25 years in audio, and how to make a podcast actually work

Most companies start at the wrong end. They want "a podcast", because everyone tells them they should have one, without knowing what it's about, or who it's for. Sander de Heer sees it at big communications departments that understand everything except audio. People who have spent years on video, online, newsletters and print, but never asked the one question that matters: how do you reach the ears, the imagination of a listener?

Then comes his sharpest question, and he's strict about it. Who is going to listen, voluntarily and in their own free time, to half an hour of a podcast about a bank, if that podcast is only about the bank? A sales pitch in audio form gets no one to listen through. And a podcast that isn't part of your whole communications mix simply stalls: a few nice conversations sitting somewhere online, heard by twenty colleagues and some family.

"Who's going to voluntarily listen to a podcast, often in their free time, about a bank, if it's only about that bank? Nobody listens to that of their own accord."

Sander de Heer

The best proof of Sander's own method is his own show. De Veertigers began in the 2020 lockdown as a hobby project, one idea: forty-somethings run into things, is there something in that? He found the right group: Jet, Manuel and Wietske, four forty-somethings of completely different stripes. Wietske is the youngest, in a rented flat in Amsterdam with small children. Sander swapped Amsterdam for nature near Amersfoort. Jet lives in a loft in Rotterdam and her son has already left home. Everyone different, and that's precisely what makes it a strong format.

Because forty-somethings get overlooked. Twenty-, thirty- and fifty-somethings all have their own corner; the group in between doesn't, even though plenty is going on. Older children, a career, a mortgage, rising energy bills. It's about parenting, but just as much about love, sex, hobbies and going out, can you still pull an all-nighter, and should you mind if you can't anymore?

In five words: a laugh and a tear. On one side they're in stitches about the eighties and the daft memories. On the other, the real things come to the table: how their parents are doing, a death within the group, the dementia diagnosis of Sander's father. It's a chat podcast, but with a purpose. And it works for one reason that applies to any organisation brave enough: they're all different, and they dare to be sincere and honest.

Sander names exactly where a platform makes the difference. He says you can "see precisely where the listener leans in and when they leave", and that this is genuinely interesting data. For a maker who swears by the ideal timeline and by that half-hour attention ceiling, that's the tool beneath the conviction: seeing whether people keep listening, and exactly where they drop off. That's what listener analytics is built for.

A podcast like De Veertigers also asks for what Sander calls the most future-proof form: on-demand. No waiting for an FM frequency, you publish once and let it travel to the listener digitally, who starts whenever it suits them. That's exactly what hosting & distribution does, upload once, in every app.

And for makers like Sander, who make podcasts for law firms, banks and governments, one thing weighs even heavier. Those clients work with sensitive material and strict requirements. A platform that's EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001-certified is then not a nice-to-have but a precondition, whether you're working for the financial world or producing as an agency for several clients.