Sonic taste is subjective. As you age your music stays in your early 20’s. Way younger if you have kids. With a push for less screen time, audio ads will be a focus for marketers and original audio storytellers of all styles. Parents will program kids listening habits, and younger audiences aren’t listening as much but listen via social video. Audio will continue to grow with our habits - exercise, chores, daily routine, in the car… and as the ability to listen gets better there’s no surprise it’s the fastest growing media.
Audio Predictions for 2023
Tech dominates conversations around how easy it is now to produce video and audio work. Editing tools like Descript will become more important in the production process, especially when it comes to fixing bad audio. There will be resistance to the change because crafts people don’t want to use new tech because the tools are designed to be quick and easy to use from templates - this will help speed up the process and improve the quality of what is delivered - if you know how to make the work sing creatively and your sound has personality.
Having AI help to script or deliver audio content will mean we’re quickly hearing lots of the same old stuff - so standing out will be a better approach for brands to reach their audience.
Audio strategy will become part of comms / marketing / brand / UX strategy. It’s easier to communicate to people who work on their feet, in their car or who aren’t near a computer via audio. QR codes will link to audio as part of the norm.
In podcasting -- we’ll hear more brand theme songs, jingles, audio logos. Radio ads will follow and while I don’t predict we will hear many ads that are short soap operas or audio sketches we can live in hope.
The State of Audio in 2023
Making audio or a podcast is part of a brand’s suite of content, but styles have stagnated. Shows that speak to a specific audience enjoy the most success. More brands will promote their podcasts in media, and create content off the back of it - easier to do with tech changes. Social media teams are managing podcast’s socials to talk to the community.
Listeners are playing with audio channels / podcasts / audio apps in conjunction with insta / LinkedIn /Podcast YouTube but it’s the hands and eyes free no screen connection that will contiue to excite the industry.
We’re in a big audio ad growth phase - “Wherever you get your podcasts”. Programmatic ad creative needs to evolve and with a creative attitude global companies should be speaking in local voices if not already.
Internal comms can thrive in audio but we’ve seen a lack of pick up because projects take too long, rather than making more episodes shorter in bulk blocks of content production.
Top Audio Trends for 2023
Audio podcast producers are in short supply and they’re expected to know everything when it comes to podcast production - something that video content producers aren’t expected to know. There are plenty of people producing in house podcasts who aren’t seeing much value - trend in 2023 will be to make podcasts work better for the business, but expect to seek external help to deliver a podcast that links to a strategy.
Audio Assistants don’t have the noise that they did a few years ago, but using voice in search feels to me something that should be trending up, not down.
Where tech trends are exploding is in AI voices and production - especially now that Descript has a voice creation option that can help to edit audio mistakes made by people - so we don’t need to get them back into the studio if they flubbed an important line.
As people return to the city, brands and councils will think in sound more. For example: at the traffic lights, we could fix the audio instructions so there are 3 sounds at a traffic crossing - one for north / south, one for east / west and one for pedestrians? Maybe a warning sound for tram/EV approaching fed to people wearing headphones?
We’re seeing lots of companies who tried podcasts once and it didn’t work or they made something very expensive and it didn’t work. We’re seeing podcasts fail to generate huge audiences because there’s no promotion, or the audience isn’t interested or the returns on investment have unrealistic goals. We’d like to see a trend of giving it patience and thinking long term.
Hopefully we’ll hear plenty of great stories in podcasting and audio in 2023 for all.