Sam Sethi: 0:12

Hello and welcome to Pod News Weekly. And it's a welcome back to Oscar's around the he's the CEO and co-founder of a wonderful company called Wonder Kraft. Oscar, hello, how are you?

Oskar Serrander: 0:24

Happy to be back on the show.

Sam Sethi: 0:25

We're very happy to have you now. Last time we chatted, you had just come out of the quiet beta. You were launching a translation service white glove capabilities, which is basically humanizing the transcription. Now you've launched something very exciting a studio AI advertising platform. Tell me more about it.

Oskar Serrander: 0:47

Yeah. So last time he had me on that was right when we launched in early February, which was the, the first big platform release from one Kraft. We actually had this capability then too, but we hadn't really dug deeper into it. We really started to test out with a few partners and how they were creating audio and producing for different use cases. Advertising was one of them. And translation and dubbing, as you mentioned, was one of them that we were pushing then together with a few partners. One of them or their CEO that we started designing with in the fall, and this time around we are a couple of months ahead, six months in that release. And since then for the past six months, something that I am obviously very passionate about is advertising. I've been in that space for almost 20 years, starring agency side and Spotify and iHeart and recently accounts for six years as a chief operating officer. And it's kind of became a quick focus for us because the demand is right there. There is a lot of problems in the ad production kind of workflow for audio companies all around the table, really for brands to be able to produce audio ads as fast as they want to at the speed of culture. Meaning you can go live with something quite fresh and a fresh message way faster. It doesn't really exist today because of the lengthy and costly production workflow that exist. So that's something that I wanted to fix and I wanted to fix for my entire career. And we saw that we were really getting a lot of traction on that early on with the first version of the platform. And since then, together with our partners around the world, really studios, marketers, brands in a lot of ad media companies that need to have these capabilities more in-house. We started building out these capabilities in the big release. Now this week was with our new timeline editor, sound effects audio clips and everything centered around really empowering creatives to start working on copy, collaborate with their team and produce studio quality, audio advertising and voiceovers for their projects. And we're super proud of it and we're coming out of the gate running quite fast. So it's been a busy week with lots of demos and showcasing these new capabilities and it's it's just a joy. It's a lightweight. Audio editor is so much fun. Sound effects. For instance, one of my favorite new features. You can just type anything rainy New York with dogs barking in the background, it will generate those sound effects for you and you'll be able to edit that into your production. So it's a delight to create audio ads in voiceover very quickly.

Sam Sethi: 3:28

So James created one full pot News Daily, and he did that by just pointing it at the website, asking it to read the website, transcribe, and then create the app. And it did that super quick. Now, James, you still I don't know if you know Oscar. He used to actually be a professional copywriter for advertising. That was one of his secrets in the background that he used to have on radio. So he was like, The ad is great. It does what it says on the tin. It's not going to win a creative ad aboard. But I guess what he could have done was taken the transcription before it turned it into a physical voiceover. And he could have changed that a bit. He could have added more effects to it. He could have. So again, where or who do you see using this? Is it specifically Dion designed for ad agencies? Is it designed for the, I don't know, the average podcast or is it designed for the radio stations? Where do you see it fitting best first?

Oskar Serrander: 4:28

We have a use cases on all those areas now. And I think the best answer is really centered around the creative, whether that's a creative sitting on a brand side or an in-house agency at an advertiser or a brand company or at a media company selling advertising or servicing advertisers for their podcast or music streaming or radio or agency side, where you also servicing advertisers and creating that. Well, we're really built with wonder. Kraft is focused on the copy and the idea. What James did there was we have an ad copywriter assistant built in the platform. If you have a sitter with creator writer's block, for instance, and can come up with ideas, we can help you. And that's really our stance and generative API on our platform is that it's just like you're using chat liberty or you're using other general API to come up with scripting ideas elsewhere. We really lifted that into and created an ad copy version of that within Wonder Craft to get you started. But the cool thing really about the platform is that it's a text editor at first rate, so you can really start massaging the copy and really get creative and create so many variation so easily. So in this case, James, use a website and it generated a draft he could put. He can then start sketching out ideas with voices and different characters and different music beds and now even sound effects and little settings or audio clips that he already has and do that very quickly. But you can also spend some time on it and start writing copy and collaborate with your team or share it with your client to get feedback. So the way that I would answer that question is that we really want to bring everyone together around the creative idea and make wonder Craft a tool that you can use further upstream in the creative process is one thing that I'm that bothers me a little bit. Being in an industry is that audio first ad creation is often a kind of an afterthought. It's something that you Oh, we need a radio ad or we need a music streaming ad or we need a podcast ad quite late in the process. And what we want to do is allow for great copywriters and creatives all around the table to be able to start drafting ideas and have audio be part of their ideation way earlier. And it's a delight to work with it. And again, the fast way that you can create variations is also very important for advertisers and everyone producing audio because you can then start creating podcast specific narrations or music streaming, which is different than podcasting, right? And even radio, which is vastly different, you need to have a little bit more attention grabbing sound effects or or just a different composition of the ad music stream. You need an early hook to keep people on so we don't zone out in podcasting can be a little bit more mellow and more conversational. As we know, it's a super powerful channel for that kind of messaging and it really allows itself for that. So what I really love about this is that you can create so many variations so quickly and start really testing out different formats. And I think that's a huge strength of the platform.

Sam Sethi: 7:33

Does it pass the Turing test? So. Will I with a ad created with Wonder Craft, be able to tell the difference between an ad and his voice over with a human? How close are you now to people going? I couldn't tell the difference there. Oscar They're both the same.

Oskar Serrander: 7:52

I mean, it's 100%. I think the technology above synthetic voices is definitely passing the Turing Test. Funny enough, I was on another podcast with friends over at Oxford Road earlier this week and we reviewed some of the top spending ads that are running on podcasting right now. I think you pulled that from Magellan. This is advertisers for advertisers that spend $20 million in podcasting in the past, I guess month maybe. And it was crazy to me how they kind of sounded like out of the box synthetic voices. I don't know if they used it or not. But again, there were mixed quality of ads. But my first question on one of them was, is this an age I've always really here, but it was a well delivered read. But again, it's right there with Wonder craft that we have also parrot mode, which makes you you can deliver the lines with 100% accuracy if you want to. Wanted a line to be sarcastic where you wanted to emphasize a certain word with parrot mode, you can just use your computer microphone to direct the voice perfectly. So yeah, it is 100% on par with normal studio productions. And I think that's why it lends itself to a very good tool for different use cases, not only producing ready ads that you can obviously run as a campaign, but also for drafting in briefing studio productions. So we have a lot of use cases where studios use it for sketching out the idea, making sure you do the approval rounds, which is just sharing a link. You can collect feedback and comments and you can edit it down to the finished host read or voiceover with the perfect intonation that you want, and then use that as a brief when the actual big talent goes into the studio and say, Here's what we want you to produce for us, for example. So it's a few different use cases there where this is very useful.

Sam Sethi: 9:46

Yeah. One of the things that I would like to try and work out is when next was one the craft. Are you going to get into a video or is this a natural evolution from audio to video for you guys where you will pitches video ads as well?

Oskar Serrander: 10:01

We're definitely thinking that long term, what we are very diligent on right now is the quality. And for us, it's about the workflow. It's about the tool itself, how you can collaborate with your team and reduce all that friction that now exists in these workflows. My previous company we had, we could rack up hundreds of emails for just one single campaign, right? And it's really hurting organizations that deal in podcasting and music streaming to kind of handle and onboard new advertisers. So my big dream here in our big dream is really to make audio more accessible to brands. And that's the end goal. That's the mission. And we want to do that by creating something that is further upstream in the creative process so brands can start thinking Audio is at the end of the day, what I think for music and is not only music but for the audio industry in general, is that we need more advertisers in the space. We can just count the thousands of advertisers that are active in podcasting, and I don't think that's a sustainable way to do it. So I think there needs to be a creative tool that really unlocks more excitement around creating ads. And I think this is the way to do it. I think audio needs to compete a bit more with the digital channels like Google and Mirror and Ticktalk that provide the full eight eight easy tools to produce and deploying ads. Video Get back to your question of sorry video is certainly on our roadmap, but we don't think the technology is really there yet to make it exciting and make it a really easy tool to produce that. But that's happening very quickly. So we are part of our R&D is actually exploring that as well. So eventually I think one aircraft will have a video solution for that type of advertising as well to add your own imagery or videos, but also maybe generating a creative in that format as well.

Sam Sethi: 11:57

One tool I use a lot is the script. Now, I use that to take interviews like we're doing now, and I'll edit those within the script. If I listen to what I can do with Wanda Craft, I could take the recorded edits and I could translate that. I can clip it out. I could take that and ask it to take a subsection of it, summarize it. Is there any way that you will start to extend the reach of what Wanda Craft can do? Maybe just have it as a audio tool for editing as well. Allow the script.

Oskar Serrander: 12:31

Not impossible, Sam. I mean, we've been live for six months. We're developing very fast. We're building out their team to be able to really build on the use cases that we uncover together with a lot of our partners, We're blessed to have so many amazing customers on our platform that big teams, smaller producers, marketers that give us these insights into their needs and we're building that way. So it depends on where this kind of takes us. We'd like to test things out and see how we can make this even a better tool. And I think where we are now is, is to first start of it. Just a couple of days in and the new studio and the editor is fantastic, but we have a lot of ideas where we can take it. So yeah, all of it. This is possible. We're just setting the roadmap as we kind of uncover these little pockets of demand for better services. So that's the best answer I can get on that right now.

Sam Sethi: 13:21

That's right. Let's see if I can two out of you. What else is on the roadmap, then?

Oskar Serrander: 13:26

Well, one thing that we're excited about is that we've built this network of translators that we use for quality control and assurance. And again, our stance on A.I. is really to improve the workflows. And I love that every user that we use that come on board, that are accustomed to whether you're sitting on agencies or brand side, there are quite nowadays accustomed to using general A.I. to just speed up their ideation, etc. I think that's an important part of what we're building. And then I think what we're looking at next is the translation within the studio. So we actually have quite a lot of customers around Europe and in Asia, which is part of why I'm so tired. Sam, because there's late night calls with Asia and early morning calls for the Europe. But what they see is a is a demand for being able to create ad copy for quite a long list of different languages. And if you don't speak, if you're sitting in Singapore and you're creating a campaign around many different languages or you don't speak Japanese, for instance, you need to have a kind of a human quality control function in there to be able to say that, okay, this is actually localized copy. So we already have that big network of translators that we work with, which is a beautiful thing we talked about in the last episode. And I think in this fall we're experimenting with lifting that into the studio so you can write copy across many different markets in actually have a quality control from a copywriter or a translator who can help you make it perfectly localized. So that's one service that we're looking at. You mentioned video. I think we're just exploring that as an R&D. And then there's building upon these collaborative functions that we have so you can work more faster with your team and be able to work on copy and create the ads and the voiceovers that you are looking to do. One thing that is I'm quite excited about is the idea of being able to translate different ad formats. So one thing that we're working on very soon and already starting to do testing with is the ability to take your radio spot, for instance, and quickly translate that into a podcast ad. I think a big problem within the audio industry that radio ads tend to kind of creep in on podcast experiences and music streaming kind of sits in between. And I think there is I've seen quite a bit of demand and I've experienced this myself too, right? It's easy to take a radio ad that's out there and traffic that. But what if we can help advertisers in platforms and translate or reformat them as a better podcast read, for instance, rather than a a loud one 800 divorce type of radio ad that you.

Sam Sethi: 16:14

He had.

Oskar Serrander: 16:15

Saudi adds. So yeah, kind of reformatting between those platforms. I think that's a that's something that we've seen a lot of demand for recently.

Sam Sethi: 16:22

If I want to come play with it, If people want to go and see demos of theirs, whether they go Oscar.

Oskar Serrander: 16:27

Oh, great. You can go to Wonder aircraft on air. You can also reach out to me or team at Wonder Craft Dot. I would be happy to do demos. We we make it really easy for you to come on board. We understand that this is a very new and novel way of working, but it is truly it has such a huge benefit for the time cost efficiency and just, I'd say making teams happier at work because we remove a lot of the administration and a lot of the approval and a lot of the long email chains. So please reach out to us a team at Wonder Craft. I'm happy to give you a demo. We also do training sessions for entire teams.We do open office hours for all the big enterprises that we bring on board to make sure that everyone gets quick solutions and help to produce quite quickly. But the tool is very intuitive and easy to use, so people learn it quite quickly, which is fascinating. But we understand that it's new, so we want to really help service everyone that comes on board and be happy to do so for anyone who listens to this.

Sam Sethi: 17:27

Couple of last questions. Is the team still in London? Where are you going to expand out to next? How far and wide is one aircraft going to be in a physical location, I guess.

Oskar Serrander: 17:37

We have a low base in London, which is great. My two co-founders are there. You have a few people, but we're distributed. And again, I've been over here for 14 years and it's great that we can spread out a little bit four times on purposes. And we are distributed all over the world and we don't really pay too much attention to it. We do like to have our culture is very collaborative. We it's just the way that I want to run a company and I really enjoy it thoroughly. So it doesn't really matter if you're very close to everyone that we work with on the team. We just brought on a new head of design coming from Canva, actually, which we're super proud of about. Fantastic.

Sam Sethi: 18:13

He asked.

Oskar Serrander: 18:13

So everyone using one aircraft can see how much more beautiful it's becoming, which is. Yeah, makes me incredibly happy. But yeah, we're not. We are expanding with team members this fall for sure. Where are they going to sit? I don't know yet. It's about the talent and the great people that we're going to find and where they are. So we'll see.

Sam Sethi: 18:32

Cool. Oscar, thank you so much. I'm going to go off and play now. I'm going to actually going try and create some ads and see what I can do. Probably never going to make public airing because I'll be that bad, but I'm not. Thank you so much. This is going to be a lot of fun Oscar speeches to my friend.

Oskar Serrander: 18:49

Thank you so much, Sam. I appreciate you and think for having me on again.