The club’s name doesn’t exactly fit.
The Indianapolis Podcast Brunch Club typically meets the last Thursday of every month from 6 p.m to 7:30 p.m., although the March meeting has been canceled because of the new coronavirus outbreak.
“It (the name) predates me,” said Susan Miller, the chapter leader who started the Indianapolis club in January. “I would have called it the Cocktail Hour Club. It was started by a woman in Chicago five years ago and is akin to a book club for podcasts.”
Miller, who lives near Anderson, is the public relations director for 5MetaCom, a Carmel business-to-business marketing company for technical and scientific products.
There are two to five hours of listening lists for the theme of the month.
The January topic was fake news while February’s was nuclear energy and the coronavirus. There are more than 70 chapters worldwide.
Carmel resident Jeff Ealy, a 2006 Carmel High School graduate who is 5MetaCom vice president of marketing services, began listening to more podcasts in the past year.
“I was getting bored listening to the same couple of tunes on the radio and was looking for something more entertaining,” Ealy said.
Ealy said he often listens to a 10- to 12-minute story.
Podcasts are a part of what 5MetaCom helps produces for its clients for approximately 18 months.
“It’s not exactly the sexy serial story but it’s going deep on a tightly niche subject,” Miller said.
Ealy said the company works behind the scenes to produce the podcasts.
“We produce the conversation guide for the program we are going to put together,” he said. “Our customers are the authorities on the subject.”
Miller said podcasts work with the company’s clients because it’s business-to-business marketing.
Ealy said the podcast can be a marketing tool that the company itself actually owns.
“The interesting thing about a podcast is there is no middle man,” Miller said. “It’s just you and the listener. It doesn’t have to be so perfect from a production perspective. At first, people would say, this is never going to fly, you said ‘um’ 14 times, but I think it’s how we talk in real life, so people are OK with it.”
Ealy said there is a conversational nature to the production.
“The podcast provides a way for them to communicate directly with the niche audience,” Miller said. “You can reach a larger mass that shares that interest.”
For more, visit podcastbrunchclub.com/indianapolis/.
