“There’s So Much More To Do”

If you happen to be strolling through Washington Park in Newark, New Jersey, it’s pretty hard to miss the old church sitting right across the street.

Opened in 1933, the former house of worship welcomed congregants for 62 years before going defunct in the mid-1990s. It remained vacant, essentially forgotten by the city, for almost a quarter of a century when Audible decided to renovate the historical building into the company’s 80,000 square foot Innovation Cathedral.

“We brought it back to life and brought back a lot of energy into the city,” Diana Dapito, Head of Consumer Content, tells me over Zoom. She’s been with Audible for nearly two decades, an impressive tenure one doesn’t often see in the corporate world.

“It’s the product that we offer, which is just really exciting,” Dapito says. “It’s a way to get stories all the time and that escapism or that learning. That’s really important to me, to be working on something that I care about deeply. And it is the people. If you’re working with people who challenge you and are really passionate about what they do and are creative and excited about what’s going on, you stick around.”

Rachel Ghiazza, on the other hand, is a veritable newcomer, having only been a part of the Audible family since 2019 as EVP, Head of US Content. Nevertheless, she brings years of experience from time spent at Yahoo!, Viacom, and, most fittingly of all, Spotify.

“We’ve really started to focus quite a bit not just on who we are in our creator offering, but also who we are in a content creation capacity,” she explains on the call. “Really doing a lot in the original audio space: thinking about what types of creators should be working in audio, what types of stories could be told in audio, [and] continuing to break down the barriers.”

As evidenced by the rechristened church a stone’s throw from Audible’s main headquarters, the name of the game is innovation, especially as the brand celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. What began as a virtual hub for audiobooks in the early days of the internet has evolved into a global audio entertainment empire.

Congrats on 25 years! What’s it like to celebrate this kind of milestone?

DAPITO: I’ve been lucky enough to see the organization grow and to grow with it. From the days of when we would add just a handful of titles to the service every week to now hundreds and hundreds and hundreds every day. There’s such an amazing caliber of talent that we’re working with and able to reach so many millions of listeners around the world. But I think to be at this milestone is to reflect on Audible as a disruptor — both on the tech side and on the content side. From inventing the first digital audio entertainment player a few years before the iPod, to working with Robin Williams on what we’d arguably call one of the very first podcasts. To see where we are now and to still continue to lead in the space is just really exciting.

Rachel, what drew you to the company?

GHIAZZA: Whenever you’re picking a place you want to work, there’s a number of dimensions you’re looking at. First of all, I’m just excited to work in the space and continue to work with Audible. I think they’ve made such an impact on audio and have continued to lead the charge there and I’m just getting started, there’s plenty more to do. But also the company mission. It’s really important to make sure you’re working for [a company where] you really identify with the mission of the company. The thing about Audible is it’s not just the mission, it’s the way we work every single day. It’s the way we show up, it’s the way we interact with the communities we’re in, it’s the way we interact with each other. It’s just a really amazing experience to be able to work for a company that has such a solid identity of who they are and such a solid identity for what we do — even outside of what we create in the audio space.

The disruptor concept is interesting. Can you expound on that?

DAPITO: Every couple of years, it’s a new role or a new job or a new opportunity because of our ambition to keep inventing on behalf of the customer and to keep working with the creative community. Back in 2012, we came up with the technology Whispersync for Voice, so that somebody could be listening to a story while they were commuting and then get out of the car and obviously, need to finish it. And so, they can head to their ebook when they’re laying in bed and pick up right where they left off. So that ability to keep the story going and to help you get more stories in your life.

[The year before], we launched ACX, which is our marketplace that connects authors and actors to create audio editions of books that probably wouldn’t have been made into audio otherwise. We’ve been able to give voice thousands of of creators in that sense and offer many more stories for our customers to be able to listen to …

We just launched our Best of the Year and so hopefully, if you’re in that search engine and looking at the best of audio entertainment, it comes up and you see that range of of content that’s available. We’re really listening to everything, we are passionate about what we do and the recommendations that we make. Having built that trust and having had those consumer insights for the past 25 years, helps us to create what should be next and what our customers are going to enjoy, even if they’re not our customers yet and they don’t know. They’re going to soon soon find out and I think that’s part of the fun of what we get to do into helping to reach these new customers.

GHIAZZA: One of the pivotal moments for us was the launch of our Plus offering. We’ve been looking at customer appetite to continue to listen to all kinds of things and explore different creators and different stories and different subjects in different formats. And when we launched Plus, it opened those floodgates and gave our customers a whole new offering of content that they could explore. What we found is that they were very interested in discovering new types of content. They were really interested in discovering new stories and new formats.

What to you makes the audio space so dynamic and popular?

DAPITO: There’s such an intimacy to it that it just brings you so close to the content itself. It’s just a very powerful experience to have a voice, or many voices and sound effects, in your ear helping you throughout your day. I think people do sometimes need a break from screens and when your audio can keep you company — either when you’re traveling or doing stuff around the house — I think people are realizing that as more of a way to to just be entertained in a slightly different way than they’re used to.

GHIAZZA: On the creation side, it creates this limitless playground. Some creators are inhibited by considerations like travel sets and people and crews and those things that can become a challenge if you’re creating something visual. Audio allows you to create these incredible worlds in your mind. The human imagination is obviously a powerful thing and that imagination can create that story and that world in and around the words that are being spoken.

We’re talking over Zoom right now, which is one of the major byproducts of the pandemic. How did COVID affect what you do at Audible?

DAPITO: I think as a business, we were able to pivot pretty quickly in terms of turning around our production arm and very quickly moving [away] from having so many actors and post-production and producers in-house, so people could start recording from home. We were able to send kits to narrators and different performers who didn’t have that setup yet.

GHIAZZA: We had an opportunity to revisit some of the creators that we’ve spoken to in the past who, perhaps, had one too many projects happening and found themselves with a little more time. This system that really Diana and her team helped set up also enabled us to do some really important things. [For example] we’ve been investing in the theater space. During the pandemic, there were areas of the creative world that were impacted in different ways. And with the theater community, many of them were unable to keep working and keep putting on plays and keep performing. And so [through] our theater program, we were able to continue to produce and continue to create and people were able to use their their kits.

Speaking of the creator side of things, you have a number of partnership deals with major entertainment industry names like Kevin Hart and Zachary Quinto. How do you go about attracting caliber talent like that?

GHIAZZA: One of the things I like the most about it is that we work with a pretty diverse group of talents. We’re working with emerging talent, established talent, diverse talent. And with each one, we’re making different types of fresh and unique things. That limitlessness that I mentioned before allows people to create what they want to create, and what’s in their mind. It really creates a playground for them, which is exciting and new and fresh and allows us to explore a wide range of genres and content types and listening experiences. Creative minds love that. It makes it easy.

DAPITO: Some of the projects that I’m most looking forward to that we plan on releasing next year are sequels to some of the really exciting originals that we’ve been able to create in partnership with a variety of of talent.

Have you noticed any major shifts in consumer tastes over the last 19-20 years that you’ve been with the company, Diana?

DAPITO: People are always going to be interested in great stories. They always want to be entertained. A lot of people want to learn and they want to learn in an entertaining way. I think the trends have just been in really high quality storytelling. We offer quite a range of that now across more than 750,000 titles in the catalog, which again, that growth is is incredible. On average, Audible members are listening for more than two hours a day. That’s a lot to fill. Comedy is always great in terms of escape and we’ve created a lot of great originals. I was laughing the other day in the grocery store while I was catching up on the latest [episode of] Past my Bedtime. David Harbour is the narrator [along with] a full cast and it was like, “Oh, I look pretty ridiculous here, don’t I?”

Romance, sci-fi, and fantasy titles get a lot of voracious listeners and people can never get enough. Evergreen stories like the Harry Potter series [is] very beloved. We just surpassed over one billion hours of people listening to the Harry Potter series on Audible. It’s just wonderful we’ve been able to offer both those beloved stories and then in our partnership with with Pottermore, create additional audio editions of Tales of Beedle the Bard with With Jude Law and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them performed by Eddie Redmayne.

Your originals aren’t just one note, they’re full-on productions with newly-designed sound effects. Smell-o-Vision might be the next step! In what ways are you looking to push the boundaries of listener immersion?

DAPITO: I think that speaks a lot to the creative opportunities for the overall content creators, the producers, the sound designers. But yes, we’re going beyond that single-voice performance and really bringing in elements like original soundtracks and sound-scaping and binaural and Dolby technology, which can give you more of that 3D sound. I think we and the partners that we’re working with are really open to, ‘What is the next thing? How can we continue to innovate on these different formats?’ Because maybe smell-o-vision is coming!

GHIAZZA: It can be something as simple as what we did with Rachel Brosnahan’s project, which was set over a [series] of phone calls. It was really just recreating the sound of a phone call. Or it can be something as big and as ambitious as The Sandman, which is a big [voice] cast and lots of different things happening. Each one needs to have its own unique newness to it, but it’s also trying to figure out how all the components come together to really make that story full and make that story real.

I know it’s a bit cliche to ask, but where do you see Audible going in the next 25-50 years?

GHIAZZA: There’s so much more to do. I think we’re entering into the time of voice that’s just beginning. You’re seeing a lot more of this interconnectivity and it’s available to us in different ways … We’re going to be able to control and think about audio and voice in such different ways. That’s going to open up more and more moments to listen and more and more qualities of listening and more and more opportunities for group and family listening. But also how to use those different mediums and motives to tell stories, and how you can build more interconnectivity in those stories to your life … I really think this is going to be another one of those reflective moments in the company’s history where we talk about, “Oh, look at what we laid down in 2022 and look where we are now!’”

DAPITO: In 2004, when I said, ‘I’m working at Audible! I just got a new job!’ People stopped me and were like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean?’ And then in 2008, and ’10 and in ’12, I’d get more people who understood and they’d heard of it. But now, it’s like, ‘Let me show you my library! Oh, my goodness, what’s coming out next?’ And they want to talk about their listens.

Until everybody in the universe is showing us their libraries, we’re gonna keep creating this amazing content for them and making the best customer experience we can … We pioneered this medium, and we’re gonna continue to lead it. There’s the excitement of new genres and new content types and all the sound innovations. We’re gonna be there, we’re gonna play a big part in it, and we might look more tired when we next chat, but it’s very exciting.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity