William Tyree (00:04):

Welcome to the Brand Intelligence Podcast, the show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands. I’m your co-host, William Tyree, and today we’ll look at how marketing teams are using new media strategies to shape brand image, create awareness and engagement with our audience. Joining me today is Ian Faison, CEO of enterprise podcast production company Caspian Studios. Just a few weeks ago, one of Ian’s podcasts reached number one on Apple Podcast charts out of literally millions of podcasts. To get there, he used Hollywood style storytelling complete with big name actors that will use that example to talk about the future of brand marketing and brand management. Welcome, Ian. Great to see you.

Ian Faison (00:43):

Yeah, great to see you as well.

William Tyree (00:44):

Welcome to the podcast. So Ian, before we dive into your amazing story, we’d like to ask guests to give us a theme song. So if you were walking on stage today, what would your walkout song be?

Ian Faison (00:55):

So I have to do something that would make my son happy two and a half, and I listen to his favorite songs all the time. So it would have to be I’m still standing by Elton John because that’s my son’s favorite song and that’s what it feels like to be a marketer sometimes just stand standing. My other option was try everything because that’s one of his other’s favorite songs, which also kind of feels like marketing sometimes if we feel like we try everything.

William Tyree (01:29):

I love that. That’s a great song. And it’s actually timely. I just watched Elton Johnny was on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction inducted Bernie, so that was actually pretty moving. I’m sure he would be very happy to hear that.

Ian Faison (01:41):

Indeed.

William Tyree (01:42):

I love it. Awesome. Well, why don’t you tell us what Caspian Studio does? How did it start? How has it scaled?

Ian Faison (01:48):

Yeah, so we are a B2B video podcast as a service company, and so we have 65 customers that are primarily B2B Tech companies that are creating podcasts and video series. And a lot of those are interview style, some are blended narratives, some are scripted, and then two of them are fiction series, which I know we’re going to talk about here in a little bit. I started a few years ago after I had found an immediate company and I had been talking to a bunch of CMOs and marketing leaders that were my pals. They’re like, Hey, you should do all this stuff, but just for other people instead of from a media perspective. And I had the idea of podcast as a service for B2B and the rest is history.

William Tyree (02:30):

Awesome. In your view, what role do podcasts have today in terms of enterprise brand strategy and brand marketing?

Ian Faison (02:38):

So I think about it a lot because it’s our business, but I think it starts with something that’s like before a podcast series. I think it starts with this idea of serialised content. And so I just wrote a book about this called the Serialised Content Framework where we basically studied what Hollywood is doing, what Netflix is doing, what Hulu has been doing, and apps like TikTok and all of that. And what has become really clear is that serialised content is eating the world, which is everyone has been pushing to make series and serialised content rather than one-off stuff. And so when you look at the B2B landscape, so often we would do stuff that is very much one-off like a single webinar or a single blog post. But then when you look at the serialised content that’s been out there, that works really well, you think of Dreamforce, which is a conference, but it’s really a series.

(03:40):

It’s a series that happens every year or if you were to look at the portfolio of content that Salesforce pushed to was Salesforce plus, which is a portfolio of content. And if you look at a lot of the B2B companies that are working really well, they’ve been making series, and a lot of those are podcasts or video series or video podcasts or whatever you want to call it. Some of them are short form, some are long form, some are scripted, some are narratives, some are interview style, some are shorter episodes, some are longer episodes, some are miniseries. But the key there is that it’s something that you subscribe to usually in app, whether that’s Apple Podcasts or YouTube or Spotify or whatever. It’s stuff that you can also subscribe on their website potentially. And it’s something that you just build a relationship over time, and it doesn’t mean that you need to listen to every single episode, but people know that it’s out there, it’s going, and then you see an episode that you like and you say, oh, I’m going to go listen to that.

(04:40):

And it’s way easier to build series. And Hollywood have shifted billions of dollars into series for that exact reason. It is way easier to market number two than it is to market something that is brand new. And I think that this is just something that B2B really hasn’t done a lot of and they’re starting to more and more and brands are starting to do this more and more. And if you look at things like the Lego movie or Barbie, which recently came out, which I think Barbie is broken every single record and they’re going to make a bunch more of that sort of stuff. This is something where they’ve already built a brand and then they’re creating a series and something that you can engage with on an ongoing basis. It’s kind of obvious when you say it, but you need to have a clear sort of own media strategy and you need to be thinking about series and podcast is just one of the ways that you can tell series, but it’s really effective and we can get into that too.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between Ian Faison and William Tyree…