On this week’s episode – the first of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices – we speak to Simon Kurs, Commercial Editor at the Evening Standard.
The publisher won Best Commercial Strategy at this year’s Publisher Podcast Awards for The Standard’s Sustainable Travel campaign with Iberostar, a podcast-led multimedia series exploring how to travel the world without wrecking it.
We discussed the Evening Standard’s approach to podcast monetisation, from choosing clients that align with their values to having the podcast at the heart of a 360 degree media campaign. We also explore why publishers are at such an advantage when it comes to podcast campaigns, and why utilising multiple channels can help drive record-breaking podcast performance.
Here are some highlights from the interview, lightly edited for clarity:
Creating the campaign
Travellers are increasingly very keen to engage more sustainably with travel, as is the travel industry itself. But the question for many travellers is, how can we do it? And there’s still not really a tremendous amount of definitive information out there for them on where to go, how to make choices in terms of hotel and travel, and all these things. So that was one of the reasons we felt there was a need to launch a campaign like this.
We felt there was a gap in the market for exactly this campaign with a podcast at its core, because podcasts are a really, really teriffic medium for delivering this kind of storytelling. This podcast needed to be conversational, fun and light-hearted, full of information and inspiration, certainly not preachy in tone.
Rather than launching it as an entirely new show, what we actually did was piggyback off one of our existing shows, The Standard. We took it over at the weekends, and we created a weekly takeover for six weeks where we dug deep into sustainable travel.
A 360 approach
This was a full 360 degree campaign, and we wanted to create a fully populated ecosystem across all of our channels, and really drive our audience between all of those different touchpoints.
When the campaign launched, there was already a large amount of pre-existing content that we had; service articles, inspiration pieces, think pieces, a great starter pack. We then launched the podcast, and alongside that were weekly articles in the newspaper that dovetailed with the themes of each podcast each week, and pointed our audience towards that podcast with QR codes and the like.
We then had a series of digital articles that followed up on the themes of the podcast, and the podcasts themselves often referenced articles that were on our hub to drive people between them. We put a lot of effort into creating an aligned and parallel social campaign which again took as a starting point the key themes of the podcast that week, but then ran with it in a different way.
Positive podcast results
Numbers were up nearly 20% on the Standard’s regular daily figures, which for me shows a tremendous amount of engagement. What’s really interesting as well is that they increased as the season went on.
We went really big in terms of marketing at the start; we did a takeover of the Standard prior to the podcast launching, there were a lot of articles that really spotlighted this. You would think there would be a degree of [settling], but what we found was by episode six, we were still delivering as big, if not bigger numbers in terms of audience, and in terms of the social as well.
We’re thrilled at the reception for this podcast. Feedback from the industry has been universally fantastic, be it tourism boards, travel brands, fellow journalists, everyone has really been very positive, and that’s been reflected in the listener numbers. It’s not often you can say something is delivering for audience and for commercial partners and also creatively.
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