As you might imagine given I produce my own, I listen to quite a few podcasts. I admit I haven’t actually been actively listening to audio podcasts for that long. While I listened to a couple of shows occasionally, it’s really since I moved back to Europe from Singapore that I’ve been listening to more, checking out as many shows as I can and catching up on both the most popular ones, and a few more niche ones, like revolving around games and game design for example.
The vast majority of popular podcasts are simply funded by advertising messages. The audience is as captive as the traditional TV or radio and as far as I know ad blockers haven’t found a way to remove portions of promotional message from audio files.
The format is pretty typical in most cases, with the show host reading a message from their sponsors.
That might be why I paid attention when my friend Lauren recommended the popular StartUp show, that I had heard of, though she also mentioned that in addition to the show itself being brilliant, their way of presenting ads was too.
It’s not so often I hear friends who don’t work in advertising or marketing tell me about the awesome ways in which a company advertises.
If ever you’re not familiar with it, Gimlet Media is a company created by Alex Blumberg, who previously worked for the National Public Radio (NPR). He wished to capitalize on the opportunity he saw in the growing interest with audio podcasts and left NPR to create his own media company.
In their own words:
Gimlet Media is the premier digital media company focused on producing high quality narrative podcasts.
Their first show, StartUp (season 1) tells the story of how the company started, if you’re interested I can only highly recommend you have a listen. I listened to one episode and binged the whole first season in a couple of days. It’s that good.
The other Gimlet Media shows are hugely successful (I love them too), to the point the digital media company was voted amongst the Top 100 most innovative companies in media by Fast Company in 2015, and that’s not the only award they received, for example Apple named Mystery Show the best new podcast of 2015 in their year end awards.
Alex Blumberg talks about creating excellent audio storytelling in StartUp and in other shows where he was interviewed, such as on the Tim Ferriss Show. This is something he is committed to in the production of all Gimlet shows, and just like my friend who recommended it, I really appreciate they have the same commitment to the way they advertise for their sponsors.
Rather than reading out what often turns out to be bland sponsor messages, they go out and find people who use the products and services they’re advertising, or somehow they create small stories around the sponsors. It highlights the sponsors in an interesting way, in the same way I’m listening to Gimlet shows for their interesting stories. They integrate the sponsor in their branded space by giving it a “Gimlet audio story lifting”. Every one of their shows also features the same music preceding sponsor messages, so it’s clear what is the main story vs the sponsored message. It makes the sponsor more interesting and in turn I’m more inclined to remember and talk about the ads.
Of course they weren’t the first to create this kind of native advertising in audio podcasts, but at the moment they have my (obviously subjective) vote for being the best and most remarkable.
Now every time I see a banner or paid search ad for Audible, I think of the person interviewed who listened to audio books during her long commute from the Asian to the European side of Istanbul. If I see something about Squarespace, I’m reminded of the fun and wonderful random websites the hosts of Reply All create, like Alex Goldman‘s Goldman Gripes. It makes sense to adapt the sponsors to what their audience are looking for, which is great audio stories.
Of course finding people who use the products and services advertised by their sponsors was all a little experimental, so they happened to make a mistake. It wasn’t great for the company, though it makes for a brilliant episode of StartUp where they explain everything about the way they advertise sponsor messages and the behind the scenes of this unfortunate event:
16/02/2016 Update: I just caught up with another episode of StartUp and it happened to be exactly about the same topic. I’m not the only person interested in Gimlet Media’s advertising, and this episode is about the tricky position of advertising compared with editorial content and endorsements. It’s definitely worth listening to. These conversations have apparently led to the idea of offering paid membership to listeners in order to start diversifying their revenue basis.
And there’s more I’m catching up with: Gimlet Media also announced they were starting to produce branded content. I’ll listen to the episode and probably update this post afterwards.
