The conversation around podcast revenue can, too often, focus on just the podcast itself. But podcasts can be a powerful tool as part of – or even at the heart of – a wider commercial campaign. Here’s how the Evening Standard’s joined-up approach resulted in their commercial Sustainable Travel series becoming the most downloaded episodes of all time.
Publishers have a really powerful advantage when it comes to monetising podcasts: they all have a wide range of other established channels to help promote and support a campaign. This should make podcasts an attractive part of a commercial offering. But too often, podcasts are put forward by themselves, or even dismissed as not having the reach of other channels.
The Evening Standard’s Sustainable Travel campaign – winner of the Best Commercial Strategy at this year’s Publisher Podcast Awards – is a good example of how to put a podcast at the front of a campaign, but still support it through other channels to ensure success.
Simon Kurs, Commercial Editor at the Evening Standard spoke to us about how the campaign came about, setting KPIs across different channels, and exceeding all expectations with listener numbers. You can listen to the full interview by searching ‘Media Voices’ on your podcast app of choice.
A gap in the market
Sustainable travel may be a hot topic, but finding useful advice on how to travel sustainably, where to go and where to stay can be a bit of a minefield. The Evening Standard had wanted to activate in the sustainable travel space for a while as it was a topic that consistently performed well with their cosmopolitan, professional audience. But they needed to find a suitable partner for the campaign.
Kurs said that it was particularly important at this point to choose a sponsor carefully. “On a project like this, it’s really, really crucial that any partners we bring on board share the same values,” he explained. “In order for this project around sustainability to have any kind of credibility, there really can’t be any whiff of greenwashing at all.”
Hotel and resort group Iberostar has a number of initiatives like its Wave of Change programme to become a zero-waste company, as well as championing responsible tourism and improving coastal health. They were excited by the idea of doing a podcast-first campaign, and Kurs said the feeling was mutual, with the editorial team enthusiastic about telling a story with a company whose values aligned with theirs.
Leading with a podcast also set the campaign apart. Kurs noted that there was a gap in the market when it came to sustainable travel audio content, which opened up an opportunity for the Evening Standard to deliver something more intimate. “We felt this podcast needed to be conversational. We wanted it to be fun and light-hearted, full of information and inspiration, and certainly not preachy in tone,” he said.
Launching into The Standard’s existing feed
The campaign launched in October 2023. Crucially, rather than launch the Sustainable Travel podcast as an entirely new show, they decided to piggyback off their daily digest show The Standard. Each episode was released at the weekend over a series of six weeks.
Eco travel expert and journalist Juliet Kinsman and the Standard’s Jon Weeks shared practical advice, traded stories of adventure, and interviewed industry experts with a view to showing a mainstream audience how easy it is to be more sustainable in their travel choices. Each episode ran to around 15 minutes long, and the team worked to make sure it was conversational and not ‘preachy’ – something people felt they could be a part of.
Choosing to release in an existing feed is something a growing number of publishers are trying, rather than building new audiences fresh for each show. The New Statesman and Tortoise have even consolidated a number of their shows into fewer feeds.
The feature-style episodes lent themselves well to a weekend release. “You look at consumption habits in terms of media, and we know that people are more inclined to turn to deeper dives and more lifestyle-based content at weekends when they’ve got a bit more time,” Kurs said. “I won’t say [its strong performance] surprised us because we knew that the audience was there for the Standard, it’s our best-performing podcast…and we also knew there was an appetite for this kind of content.”
Podcast at the heart, but not the sole
The podcast led a full 360 degree multimedia campaign, with the podcast at the heart of a “fully populated ecosystem” of articles, information and advice across the Standard’s print, digital and social platforms. They also made use of evergreen content already in their archives to populate the hub before launch with service articles, inspiration pieces and more, “for anyone who really doesn’t understand the subject or is unfamiliar with sustainable travel to come to us and just start dipping their toes into it,” as Kurs explained.
The podcast then launched alongside weekly articles in the print newspaper which dovetailed with the themes of the podcast each week. “We then had a series of digital articles that followed up on the podcast, that summarised the themes of the podcast, and often referenced articles that were on our hub again to drive people between them,” said Kurs, pointing out that they used QR codes in the print paper to help people access the podcast.
The Standard’s social media platforms also played a supporting role in the campaign, primarily across Instagram and X (Twitter). The podcast’s key themes were taken as a starting point each week, but executed in a different way depending on the platform. Video was also put to good use here, not as a video podcast but with Reels and bonus content that the hosts and other journalists had filmed while producing the content.
Measuring multi-channel success
For a multi-channel campaign such as this, Kurs said that there were agreed KPIs channel. Host-read adverts in the podcast had pre-guaranteed impressions, and branded episodes were given targets of likely download numbers with upper and lower banding. With the articles, Iberostar had a number of branded content pieces agreed, with impressions and views promised across print and online.
But because of the campaign’s editorially-led nature, there was much more earned media that came alongside it and editorial support the team were able to deliver to make the partnership valuable. “It was something that the Evening Standard was throwing its weight behind as a news brand,” Kurs said. “That’s what really helped it cut through the noise.”
The multi-channel campaign paid off in terms of listener numbers for the podcast, which were up nearly 20% on the Standard’s daily figures. But Kurs said that surprisingly, the listener numbers increased as the season went on. “We did a big takeover and marketing push at launch, so we were expecting a tail-off,” he explained. “But what we found was by episode six, we were still delivering as big, if not bigger numbers in terms of audience.”
By the end of the campaign, all six episodes had become the most downloaded of all time, outperforming both project and client KPIs significantly.
Supporting a podcast with additional editorial channels can also help overcome the difficulties of podcast measurement, which is notoriously basic. “The benefit of being a multi-channel news brand is that we do a lot of research into our audience anyway, and we have a lot of data on consumption, demographics, and segments of consumption across all of our various channels. What we can see is they align quite closely with our podcasting audience anyway,” said Kurs.
“One of the key drivers of success for this campaign was that we did this across all of those different channels…[it] really helped to amplify the podcast and put the spotlight on the storytelling.”
Advice for other publishers
Kurs was keen to point out that publishers have a huge benefit with podcasting in that they can use all their other channels to push a podcast-first campaign. “We have a massive audience, more than 13 million people engage with us through our different channels,” he illustrated. “So to be able to approach a brand and say, ‘Look, we can tell your story across all these different channels in lots of different ways, and it can all join up, and we can have a strategy behind it which links it together and drive traffic, drive engagement and interest,’ that’s a really, really powerful proposition for any kind of commercial partnership.”
“Joined-up thinking is really, really crucial,” Kurs emphasised. “Use all of the channels at your disposal to promote and amplify the podcast.”
Kurs also credited the success of the campaign to close collaboration between the commercial and editorial sides of the Evening Standard. Working with a partner with aligned values isn’t always possible, but does mean that the teams can create a product that doesn’t feel forced or overly commercial. “ Authenticity is really important, particularly in podcasting. If you’re having to shoehorn in commercial messaging that doesn’t fit with the overall tone or tenor of the storytelling, that’s going to be a problem,” he added.
Now, podcasts are coming up as one of the first things in conversation with brands because they can see it works. Kurs described podcasts as a “terrific canvas for storytelling,” and a way to connect with audiences in an authentic, intimate manner; something potential partners are beginning to understand.
However, Kurs did finish with a word of caution. “The world doesn’t necessarily need another podcast,” he said. “There are so many of them out there. So how do you cut through the noise?
“You need to make sure there’s a gap in the market to explore and exploit before you launch anything.”
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