It's human nature to give credit where no credit is due. (Accidentally, of course.) Don't let the gorilla in the room steal your thunder.

Doing things on purpose is the difference between the pros and the cons. (And by "pros and cons" I don't mean "positives and negatives".)

But keeping that in mind, you have to choose which hills to die on.

We might be seeing a momentum shift in the podcast industry. But as yet more evidence that podcasting isn't as unique as the gurus would have you believe, we've been here a hundred times before.

It's been four months since the last episode of this show.

Certainly it has podfaded and will never recover, right?

Not everything has to be a passion project. But going through the motions is a conscious choice. A quick story might help you get back on track.

A/B Testing isn't new. It wasn't invented by the tech community. And that might be why many people are just plain using it wrong.

Advertising fails, as far as I'm concerned, for one reason more than any other. Maybe this perspective shift can change your results.

Content creation is supposed to be fun... isn't it?