The Voice In My HED

Hosted by Neil Hedley

Episodes

Language

EN-US

About the show

Advertising, copywriting, branding and marketing - it's all fair game with the Creative Services Director from KNOPP Studios, Neil Hedley. Every week, Neil takes forty years of experience as an award-winning writer, producer and voice artist and offers takes and tips that ensure you'll learn something new that will help you move your business forward, or at least get you thinking about things in a new way.

Listen to episodes

45 recent

9 min

How to Beat Spotify's "Skip" Button

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.

9 min

How the Gurus Killed My Show

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

8 min

How to Apply Preparation H

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.

5 min

One Coin, One Cone

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.

11 min

The Keys to a Great Interview - Part One

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.

6 min

Forking Genius

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

10 min

What Anyone Who Uses a Microphone Can Learn from Van Halen

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.

10 min

What Broadcasters & Podcasters Can Learn from Barbra Streisand

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

5 min

Hey Podcaster! Show Me Your Deck!

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.

14 min

They Lied To Us

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.