From concept to execution, a podcast produced by Pacific Content usually takes four months to launch.
The pandemic has changed that.
“If we’re making pivots in our business right now, it’s around ‘how do we rethink all of our production and strategy initiatives to be able to get somebody in market in four or five weeks instead of four or five months?” said Pacific Content co-founder Steve Pratt.
The Vancouver-based company, which was acquired by Rogers Media Inc. in May 2019, specializes in developing podcasts for other firms.
The business model means it’s not dependent on dollars from advertisers, but on marketing budgets from companies that commission Pacific Content for podcasts.
And companies that spent the last half of March in paralysis are now looking for new marketing opportunities, shifting their budgets from live events or video productions to audio content that Pratt’s company can produce remotely.
“Everybody wants to get to market as fast as humanly possible,” he said, adding demand for audio content is seeing spikes in certain categories as the public abides by health officials’ calls for people to stay at home.
Meanwhile, views for video content offered by Victoria’s SendtoNews Video Inc. are up 50% during the last two weeks of March compared with a month earlier, according to CEO Matthew Watson.
The company is best known for its video distribution platform for sports highlights that are showcased within online stories for publications such as the Los Angeles Times or The Chicago Tribune.
Last August SendtoNews expanded beyond sports and into finance, health, news, lifestyle and weather videos.
It also launched a video player for 200 publishers in early March for dedicated COVID-19 coverage, which Watson said garnered 15 million views per day in the first week.
With live sports now on hiatus, SendtoNews is now featuring sports highlights from past glories such as the top moments from the New York Yankees’ 2019 season.
Watson said the changes have helped the company weather the storm during this uncertain period.
“The challenge we face isn’t video inventory. The challenge we face is just the pullback from advertisers. While we see some aspects of the economy are thriving … we also see that there are huge sectors that advertise with us, such as travel and some other ones, that have pulled back.”
As a result, the rate SendtoNews charges advertisers per impression has dropped since the pandemic.
Pratt, meanwhile, believes the pandemic will change the way content is consumed.
“This is a massive disruption of people’s habits and routines and in some ways there’s an opportunity to build new routines while people are working from home,” he said, adding that everything from the use of smart speakers to listening to podcasts directly off desktop computers rather than mobile devices could shift.
Furthermore, many of those habits will likely stick around after the pandemic subsides.
“We have just had the world’s fastest cultural shift in history where half the planet has just learned how to work from home in a week,” he said.
“A lot of people are not want to go back to the office.”
