Somewhere, right now, a content manager is editing episode 8 of a podcast that has 94 listeners. Eighty of those are employees. The remaining fourteen are podcast guests’ parents and a bot from Jakarta. The podcast has a trailer episode, artwork designed by the same agency that did the website rebrand, and launched with enormous enthusiasm in Q3 of 2022. The last episode was recorded in February 2023 and is “in post-production.” This is the brand podcast — the rooftop bar of content marketing: everyone thinks it’s a great idea, but the execution is exhausting and the ROI is impossible to justify.
How It Starts
The brand podcast always begins with a meeting in which someone says, “We should have a podcast.” This is received with immediate enthusiasm because everyone has a favorite podcast and believes, on some level, that they could be an interesting host. Nobody in the room has ever produced audio content. Nobody knows what it costs. Nobody asks. The mandate is appropriately ambitious: a weekly show exploring “the intersection of [industry] and culture.” The host will be the CEO, who loves to talk and has opinions. It will “build community,” “establish authority,” and “drive brand awareness.” It will, almost certainly, not do any of these things. What it will do is teach the marketing team a great deal about audio production, interviewer technique, show notes formatting, and the difference between 44.1kHz and 48kHz — knowledge they will apply to a podcast that will be cancelled within 18 months.
The Production Reality
Nobody tells you how hard it is to produce a good podcast until you’re already committed. The recording is the easy part. The hard part: pre-interviewing guests, scheduling disasters, sound quality management (your CEO records from a tiled bathroom with AirPods), editing the pauses and the tangents about a recent flight delay, writing episode descriptions, creating audiograms for LinkedIn, uploading to all platforms, sending the newsletter — and somehow repeating this every single week. The result: four excellent episodes, two acceptable ones, and then the rhythm breaks when the CEO cancels two recording sessions in a row and the content manager is reassigned to a product launch. The podcast enters “hiatus.” It is never officially announced. It is never officially ended. The Spreadsheet Sloth knows how this goes. It’s tracked the “episodes published” column. The cells below row 8 have been empty for fourteen months.
What Nobody Measures
Brand podcasts are rarely evaluated on listener numbers because the numbers are terrible and everyone knows it. Instead, they’re evaluated on softer metrics: qualitative feedback from the CEO who “loves doing it,” the fact that two podcast guests became customers (correlation, causation, who cares), and a LinkedIn post about the podcast that got 200 likes. This is not measurement. It’s selective data gathering in service of continuing something that the CMO announced publicly and cannot be killed without someone losing face. The podcast has become undead: not alive enough to grow, not dead enough to bury. Run the honest number: total downloads divided by total production cost. Compare it to every other content format you produce. The podcast will come last. It will still not be cancelled.
The Podcast That Actually Works
There are brand podcasts that work. They share characteristics almost never present in the initial pitch: a specific niche audience, a distinctive point of view, a host who is genuinely good at interviewing, a production schedule that matches actual capacity (monthly, not weekly), and a realistic distribution strategy. None of these things are exciting to pitch. “We’ll release one episode a month, specifically for procurement professionals in the pharmaceutical sector, with a host who isn’t the CEO” is the correct brief. It is never the brief that gets approved. The approved brief is “thought leadership at the intersection of [industry] and the future.” And so the cycle continues. Get the merch for people who’ve learned this the hard way at nobriefsclub.com/shop.
