“If It’s Not Worth Your Effort, It’s Probably Not Worth My Time”

Last week, Lower Street hosted the 2025 Brand Podcast Summit– two full days of panels, presentations, and interactive sessions, all focused on the subject of brand podcasting. We heard from speakers from YouTube, The New York Times, Morgan Stanley, Red Hat and REI, covering topics from video, to AI, to audience growth.
I’m super proud of the content we pulled together for this event, and wanted to pull out my biggest takeaways from the event. So I’ve put together my 9 biggest takeaways from the event.
You can watch the replays of all these sessions at brandpodcastsummit.com/replays/.
Podcast Success = Business Success
As Paul Riismandel from Signal Hill Insights said in his presentation, “Am I Doing This Right? Presenting: The 2025 Branded Podcast Benchmarks Report”: “To get what WE want, we have to deliver what AUDIENCES want.”
For brands launching their own podcast, business success is directly tied to the success of your podcast. When a brand sets out to make their own show, they universally want listeners of the podcast to walk away with a more favourable perspective of the brand. But to achieve this “halo effect,” you must first create a podcast that resonates with your audience. According to Signal Hill’s research, the top driver for creating this “halo effect” for brands is keeping the audience’s attention for the entire episode. So how do you do this? First, get to know your audience. Then, create a show that covers topics your audience finds interesting– the key factor determining listener attention is whether or not they are interested in the topics covered. Finally, make the podcast entertaining. As Paul says, this doesn’t mean it needs to be a “laugh riot”. But injecting storytelling, real stakes, and engaging speakers will help keep listeners tuned in and, in turn, drive real results for your business.
Create a Holistic Measurement Plan
Many aren’t aware of the tools at our disposal to measure the return on a branded podcast (even those working in brand podcasting), but the truth is that we do have the tools we need to create a clear picture of the effectiveness of brand podcasts. Every brand podcast has a different goal, so the tools we use to measure effectiveness definitely differ. But by combining the tools at our disposal, we can collect both qualitative and quantitative data to create a clear picture of the success of the podcast. Here’s some tools we should be combining to understand our podcast:
- Reach: downloads, streams, YouTube views
- Engagement: Spotify and Apple consumption rates
- Listener Sentiment: listener surveys, reviews, comments
- Brand Impact: brand lift studies (measuring awareness, favorability, purchase intent)
- Pixel Conversion: pixel attribution (tracking listeners to website visits, searches or purchases)
- Direct Conversion: guests or listeners cite the podcast directly as cause for becoming clients
Measurement is incredibly important for brands. During the panel conversation, “Measuring the ROI of Your Branded Podcast,” Jamie Roô, Head of Digital Content for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, summed things up nicely:
“Making good content is really fun. But we’re not media companies. Most of the time, we’re not making them to sell advertising on, right? We’re not generating revenue from advertising from our podcasts. We’re doing it for some business reason, and I think to continue to sustain this type of project, you have to stay really tight with what your strategy is from the outset and what the strategy needs to be to continue going forward.”
Branded Podcasts Should Be as Good as Any Podcast
Building off of this, another takeaway that came up again and again at the Summit? Your branded podcast needs to be just as good as any other podcast out there. It shouldn’t feel like a “branded podcast”. During the “Think Outside the Box in B2B Podcasting” session, all three speakers stressed that they’ve had success with their podcasts by keeping the brand touch light. Instead, they’ve focused on creating shows their target audience will love, and benefited from the halo effect.
- Red Hat created a storytelling documentary podcast: “One of the things we kept hearing were stories of people learning their first programming language, or people just geeking out about the history of tech. We started realizing that software developers are, one, really great storytellers. And two, really love hearing stories.”
- Early Warning created a True Crime podcast: “The impetus was really human fascination with true crime. We see it’s all over Netflix, it’s Dateline, audiences love it.”
- Atlassian created a serialized non-fiction podcast and a debate-style show: “If we’re introducing ourselves to folks for the first time, what’s the best way to do it? Is it to jump right in, mid-funnel, and talk about the newest things about our products? Probably not.”
Later, Shreya Sharma stressed this point further during the “How to Get People to Actually Listen to Your Podcast” session: “If you’re making a branded show, people should not be able to tell the difference between a branded and non-branded show… Don’t think of your branded podcast as a 40-minute long advertisement. Think of it as content.”
No More Experts Talking About Topics
As discussed above, successful podcasts offer a creative premise. As we saw in our panel about thinking outside the box in B2B podcasting, Red Hat, Atlassian and Early Warning all took a creative approach and developed podcasts that are not the standard interview podcast with experts in their niche industries. In the session “Playing Favorites: Why Most Shows Fail to Earn Fans (and how to fix the problem before it starts),” Jay Acunzo warned against creating commodified content, mimicking what all your competitors are doing. He shared tips for developing a podcast with a premise– and this means NOT making a show that’s just “talking topics with experts”. He shared his audience resonance pyramid, which requires coming up with a show that is relevant, enjoyable, impactful and personal. A podcast needs all these things– needs a unique premise– to stand out and, in turn, be successful.
For Humans, By Humans (FHBH)
AI is a huge topic of discussion currently. Many creatives are afraid of losing their jobs. Lots of businesses are looking at automation solutions to speed things up or cut costs. So, Bridget Todd’s smart and precise presentation on “When Can AI Make Your Podcast Better? (And When Might It Make It Worse)” was reassuring and clarifying. Bridget stressed that Generative AI is capable of remarkable things when it comes to audio production. But it isn’t capable of replacing human producers. AI tools are useful for humans to create podcasts, but podcast consumers listen to podcasts to connect with real humans. If you take that away and automate too much, listeners notice– and they don’t like it! Bridget called this “For Humans, By Human,” or FHBH. Listeners are clear that they do not want fully AI generated audio. This review Bridget shared from an AI-generated podcast really sums things up nicely: “If it’s not worth your effort, it’s probably not worth my time.” If you can’t invest the time to produce the podcast, why should your listeners invest their time in listening?
You Need to Know Your Audience
One of the biggest takeaways from the entire event was the importance of really getting to know your audience. It came up again and again, in multiple sessions:
- Paul Riismandel stressed how important it is to know your audience so you can create a podcast that resonates with them
- Jenny Barber shared how REI thinks about their audience segments, and creates distinct shows to target each segment, building an entire podcast network for the brand
- Shreya Sharma and Hannah Southern stressed the importance of building an audience profile to learn what other content your target listeners are consuming, so you can then build a smart marketing strategy to reach them
- Brent Simoneaux shared how Red Hat used listener surveys to understand the topics their target audience would want covered on future episodes of their podcast
Whether you use listener surveys, polls, social media, or working with an audience research firm, truly understanding your audience is essential to building a successful branded podcast! As Brent Simoneaux of Red Hat said, “They need to know, ‘You speak my language. We are of the same group.’”
Make Your Podcast Part of a Multi-Platform Strategy
With all of the work you’re putting in to make your podcast, why wouldn’t you stretch that content across other channels? The New York Times are some of the best at translating their storytelling across multiple different mediums, so it was interesting to hear Raquel Bubar discuss, during her session “From Podcast to Print: Unlocking the full potential of your brand storytelling”: “To encourage deeper engagement, we are building storytelling that works across all the corners of the New York Times.”
You can leverage the storytelling, research, and creativity that goes into your podcast, and turn episodes into a blog post, or a series of Instagram stories, or a LinkedIn article. And this approach works both ways– why not take a TV or social media campaign into a podcast series where you can dive even deeper and spend even more time engaging your audience? Creating a 360-strategy to meet your audience where they are will help reinforce your brand’s values and messaging across all touchpoints with your brand.
Taking a 360 approach with your podcast can also help you turn your listeners into a community, deepening your relationship with your target audience. During the “Extreme Makeover: Podcast Edition” session, we heard Head of Audience Development Hannah Southern recommend our guest start a book club over social media based on each episode of the podcast to further the connection with listeners.
Take the Time to Do Things Right
Another important takeaway from the Summit was the importance of taking the time to do things right. By this, I mean making sure that you’re thinking about all aspects of the show, and investing the time (or resources) to make sure your podcast quality reflects your brand in the best light possible. We heard from three talented Sound Designers during “Why Your Podcast Needs to Sound Better: The Science & Art of Good Audio,” who demonstrated the impact sound design has on your overall podcast. All three shared samples of their work, demonstrating how music, sound effects, mixing, and pacing can all dramatically alter the impact of audio. This is an aspect lots of brands overlook, focusing on the content of what is being said, without considering how it’s being received. But Sound Design can completely alter the impression a listener will have of your tone. Will they associate you with uplifting, inspirational stories? Serious news they can trust? Will they view you as fun collaborators they’d like to work with? All of these factors are influenced by the Sound Designer’s touch.
Similarly, the visual branding of a podcast is often overlooked or forgotten about until the last minute. But the truth is that the artwork is the first impression a listener will have of your podcast! During the “Podcast Artwork Best Practices” session, Creative Director Sami Wittwer shared tips on building a visual language for your podcast that accurately reflects the listening experience. While it’s often an afterthought, your podcast’s visual branding can make-or-break someone’s decision to click play on your show– it’s definitely not something you want to overlook.
Develop a Video Strategy That Works for Your Goals
While video is not a new thing in podcasting, it is becoming increasingly important. Sounds Profitable prepared a presentation and panel on “Video Podcasting: Trends, Insights & Best Practices” featuring four different guests with very different perspectives and experiences with video podcasting. The overwhelming takeaway for me was that there is no single correct strategy that will work for every single podcast. Different podcasts have different goals, and require different video strategies. Stephanie Chan from YouTube shared, “Just start where you can. It’s better for you to get onto YouTube in whatever form you can today, rather than stay on the sidelines until you have what you call a ‘perfect video’… Video’s really a spectrum. If you want to start exploring video, there are a lot of different approaches that we’ve seen work on the platform.” This doesn’t mean going forward with a poorly thought out strategy or hastily created content. But it may mean that you start recording video and editing short video clips for YouTube Shorts, rather than making full-length video clips. It might mean uploading your full-length audio episodes with a static background as a video file on YouTube, to increase discoverability. Maybe that means only publishing full-length video episodes occasionally, for special episodes. Any of these options could lead to podcast success, and give you the opportunity to start off slow and build on your video strategy from there.
Sign up for the newsletter for the latest brand storytelling and podcast inspiration, insights, right in your inbox, every two weeks. We promise to never spam you.