Hello, my name is Christopher Phin. I'm the creative content lead for Message Heard, and today I'm gonna give you a tip about naming your show. Message Heard is a podcast production house based in London, and we make a whole bunch of shows for branded clients. We do co-productions, we make our own editorial shows, but my role within the company is as creative content lead.
And what that mostly means is that the majority of my time is spent working on the branded side for the shows that we make for a really wide variety of different clients, whether those are B two C, B two B, or internal shows. And my job really is to. Do the most work I can at the start of that process so that we can help the companies we work with shape the stories they want to tell, figure out the best formats for the stories they want to tell and get that message heard.
And the point there is really, I mean, you know, this is a bit inside baseball, but. Within the company. The way I state my job is I wanna get the client as excited about the podcast project as I am about the ideas I've had for how they can tell those stories. And then I wanna turn around and make our team of producers internally within message heard as excited about that way of telling the story as well. Doesn't matter if it's the most exciting client or the least exciting client.
I want us to be excited about the way we can tell the stories in our engaging, exciting, and ultimately effective way. Like most people, I started off in podcasting as a listener and in fact, I started off as a radio listener. I would be working late as a waiter, as a student. I'd come home and stick the radio on. It'd be either Radio four or the World Service, or weirdly for me talk sport, which is odd because I like neither sport nor right wing provocateur or commentators.
Um, but something about it really worked for me at that time. But, so I started listening to radio and then gradually did that really, uh, like. Many people do this. That slide into podcasting of consuming some of the radio shows, especially from Radio four for me, that I would enjoy as podcasts, as on-demand listening. And from there I got the itch. And at one point, when I was particularly creatively unfulfilled in a job, I started my own little podcast and it was just me.
Tasting different whiskeys, and talking in the microphone about my experience of them and the sort of history of whiskey. That podcast is still ex instant, but it's been many years since it was updated. But And that kind of festered for a while until I was working at publisher here in Scotland and there were some internal changes, which meant that I was making my own role redundant, which is a fun trick to pull off if you can do it. And at that time, had some conversations with the chief exec.
I. Did a few different roles, but the one thing that came out of those conversations really was starting the podcasting channel at that publishing house in Scotland and ultimately developing a slate of a dozen, 15 more shows across lots of different verticals within the company. If you ask a lot of people what they love about podcasting, they'll point to the fact that it's very accessible, and that's true.
They'll point to the fact that it can elevate underrepresented or marginalized voices, and that's true, and those are things I love about it as well. But for me, there's one particular thing that podcasting is brilliant at and that is turning dull activities. Great. So if it's something like your commute, and not to be too dramatic, but your commute is basically time stolen from you by capitalism, it's time that you don't have under your control that.
a societal machinery has taken away from you. as podcasters, we are in an astonishingly powerful and privileged and honored position such that we can be the reason that when you are leaving your house, Over morning, your thought isn't necessarily, oh God, I've got to spend 40 minutes crushed into somebody's armpit on the tube. It is, thank God, finally, 40 minutes of me time that I can catch up with that show that I love.
I can sit virtually next to the table where these people are having a conversation. I can walk sneakily. Virtually alongside these people as they talk. It's time for me. I am reclaiming that time and that intimacy of connection, that authenticity of voice, that ability to be connected with people in time that otherwise would be ripped from you. That is intensely powerful.
Every single day, if I go on to podcasting subreddits, there are dozens and dozens of people posting the variants to the question. Can you help me think up a name for my podcast? And very often, when. Elucidate on the, you know, the format of the show. It will be what one might kindly refer to as quite a generic concept. You know, And what they want is a, a name to go on top of that. And very often they're quite hung up on uniqueness, which is hard to do.
Podcasting, millions and millions of podcasts out there. But actually my contention is that
if you find it hard to think of a name for your podcast, then your podcast isn't good. Yet. If you up with a podcast and then just cast about for a good name then you probably don't have a particularly well conceived show. The solution therefore, isn't necessarily just trying to come up with a bunch more names. It is to rework your format and the mission of the show until the name is obvious.
In other words, the name for your podcast should be a natural and inevitable consequence of its format and its mission. However, you can work backwards. So if you've got a fairly generic idea for a show and you cast about for some ideas and like a hilarious and neat pun occurs to you, that is. Too good to leave on the table. What you actually then have to do is go, well, what format points could I put in place? How can I adjust the mission of this show?
Maybe it was something snarky that you come up with, but your show wasn't snarky. Do you wanna pivot it to be a snarky show? Maybe it's a show where you are elevating user generated content, you're bringing voices in from externally, and that's reified the name. What can you do with that? How can you ensure that the name isn't just a coat of paint that's.
it's licked over the thing that you've made, but is actually an inevitable and and fundamental part of the entire raise on debt for that podcast. You can find [email protected]. That's C H R I ss P H I n.com, and you can see all of my links in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Podcasting People.