Faced with rapid growth and higher stakes advertising conversations Shameless Media needed solid facts to empower them to collaborate with brands that aligned with their platform. WhalePod worked with Zara and Michelle of Shameless media, to build a comprehensive story of who their listeners are and the value of their audience, which yielded immediate credibility in brand conversations and over 3000 new subscribers to their mailing list.

IMPACT AT A GLANCE

500

High-Value Listeners Identified

3000

New Email Subscribers

5000

Listeners Providing Actionable Information

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The Situation

Zara and Michelle of Shameless Media are re-defining what it means to be a podcaster. They have gone beyond pure podcasts by creating a platform that extends into social media and the lives of their listeners. Daily they are on their facebook group of 30K members having conversations with their listeners all while producing multiple podcasts from beginning to end. This effort has resulted in all of the podcasts they have produced regularly appearing at the top of the podcast charts.

The rapid growth of their podcast platform has attracted the attention of increasingly large brands, with this comes an expectation of solid facts backing up claims of the value of their audience.

To communicate the value of its audience to the right brands, Whalepod and Shameless Media collaborated to analyse the data its podcast platform produces to build a comprehensive story of who the Shameless Listener is and why they are so valuable.

Our Approach

After a number of design conversations, we were able to breakdown the questions that Zara and Michelle most needed answers to. One of the difficulties of podcast analytics is the limited range of data that the user-facing podcast platforms provide. Luckily the effort of Zara and Michelle to cultivate an engaged community meant that a rich source of information was there for us to explore.

The break down of how the project progressed can be summarised by the following 3 stage approach:

WhalePod Recommendations

Through the analysis, it became immediately clear that the story Shameless Media has been telling about who its audience is, was mirrored in the data.

On an emotional level, the sentiment analysis of its facebook group provided proof of the positive and caring community they have built.

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The Insights Story painted a similar picture with it confirming a lot of what Zara and Michelle knew about the positivity of their community. More importantly, the insights shed light on specific figures that can now be used in brand conversations and to drive their strategic vision.

An example of an actionable data-informed recommendation was for Shameless to focus their video content expansion into IG TV to leverage the social media habits of their audience.

The Results

Actionable Insights to Empower Shameless Media in brand conversations

Even before completion Zara and Michelle provided feedback that the insights generated proved invaluable in a brand conversation with a big 4 bank. This was only possible due to the co-designing nature of the project, providing insights and updates through the process.

500 High-Value Listeners identified

These listeners can be used for future targeted campaigns and as a template for how to produce more of these listeners.

3000 new mailing list subscribers

These are particularly valuable as they are part of the community completely controlled by Shameless independent of any external platform.

5000 data points providing vision and clarity for the shameless media strategic vision

Shameless is now able to supplement its strategic vision with insights into what their audience wants.