Mastering Audio Branding for Your Podcast with Jodi Krangle

Do you ever wonder why certain podcasts stick in your head long after the episode ends? It isn't just the content, it's the audio branding. Many podcasters struggle with inconsistent sound quality or generic intro music that fails to build a lasting connection. If your show's audio identity is missing, your audience might be engaging with your content but failing to remember your brand. In this episode of Podcasting Unlocked, we sit down with voiceover expert Jodi Krangle to discuss why audio branding is the secret weapon for podcast growth, how to use AI in podcasting without losing your human touch, and the essential voice health tips every host needs to stay in the game for the long haul. This week, episode 278 of Podcasting Unlocked is about mastering audio branding for your podcast! 

Jodi Krangle has been a voice actor since 2007 and has worked with clients from major brands all over the world, including Dell, Lindt & Kraft. She is also a singer and has released her own album of jazz, blues, and traditional tunes (jodikranglemusic.com). Through her career, she has learned a lot about sound and how it influences people. Jodi hosts the podcast called Audio Branding: The Hidden Gem of Marketing.

In this episode of Podcasting Unlocked, Jodi Krangle is sharing the importance of establishing a strong audio brand for your podcast and actionable steps you can take right now to set the tone and expectations for your listeners early on. 

Jodi and I also chat about the following: 

• Build a Consistent Sonic Identity: Discover why your intro music, transition sounds, and even your speaking tone form a sonic logo that helps your audience recognize your brand instantly across all platforms.
• Prioritize Voice Health: Learn actionable strategies to protect your most valuable asset—your voice. Jodi shares why hydration, proper rest, and vocal warm-ups are non-negotiable for long-term podcasting success.
• Balance AI with Human Nuance: Explore the productive ways to use AI in podcasting for efficiency, while understanding the limitations of automated voices that lack the emotional resonance your audience craves.
• Leverage the Psychology of Sound: Understand how music and sound frequency influence memory and emotional response, allowing you to guide your listener's journey through every episode.

Be sure to tune in to all the episodes to receive tons of practical tips on turning your podcast listeners into leads and to hear even more about the points outlined above. 

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the episode to post in your stories and tag me! And don’t forget to follow, rate and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!

Learn more about Podcasting Unlocked at https://galatimedia.com/podcasting-unlocked/ 

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Transcript

Alesia Galati: 0:00

The audio branding for your podcast is probably one of the most important parts of your show. Today, we're going to be talking with Jodi krangell all about how she has her podcast audio branding, as well as strategies you can use to make sure that you're taking care of your voice as a podcaster, using AI in a really productive and effective way, and also the different ways that you can integrate audio branding to make sure that you do it so that your audience doesn't do it for you. All right, let's go ahead and welcome Jody to the podcast. Welcome to podcasting unlocked the show for purpose driven podcasters. I'm Alesia Galati, founder of Galati media, and I'm here to share actionable strategies to help you amplify your message and grow your audience. Hello, Jody. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. We're going to have a very fun conversation today, but if you could start with telling everyone who you are, what you do, and a bit about your podcast,

Jodi Krangle: 1:01

sure, well, I am very excited to be here too. So thank you so much for inviting me. I am Jody Kringle. I have been a voice actor since 2007 full time, and mostly in the commercial, corporate narration space. And because of what I do, I was noticing that voiceover was kind of an afterthought in a lot of instances, and it seemed to me like people were not giving sound its due. They were focused on the visuals, and that was all that mattered, and then they were tacking on the sound at the end, which included me. So I decided in November of 2019 that I was going to start a podcast to help people understand how sound influences us, both in our buying decisions, because it totally does, and in our daily lives, because it totally does. And it's called Audio branding. We're at over 300 episodes, and I think we're this is the sixth year, so, yeah, going strong.

Alesia Galati: 2:01

Wow, congratulations. Thank you. I'm so curious. What does that look like to be able to use your voice in that way as a full time job like, I think a lot of the times we see that as like, oh, side hustle stuff. And so what does I guess that business model look like for you. For anyone who's like, I have questions too,

Jodi Krangle: 2:24

it is a business. I will say it is a business. This is not you doing a side gig, usually, because it costs money to get into it. The simple fact of it is that you're investing in your education, in your materials, in the equipment, in your website, in your coaching, all of these things are needed before you can actually reliably hang up a shingle. Really, you got to know what you're doing, and especially now, because if you don't know what you're doing and you just have a nice voice, you can be replaced by AI. They don't need you. They can pay $5 for an AI, so you better be good at what you do, is all I'm saying. You don't want to just start with nothing and then assume it'll all come you need some training. And that was always the case, but it's more the case now than it ever has been. What has

Alesia Galati: 3:18

that shift been like with AI and for context, my kiddos are homeschooled, and they recently replaced one of the lessons with an AI guy, and it is so clear that it is an AI guy. First of all, his lower body doesn't move at all, just his head. So it looks very, very strange. Yes, and

Jodi Krangle: 3:40

create a blink properly. It's weird,

Alesia Galati: 3:43

very weird. Yeah, yeah. The other thing is, it's his English class, like language arts class, so the cadence is so important, the inflections in understanding what they're trying to portray. I sent them a very strongly worded email, because I was like, this is we're learning about the whatever the like the A, B, A, B, of poems, and you're having this AI bot read a poem, not with inflections, not with any type of cadence that makes sense for a human being to even follow like, I don't know if this just like the way my brain works, because pretty sure I'm somewhere on some spectrum, but

Jodi Krangle: 4:29

I think all of us have varying degrees, honestly,

Alesia Galati: 4:34

yeah, and so I don't know what it was, but I could not understand what He was trying to say. I heard the words, but it didn't compute as actual information to my brain. And I was like, because

Jodi Krangle: 4:49

that AI doesn't know what it's saying, that AI is a bunch of ones and zeros imitating what it thinks the next word will be based. On probability, it's not an actual person. It's not someone actually speaking. And the problem with some of these, AIS, a lot of them, is that they don't pronounce place names properly. They don't pronounce given names properly. They don't pronounce a whole bunch of things properly, and then you're teaching kids how to pronounce stuff like I really it's unfortunate that they're using it for educational purposes. When you're talking about things like paperwork that needs to be done in a corporate setting, that people just need to listen to, and they need to know that you listened. And that's really it. Maybe you can get away with that kind of stuff. But when it comes to learning, we don't learn as well from Ai. We just don't it doesn't land because there's no lived experience. It's hollow. It doesn't sound like a person. And I'm not saying AI will always be like this, because it's getting better every minute of every day, of every week of every month. It's getting better, but it's still just ones and zeros and probability, and there's no lived experience behind that. There's no subtleties. You can't have more than one emotion in a word, right? We as human beings can imbue a word with so many meanings just one word, like I'm doing right now, and an AI can't do that, and that's why I don't believe my job will ever be taken, because until an AI can figure out those subtleties, there's no point in replacing me. You can fiddle with it until you're bored out of your skull four hours from now, but it's not going to be able to give you what you want to so

Alesia Galati: 6:45

I'm finding people are using them in interesting ways. I've personally used AI for generating show notes or YouTube descriptions, things like that, right? Taking the definitely help doing that. There was one time where I pronounced a word wrong throughout an entire episode, and afterwards, I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, I'm gonna sound so stupid. And so instead of re recording the and it was me with a guest, right? So if it was just me, I could figure it out, and I would just redo the episode. But it's me with a guest. I don't want to waste the other person's time. And so I and it was something simple. What I said was Latin countries. When I met, was Latina countries. So like Hispanic countries, Latin X countries. And I just said Latin throughout the whole episode. And I was like, That is a misrepresentation of what I'm trying to say, and also it can take away from the experience of the episode. So I had it go back through and add Latin x with my voice, right? So I taught it, here's my voice. We're only changing this word or regenerating this word. It does look a little funky on the video, because I'm saying less than I'm actually saying, but that was the only time I had ever used it. And even then, it still felt slightly off, like even though it was my voice and I changed it with my voice, it was still off. And I saw someone recently talk about how they wanted to use Google LM to create an interview where the person is interviewing the podcaster, and I was like, Do you not have friends like, I just don't understand why you would want an AI bot to interview you about your expertise when a friend can pull so much more emotion, yeah, and more experience and ooh, what about into the conversation. So anyway, how are you using it as someone who is like, okay, AI is here. But also, voice is important.

Jodi Krangle: 9:36

I use it for productivity, not creativity. So I use it to make myself more productive. So for my podcast, for instance, I'll use it to help me do some research on my upcoming guest, which saves me a lot of time. I do have to check it. Obviously, it saves a lot of search time on my behalf, and I don't have extra hours in the day to do set that sometimes. So it helps a lot with that. It helps with making highlight reels for the video, it helps with coming up with interesting, hooky titles and things like descriptions that may or may not be read by a human. To be honest, there are some things that I think it's really useful for, and productivity on a podcast is one of those things, definitely, as far as creativity is concerned, I just, I don't want us to be replaced by the robots. I have seen some really interesting uses for it. If you're going to get really creative with it, have two dogs talking on a podcast? Have you seen those, the videos where it's like dogs talking? Talking to each other, or a dog and a baby talking to each other. I don't know what the adults are doing. Like, why do they feed you something different from me? Or, like, interesting discussions about that, like, really wonky things that maybe a baby and a dog might discuss, right? But it's like a video of an actual dog and an actual baby, like their AI constructs, but in that case, it's more about the writing and how creative the writing is, and the AI likely did not write it. It was just created to have a video representation, right? And someone wrote that script. And I think that's a really fun way to be creative with that kind of thing, because it's creative, but in a sense, different from what you might expect. I think those are really clever. Should it write your resume? No, should it write your novel or your business book? No, no, it should not. You can

Alesia Galati: 11:43

evaluate your resume, yeah, how you can improve it for maybe a particular job that you're looking for, or what can help you missing Exactly?

Jodi Krangle: 11:52

Yeah. What else could I mention? It can check your grammar, it can check your spelling, it can make it sound maybe a little better. But even when it does that, it changes the tone of you. So like, why have it write a book when it's not going to sound like you? Or how much do you have to train that thing to be able to make the probable next word sound like you? Yeah, because that's really what it is. It's all about probability. It's not about it actually thinking it can just figure out the probability way faster than we can. That's all. That's what it's doing.

Alesia Galati: 12:31

Yeah, and that tone is so important I even think about it. I was asked working on a blog post the other day. It was like a roundup of workplace romances for my we read smut account, and I was like, Hey, give me some SEO friendly titles that can work for this. And so that's through them. And I'm like, because open door had open door in there somewhere, and it's got workplace and I was like, Ooh, open door policy. And then a colon, and then, like, 20 workplace romances, right? Kind of that spin open door policy. And I was like, This is what I'm going with. And they were like, Oh, that is fun. And I'm like, yeah, so weird,

Jodi Krangle: 13:11

but it's a great place to start, and it helps you not have to look at a blank page. So in a sense, I mean, it's helpful. I'm not saying it is not useful ever, or that you should get rid of AI, that it's the bane of our existence now, but I just, I think when we start relying on it too much, it just, it's taking over. Do I want every second search on my browser to be an AI description? No. Do I want the word processor I'm using to come out with five suggestions every time I type a sentence, no, it's so super annoying, how integrated it is in some of the things that we've been using every day. Now I'm a Gen Xer, so maybe it's just me. It could be. I remember when there wasn't an internet I remember when there wasn't word processors. For me, maybe that's a little bit more of a leap, but I find it super annoying. I don't want it to interject, unless I ask it to Yeah.

Alesia Galati: 14:14

I think even my kids asked me a question the other day about we were watching the Irwins, like their show, and my son was like, what was the kind of Stingray that had killed Steve Irwin. And I was like, so I Google it, and an AI overview came up. And I'm like, I it literally could have just grabbed an article. I don't necessarily need a full AI overview of this is the kind, and this is why it was a freak accident. And here is the size of these. I don't need that much information. I just needed a simple answer. But I think too to the productivity idea. I think sometimes it can even make us less productive because we are continuously refeeding it or retraining it. Or how long does it actually take us to train it, to be in our tone, to use our own like voice for things? Exactly that it's like, you have to be really strategic. I recommend creating bots, gems, whatever you're using to make them sound more like you, because your audience is going to know, and especially if you're creating an ad for your podcast or an ad for your products, and you're using your voice for it, having AI create it. You want to read that back quite a few times to see. Is this even something I would say like this? And I think that's so important, but yeah, I agree. We can use it for productivity, but not creativity. Let's see our brains

Jodi Krangle: 15:40

don't get rid of copywriters either, especially when it comes to advertising, because. These are people who have the psychology, who know what is going to work. And I just it's such a disservice to people to get rid of human creativity when it comes to writing, yeah, you know, for those of us who just are touching the edges of that world, maybe it's okay. But when it comes to writing advertising and marketing and branding stuff, you don't want to play around with that stuff. You just don't, because you're representing a company brand. Do you want that brand to sound cheap? Do you want it to sound like it's generic, like it sounds like everybody? No, it needs to have its own flavor, its own feeling, its own personality, and a human writer is going to do that?

Alesia Galati: 16:32

Yeah, that's so incredibly important. So as someone who is using their voice constantly, what are some strategies that you're using? I'm asking this because I lost my voice twice last year, I had pneumonia one and then I had bronchitis and the other one. Oh, it was a rusty year for sickness last year, but lost my voice for about a few weeks for the one and then over a month for the other. Thankfully, I had been very like I could only whisper, and even then that makes that ruins your voice more if you're

Jodi Krangle: 17:07

trying to win, whisperings even harder.

Alesia Galati: 17:09

So bad. Yeah, like I could not talk, which doesn't help when you have an 11 year old and an eight year old kid either. No, probably not great between that and then the podcast. But thankfully, I had enough episodes recorded already, pre done that I could make it work. We could redo replays, right? There's so many different things I could do. But how do you keep your voice ready to go, especially doing this full time, and if maybe one or two tips that you find are really helpful for people who are like, actually, I need my voice is feeling a little dry today. What do I need to do?

Jodi Krangle: 17:48

Yeah, you definitely need to stay hydrated. And when I say that, you need to have had water at least 20 minutes before you're going to be doing whatever you're going to be doing, it needs time to be absorbed and to start working to actually hydrate things. So, yeah, just being hydrated is a really good thing. I sing sometimes. Singing can warm you up really well, and you don't have to be a good singer. No one's hearing you. It doesn't matter. And I definitely am one of those people who thinks that everyone should be able to do whatever they want musically. If you want to sing, I don't care if you're good, bad, indifferent, whatever, like anyone can do. It is what I'm saying, and there should be no gatekeepers on that. Maybe I'm not buying their album, but I don't think that should stop anyone from singing. But yeah, so singing is a good warm up. Some tongue twisters can be a good warm up as well sometimes. And there are tons of those you can find all over the web. That's a good question for

Alesia Galati: 19:57

exactly. Give me some

Jodi Krangle: 19:58

time, make me a list of tongue twisters for vocal exercises. Yeah, that'll work perfect.

Alesia Galati: 20:04

We'll have a few in the show notes for people, for people to grab. That is interesting. I like the idea of singing. My one kiddo, we'll put music on. He'll just start singing, singing along with it. No shame. Does not care. Doesn't have a particularly good voice. But who cares, right? Just have fun with it. Is there a certain song that you are like, this is my kind of go to song, or is it just depends on the mood.

Jodi Krangle: 20:30

It depends on the mood, but I love old torch songs, like jazz torch songs like, that's my go to so there's a song by Sarah Vaughn called Good night. My love that I love to sing, and is actually the last song on my album. So I have an album that has 14 Songs that like I put out in 2015 before they were releasing singles, and never anything else. It's on Spotify or whatever, if you want to look it up. I just love singing that song, just because it has some long, drawn out notes that are you have to hold feel good with before you let them go, kind of deal. And that helps, that helps, but it's different for everybody, I'm sure. And honestly, as far as warm ups are concerned, I don't do all that many. That's the thing about me. Doing shorter form stuff. We had this discussion before we started. So I don't do audio books. I don't do long form narration, like e learning and stuff like that. So when I'm going to do something, it usually lasts five minutes or less. So for me, while warm up is important, it's not super important if I was going to be in the studio for four. Hours that would be different. Yeah, nice.

Alesia Galati: 21:51

So like, for me, if I'm reading something out loud, I yawn every time it is, without fail, so ridiculous every time, my husband's like, Hey, can you read the last two pages of this our bedtime book out loud? And I'm like, Oh, I already know I'm gonna be yawning and stopping and why I work so hard.

Jodi Krangle: 22:13

Yawning opens your vocals. It actually is a good thing for your breathing, so use it.

Alesia Galati: 22:21

Just cut that part out.

Unknown: 22:23

Why not?

Alesia Galati: 22:25

Nice? Okay? And if people are like, Okay, I might want some support around having someone record this for me, or record my ad for me, for my business, or maybe they have this is the podcast, is their side hustle, and they know that their business needs support. What kinds of promotional stuff do you do with your voice acting? Just so people know

Jodi Krangle: 22:46

what I do personally is only the voiceover, so I don't do any production or anything like that. I'll read someone's script and then give them two or three takes of it. I do a lot of intros and outros for podcasts, and I have a set price for that kind of thing. So it's usually pretty similar, and then they can just use it for as long as they want to on the podcast. As far as ads are concerned, it depends on a lot of things, but usually it's it depends on the size of the audience for the podcast, right? It really depends on how many people are going to hear it, and that's how most VoiceOver is priced, based on licensing for a certain amount of time. When it comes to ADS, it's tricky, so best to talk to a professional and see what your needs are and what they might need for their podcast. But when it comes to promoting businesses on your own podcast, often the host read stuff gets paid to, paid attention to, a lot more than a professionally produced commercial. So I would almost suggest, if you're going to have a sponsor or something, and you want that sponsor's stuff to be paid attention to, it should be you that reads the ad, not me.

Alesia Galati: 24:00

Yeah, I definitely agree. We're seeing a lot of a shift from audio podcasts to video podcasts with Spotify now integrating video that was in the last three years or so, YouTube having video podcasts the last two years now, Apple, which has always been able to have a video podcast, is now trying to push for video podcasts. Yeah, they've only had

Jodi Krangle: 24:26

it in certain geographical areas, I think so. Yeah, if you were outside the US, you were out of luck.

Alesia Galati: 24:33

I've never even tried. I'm not an Apple user.

Jodi Krangle: 24:36

I refuse. I am not either. And everything in my house is Android and PC, yeah, which in my line of work is unusual, strangely, right? Because most voice actors I know are all Mac people, so no, I've had a computer since DOS, so I know the inner workings of a PC, and I prefer to be able to look under the hood if I need to. I'm a nerd that way. Yeah, so I don't want a Mac. I don't want something that sits on my desk that I can't do anything with. I want to know what the drivers are doing. I want to know when I need an update. I want to know how things are working together.

Alesia Galati: 25:14

Yes, 100% agree so with this big shift to push towards video, we're still seeing some podcasts being very audio focused. Of course, there are things that we can do on the audio side that can make our video even better. But what are some ways that we can use sound to influence our audience, to maybe help them with most of the shows, being like of the people who listen to this podcast, being business owners, they're either wanting their audience to take action, buy their thing, maybe make a positive impact in their own lives, right? You're trying to influence your audience in some way. For my hobby podcast, it's read this book or check out this author, right? You're always trying to accomplish something with this show. But what are some ways that we can use our sound use, maybe extra elements or even our own voices, to make an impact or influence our listeners?

Jodi Krangle: 26:11

Well, I think that a podcast can have its own audio brand, so it can have intro music that it uses all the time. The voice of the host is definitely a part of that audio brand. If you have little audio elements that announce that a different segment is coming, then that certainly helps, especially when you want people to pay attention to a sponsored message, then they know that the sponsored message is coming, and they know when it's over, and you want to keep it short, but generally, that lets them know here this is something you should pay attention to, or it gives them the. Opportunity to fast forward. You never know. But also when it comes to video, I think a lot of people, if they're video first, they forget that there's people listening only in audio. And so when you're saying, Oh, look here, I did this, you know, well, no one saw you do that when they're listening audio only. So, you know, oh, I noticed you have this great background. Here's the description of this great background. You want to describe what's happening on the video so that I'm as guilty as that of that as anyone. Sometimes you just forget. But if you remember, if you can remember, that helps people really experience what you did when you were on video. And we only started in my podcast doing video at like, the 100 and 50th episode, so now, but we're only on YouTube, and I am not sending video to Spotify or Apple. It's only audio there. And there's a reason for that, because if I decide that I want to have a sponsor or YouTube, God forbid, starts paying me at some point. Spotify and Apple don't allow you to keep those ads, or they may regulate them in some way, and I don't want to get into that, so I'm not putting my videos on Apple or Spotify. I'm keeping it only on YouTube, but it's a different audience. So if someone wants to be on YouTube and they want to see the podcast that way. They can definitely do that. It's rare that they would go back and search out the audio only version. But yeah, audio wise, I think it's very important to keep in mind that not everyone is going to

Alesia Galati: 28:20

see your video. Yeah, that's so important. We had an episode. We'll make sure we link it in the show notes, talking about folks who have disabilities. So in that case, we had a guest who was blind, and he was talking about how important it is to use descriptive visuals, how we're talking about what we're seeing, or maybe what we look like, and how, for his guests, he'll even introduce say, Hey, this is what I look like right now. How can you go ahead and tell us how you look? And it was such an exercise that was very different, I think, than anything I'd ever done. I was like, Oh, my hair is in two braided pigtails, but low on my head, I have curly brown hair with some gray I am brown skinned. I have a blue shirt, a blue sweatshirt that says I closed my book to be here. So, like, just trying to like, thank you

Jodi Krangle: 29:16

so much for making time. You're welcome

Alesia Galati: 29:20

using those descriptors. I have my background. I have a bookshelf that has a lot of romance books on them, highlighting Kennedy, Ryan, Katie Robert, ELIZABETH STEVENS, as my those are some of my favorite ones. I've got some Lego also built behind me with my Lego flowers, and I've got some Lego Star stuff and some other decorative things back there, right? So like that gives you a if you're not watching this, that gives you an idea of what the video looks like and what I look like on the video. And I found that that conversation was one so enlightening, but also is such a great reminder that when we're maybe holding something up, or oh my goodness, this is what this looks like for the people who are listening. And I can even think of when I first started listening to, or maybe not even first started listening, but when I would listen to podcasts, when I was in my corporate job, still, I'd listen through the whole day because I was working on a lot of like Data Input and Analysis and all that stuff, and I could just have the true crime podcast on in the background, telling me about murder and mayhem as I look at these spreadsheets. And one thing that I would get so frustrated about is when they would talk about something and I it felt like an inside joke, or it felt like, Oh, I'm not look I can't see it, so I'm missing out. Yeah, and sometimes I would stop listening to a podcast because I felt like I didn't get it, or, like, I wasn't, like, in the know what they were talking about.

Jodi Krangle: 30:53

There are some problems with video. Okay, when someone thinks that a YouTube only video is a podcast, that's a problem for me, yeah, because when you're taking the audio only from that video, you are doing a disservice to anyone who's listening to only the audio, because that audio sucks. So you and I are currently on Riverside, and it is recording both our audio and our video in separate files locally on our machine. So that sounds awesome, and when you get that raw audio from Riverside, you can edit that into both audio only podcasts that sounds excellent and a video podcast that sounds excellent. So that's the big problem I have with a lot of people who assume that just being on video and recording that video and releasing it as audio only is an audio podcast. It's not, it's really not. Now, you can call it whatever you want, right? But if it's honestly, if it's not RSS distributed, it's not a

Alesia Galati: 31:56

podcast, yeah, and the vocal tics are different, right? So someone who's watching a video on YouTube might not care so much about the breaths, but someone who you're in their ears, in their AirPods or whatever, and they have to hear you breathe completely different experience.

Jodi Krangle: 32:17

Then again, it depends on how the breathing is like I just had this experience myself. I was listening to a reporter on a news network, and he would say something, and then say something and Oh, my God, it was driving me crazy. I have never heard someone be that bad at breathing in my entire life. It was awful, and it was very obvious most people when they're just speaking and whatever regularly the breathing is normal, right? And breathing is normal. Not having breathing is not normal. There's a tool for this, so I don't, yeah, so I don't mind having people breathe in a podcast. It's when they're sucking in oxygen, like there's no like they're gonna die. That's the problem. So yeah, I agree that when you're seeing the visuals, it's probably a lot less in your face that they're breathing. But even when you're in an audio podcast, to me, I want to hear them breathe, otherwise it could just be an AI bot.

Alesia Galati: 33:22

Yeah, what we do, we use auphonic to run all of our video through, like the final pass, and what we do is we reduce the breath sounds by 12 decibels, right? So you

Jodi Krangle: 33:34

still like reducing a little is great.

Alesia Galati: 33:36

And it's like that mid range where it's not overly edited, it's still there a little bit. And we do the same for background noise, so that way it's not super terrible or distracting. But it might take

Jodi Krangle: 33:47

so many great tools for that now too, and so many of them are using AI, which I think is, again, another great use for AI. Why not make it have the stuff that we're listening to easier to listen to? Yes, exactly. I like that.

Alesia Galati: 34:03

So important. But I love what you said about audio branding, and I don't think that we think about our podcast in that way, right? It's just, oh, it's an extension of my brand, but the audio branding is so important. I was talking to somebody recently. She was talking about how her intro is different, and how she's trying to find that. And she doesn't mean her podcast intro, she means that pre intro. So she might sometimes she'll take clips from the episode, sometimes she'll just do like a standard introduction, or sometimes she'll do like a here's a question and here's a thought. Let's get into it. And so finding what works for her, and I love that she's taking the time to do that, and I think that having a consistent brand of set standard for you can also really help your audience. I think about my kids were listening to Nat Geo kids freaking out podcast yesterday. They have a fantastic little jingle that they do at the beginning of you've ever listened to it, it's so good. They got the fantastic jingle at the beginning, the fantastic jingle at the end. And I went to skip to the next episode, and my kids were like, no, no, go back. We gotta hear the jingle. Oh, okay, wait, let's go back. And so I think that having that set standard can almost endear you to your audience too, which, yeah, so I think audio branding and thinking about it in that way can be really important.

Jodi Krangle: 35:28

Yeah, there's something comforting about that, because less brain power is needed when we expect stuff and we get what we're expecting and it's consistent from episode to episode, then there's less brainpower needed, and we just relax into it and enjoy it. If you don't think about your audio as your company or your podcast, it's going to be made for you. You're going to have one. You just may not like it, yeah, so you may as well take control of that, is all I'm

Alesia Galati: 35:58

saying, and you can have fun with it too, which totally is so important. Like my when I was coming up with the music for the we read somewhat one, I was like, I want Bow Chicka wah wah music, like sexy bedroom music, and so, like, I had to go and search for it, and then in it, I, like, in the beginning, I say this episode is for adult audiences only. Listener discretion is advised, right? Because this is for 18 plus. Like, we're talking about stuff here. This is important, yeah, and then having that little thing at the end, that kind of about to go, wows it out like having that. And one, I think it helps me feel comfortable too, setting the tone right away that people know what they're getting into, that it's not, no, I stumbled on this podcast and Oh, my God, my kids are in the car, and I had no idea. No, you know. Right away. Here's your warning Exactly. And I think I agree with you. I think that if we don't do it, then someone else, our audience, whomever is going to do it for us. And so it's really important to do is that something that you support people with of like all right, here maybe some elements that you might need a little more toning in on, or here's some ideas. Do you offer that kind of support?

Jodi Krangle: 37:13

I do not. Okay. I am a voice actor. That's what I do. So I'm a part of that audio brand. I can certainly help people build it in that fashion, and I know people who do it. So if someone needs something like that, I can certainly point them in the direction of someone who might be able to help them out. But generally I am just like one of the elements of that audio brand. But I'll give you an example of how some of these audio brands can evolve. For instance, with my podcast, the first song that I found to use as the intro was gotten from an license, free music directory, because a lot of us start that way, right, totally valid. I found something that I really liked, and it had a really interesting hook, like a Donna duck, dunna Duck kind of thing that I really liked. And I kept with that for quite some time. And then I hired an actual musician to make me something that sort of matched that feel, and maybe had that kind of a sting to it, but was different, right? And then it evolved into that. And then I had someone on my podcast who did branded music, and I hired him to update it a little bit, and he made it more. The first one that I had made was grungy, which was like, still business like, but a little, maybe a little cooler than I have any right to think I am. But Roman, the guy that did the next version, took it and made it a little techno, which was interesting, a little more futuristic and techno, and I really liked it. And he made elements within it that I could use to section off advertising or other announcements and stuff like that. So we have, like, smaller stings and larger full versions and an intro and an outro version and less instrumentation, a less instrumented version, and then a more techno, more instrumented version, and all sorts of different things that you can play with, to use in throughout the podcast. So it evolved, and it also still had that done part to it, because that was what I loved, yeah, so it's, it's like an audio brand evolving from mentioning the name of the company to not and having a whole song, to not needing the name of the company and only needing three notes of the chorus, right? That's what happened with McDonald's. Like it was a Justin Timberlake song. For a long time. It was a full Justin Timberlake song, and I think for a year, they licensed it from him, and then they had someone else do a version of it so they didn't have to pay him so much money. And then it just evolved to only the chorus. And then from the chorus came a dun dun, dun dun. That's where it came from. So it evolves over time, but it took 20 plus years, right? Like these are the things that happen over time. Sound is a very effective means of getting into someone's brain and having things be an earworm and having you remember them. But it takes time. It takes consistency, so you really need to use the same thing over and over again for it to really get into someone's brain and for them to be comfortable with it. So that's why I say start an audio brand as soon as possible, because that's going to get in people's brains and make them comfortable, and they'll expect to hear it, and then you're remembered, cinemas, production companies, all of the different production companies. Like, if you I remember when I used to sit in a movie theater and listen to the first three seconds of the production company's music, come on and going, Oh, that's you hear the lion roar, right? You know what that is, right? So it's such a part of our lives, and maybe we don't give it enough attention, we don't consciously pay it enough attention, but it influences us subconsciously, very much so. And in fact, there's been some studies now that are saying that this is much bigger thing than people ever gave it credit for, and that brands that actually include the name of their business in their audio brand are remembered like so much more often. Yeah, and you may think that you're remembering someone's audio brand, but you're not getting the company name right, if you're asked on a survey, right? So it like. Get so many interesting things going on in our brains, and music taps into all of it. Sound taps into all of it. It's so important.

Alesia Galati: 41:57

This is so cool. We could literally talk about this for hours and hours, and I wish we had time. But for people who want to get to know you, check out your podcast. Learn more about this idea of creating an audio brand, or more about the kind of work that you do. Where can they get to know you find out more about your services, etc.

Jodi Krangle: 42:16

I am at voiceovers and vocals.com and you can find the podcast there, but you can also go to Audio branding podcast.com and that will get you directly to the podcast information, and I'm all over LinkedIn, and I don't spend a whole lot of time on Instagram, but I'm on Facebook.

Unknown: 42:36

I'm on Facebook. I don't know Facebook these days is, I don't know I'm on LinkedIn.

Alesia Galati: 42:47

Well, I'll make sure that we have links for all that in the show notes. Jody, thank you so much for being on the show. This was such a blast.

Jodi Krangle: 42:55

Thank you so much for having me. It was fun. You.