Creating Audio Gets You Ready for the Coming Audio-Activated World
Early this spring, AMPERAGE produced its first fully automated podcast for the city of Cedar Rapids. The podcast is housed on the city’s website through iframing. It is fully searchable, it is indexed on all six major podcast aggregators and the content was used in blogs and articles. 
It’s completely turnkey, and we love it. It works especially well for physicians and busy executives, because the podcast interview can be done over the phone from anywhere.
The real reason we are promoting podcasts is that audio marketing is seeing (or should I say hearing) an explosion in use. It is because of voice-assisted search. Here are some stats on voice-activated search:
- More than half the U.S. population has listened to a podcast (Triton Digital)
- 41% of Americans own smart speakers (it’s expected to be over half by the end of 2019)
- By 2020 it is estimated that 50% of all searches will be done by voice
- Google says that 20% of all mobile searches are done by voice now
- BuzzFeed reported that Google’s AI learned our language by consuming nearly 3,000 romance novels
The reason Google used romance novels is because they wanted the interface to be more conversational and easier to understand for the user. I’m not sure if reading romance will really lead to better robot-human conversation, but it will be spicier.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.