Podcast sponsorships and the business of audio on the Web

Marketing Edge Podcast special guest Scott Bourne: Scott is speaking at the Portable Media Expo later this month on the topic of Selling Podcast Sponsorships. We’ll also preview his remarks at this popular conference being held Sept. 29 and 30 in Ontario, California.

There are early adopters and there are visionaries. Provident Partners is an early adopter of podcasting. We were one of the first marketing firms in the country to see the medium as a business tactic and had early success with the new medium.

Then there are those who are visionaries. Those are people that work with a blank canvas. They are the ones who paint the picture for the early adopters to enjoy. The early adopters see a picture and imagine what can be done in that scene. How many different pictures are within a picture? The early adopters ask, "What if we took this…?"

The visionaries have a blank canvas and ask, "Why can’t we do this…?" Today’s Marketing Edge guest is a visionary by anyone’s measure. He is Scott Bourne. In 1995 he founded NetRadio. Bourne had executed the radical idea of playing music on the Internet, all kinds of music, especially that being ignored by the three-minute-and-done commercial radio world.

This podcast, hosted by Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners, examines:

1) The possibilities of using podcasting and podcast sponsorships in the marketing mix
2) How to best add podcasting to an integrated advertising budget with a hell of a lot better metrics than some other traditional advertising
3) How to view the new medium of podcasting in relation to other media so that companies can best take advantage of this new social way of communicating

Bourne is the host of several podcasts, the ones I recommend as absolutely must haves are Podcasting Tricks. They are really not tricks -- just really smart stuff to do to make you and your clients look good. And for the Mac people (I personally suffer from Apple envy) there's ilife zone. You all understand that being addicted to Windows is a lot like smoking. You’ll find me outside government buildings in 10-degree weather, hopelessly attached to my PC because it’s a habit. Enough joking.

Bourne is frequently on the O’Reilly Network and is among the friends of the This Week in Technology and Friends Network with Leo Laporte.