So just how big is the podcast market today? If you want to understand the podcast market today, we have to understand it through the lens of people. There is no more authentic medium. There is no better way to build authority and what better way for you, your brand and your brand leaders to grow an audience of people that care about the conversations that matter to them? There are 2 million podcasts in the world today. That's the number of websites there were back in 1998. The latest statistics show that we now have 1.7. Billion websites. Purely from back of envelope estimates, there are 1 million podcast hosts in the world and those podcasts hosts have spoken to 50 million people. Let's think about podcasting from the perspective of the people who listen to podcasts. If you look at the data there are 1 billion people listening to podcasts every week. The COVID 19 pandemic has done a lot to put podcasts on the agenda both for us as listeners, but also as a valid option now for businesses. Consider that a lot of what we used to do in the world of traditional corporate communications from press releases analyst lunches to breakfast briefings to business events are no longer effective options. According to the latest Edelman PR trust report, people want CEOs to speak out. What are their views on diversity? What are their views on climate change? In many ways, these very personal conversations define our experience of brands today. The question has always been for corporate leaders and communications heads. How do you do that? Both in an authentic manner and a scale. Because the most valuable assets in any organization, i.e the people, the leaders don't scale by their very nature. We all know the power of an informal coffee meeting. That's where deals are done. However, you can't scale that kind of intimacy and by contrast the press release or the social media tweet don't offer the bandwidth, the engagement or the level of scale that we need as brands to reach the people that matter most. That's why podcasts offered the rare combination of both authenticity and scale. I encourage my clients to think of their podcast as like a coffee conversation at scale. So back to those 2 million podcast, should your brand also have a podcast? Consider your branded podcast as a communication interface for the leaders of your organization. Much in the same way that the websites in the early days provided a more effective communication interface for consumers and the brand. It was far more efficient to go to the website, order a product, find the store opening hours or send an email. Then phoning up the switchboard or reading news articles to find out more about the company or going to the store to find out it was shut. Your branded podcast too, provides a better way for your partners, your network and your clients to understand more about the people behind the brand. What do they care about? What are their views on different subjects and what is their journey within the organization? These conversations, both humanize and define brands today. Because people follow people, not brands.