You can’t force someone to listen to a branded podcast — you’ve gotta make it good enough for people to come.
And that’s what Gimlet Media has done with its branded podcast for eBay, Open for Business — a podcast on building a business from the ground up.
Host John Henry follows start-ups and entrepreneurs on the stuff you wish you knew and the stuff you should know when you’re starting a company.
According to journalist Benjamin Mullin writing for an online magazine, Poynter, “[eBay] says the intimate and long-form nature of podcasting factored into its decision to tell the company’s stories with audio. They’ll count it as a success if small business owners find it interesting or useful and come away from the podcast with a better understanding of what the company does.”
As Annie Lupardus, eBay’s director of leadership and seller communications at eBay, tells Mullin, “We’ve experimented with different ways of telling these stories and extracting some of these insights from them, but hadn’t really found the right medium or platform to do it well. Podcasting seemed like a logical and really right-sized medium for us, since it’s a bit more intimate and longer-form.”
‘Interesting or useful’ has thus been counted — Gimlet is currently now producing the second series of Open for Business.
One person who is glowing of branded podcasts and a huge fan of Open for Business is Andy Hayes of Placard Media.
“I thought it was hugely informative, it was really well done. eBay has not overly pushed the name but you can certainly know that it’s an eBay product,” Hayes explains in Episode 18 of BE Podcasting.
Of branded podcasts in general, he’s adamant, “I think there is an absolute place for them. It’s about doing it correctly. It’s about doing it within your brand guidelines. It’s about making that connection.”
And the creation of branded podcasts is only set to get bigger, insists Hayes: “I think it’s going to grow exponentially over the next 12 months because it’s not an overly expensive way of branding something that’s long-term.
“And most of these podcasts are evergreen so you can listen to them whenever they make good reading and you can always go back to that brand proposition.”
Read more about how BE Media Production can help you create a branded podcast for your business or organisation.
