A bespoke advert is sort of a bespoke garment: An off-the-rack model could get the job performed, however the customized piece that matches its context will show way more memorable.
When Shira Atkins co-founded Surprise Media Community (WMN) with fellow Brown graduate Jenny Kaplan in 2018, she needed to amplify underrepresented voices and supply them help from the biggest sponsors within the market. As chief income officer, she paired podcasts like Womanica, I Was By no means There and Moments With Candace Parker with custom-made, host-read advertisements for firms together with GE, Pfizer and Mercedes-Benz.
That strategy gave Atkins and her staff at WMN a bonus over bigger gamers like Apple, Amazon and iHeart. Her continued work sustaining that edge earned Atkins Adweek’s Podcast Government of the 12 months honors.
“A lot of it comes right down to discovering the precise folks to say sure,” Atkins stated. “As soon as we discover the precise folks to say sure, determining methods to merge content material with model voice … that half is just like the enjoyable half.”
In WMN’s earliest days, it produced built-in advertisements for Skype that featured Atkins and Kaplan recording faux Skype calls to one another that Atkins now considers “embarrassingly unhealthy.” Since then, WMN’s ranks have grown to almost two dozen workers, with a full manufacturing staff creating advertisements, whereas entrepreneurs be taught what makes audiences “not hit the skip button.”
In Kaplan’s Womanica podcast, for instance, WMN has labored with Nike to create “customized bonus” trendsetter episodes that includes Nike footwear artistic director Tania Flynn and president of client product and model Heidi O’Neill. With Mercedes-Benz, it created a Girls’s Historical past Month episode centered on Nicolette Lambrechts, vp and managing director of gross sales and advertising and marketing for Mercedes Benz Vans USA, and mother-and-daughter Mercedes sellers Juanita and Grene Baranco.
WMN’s Model Studio arm, in the meantime, constructed a podcast collection for Pfizer referred to as The Antigen that started discussing maternal vaccines however shifted to Covid-19 vaccine episodes because the pandemic progressed. Audiences have responded.
“We get emails from listeners in the event that they’ve heard an advert that they really feel doesn’t resonate or that’s annoying,” Atkins stated. “We all know that host-read advertisements which might be hyper-targeted based mostly on our buyer or our listener is what wins when it comes to leveraging current relationships with advertisers to make them higher.”
From company companions to progressive establishments like Act Blue and Deliberate Parenthood, WMN has inspired advertisers to begin small and discover their voice inside current reveals. It offers them time to be taught listener habits, forge belief with listeners and hosts and, in the event that they’re snug afterward, transfer to extra customized content material. That helps Atkins gauge companions’ dedication to each reveals and their message whereas making certain they’re “not going to create content material that clogs the podcast house, which is already so overcrowded.”
