“You really have to check out…”
Whenever my friends used to say this, the recommendation at the end of the sentence would be a restaurant or bar or TV show. Now, it’s a podcast. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Over the last decade, audio storytelling—one of our oldest mediums—has seen an unprecedented explosion in popularity. And it’s a trend that brands can’t ignore—especially after GE’s podcast, The Message, reached the branded content singularity by becoming the most popular podcast in the iTunes store.
This summer, I sat down at the Cannes Lions Creativity Festival with Hernan Lopez, CEO and Founder of Wondery, an upstart podcast network backed by Fox with big visions for the future of storytelling. Check out the clip below, which was created for our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.
Transcript:
Joe Lazauskas: Hi everyone and welcome to Accountable Innovation. I’m Joe Lazauskas, the editor-in-chief of Contently, and I’m here with Hernan Lopez, the CEO and founder of Wondery, the podcast company that’s taking Cannes by storm.
Hernan, thank you so much for being here with me.
Hernan Lopez: Thank you so much. What a great set-up.
Joe: Yeah, this is not too bad. You had your keynote yesterday, the first keynote in Cannes history in pitch blackness. How was that? Was it weird? Did people freak out? Start yelling out, “where are things?”
Hernan: No. People were very much into it. Obviously, we couldn’t completely turn the lights off for security, so what we did instead is we gave people eye masks. And I should say what’s the premise of it. Because we are all about audio storytelling and…
