Audience Connection

What if the biggest mistake brands make isn’t failing to go viral, but believing they could control it in the first place? Oliver Atkinson sits down with Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, to explore why “going viral” is the wrong goal, and what fandom actually asks of a brand. Jenkins made fandom a serious subject with his 1992 book Textual Poachers, and he argues the word viral describes a level of control brands lost decades ago. The conversation is thick with examples. Jenkins unpacks why Lotso, a minor Toy Story villain, is everywhere in China while unknown in the US, and what that reveals about fandom being built by fans, not brands. He draws the sharp line between a loyal customer (his toilet paper) and a fan (his Lego), and explains the “moral economy” of trust that makes audiences feel entitled to content when brands withhold it. He praises Remington’s playful “how does Superman shave?” campaign and Lego’s Braille instructions, born from a blind fan’s grassroots fix, then dissects where A24 went wrong issuing takedowns to the very Backrooms community that fed its biggest hit. Survivor’s broken promise to fans gets the same treatment. With fans able to abandon a brand “within hours” in the social media age, this episode is for marketers, creatives, leaders and internal comms teams. The takeaway: stop shouting at the cocktail party. As Jenkins puts it, “companies don’t create fans, they court them.” Follow Audience Connection Podcast: 🌐 Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international 🦋 BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social

Lydia Chan sits down with Raelene Metlitzky, Head of Content and Editorial at IAG, Australia's largest insurer, to explore why brand storytelling isn't the story of your brand, but a story that's on brand. It's a distinction Raelene has built a career on, moving from theatre to radio journalism to leading brand storytelling inside a 100-year-old insurance business. The centrepiece is A Fire Inside, the feature-length documentary Raelene drove about Australia's Black Summer bushfires. Funded by an insurer, it reached over 50 million people, became a number one film on a major streaming network, and grew into an ecosystem of 900 pieces of content, a book, a school curriculum, and a movement to build the country's largest organisation of helpers. Raelene explains how it started not with a piece of content but with a community: "what we wanted to build was a community, an advocacy piece, a shared value system." The conversation gets specific about the attention deficit economy. Raelene cites the drop in human attention span from 12 seconds to 8.2 over a decade, now below a goldfish, and McKinsey's finding of a roughly 25,000% rise in content volume over ten years while watch time per person stays flat. Her answer is to narrowcast, not broadcast, and to treat acts over ads. She walks through the Queensland "Bruce Highway Helpers" campaign, an advocacy play with a heritage media partner that delivered the brand's first lift in consideration in 20 years. Along the way: why brands should become the show rather than interrupt it, why staff pride is an underrated metric, and why trust should be treated as a strategic growth lever. Her through-line is a challenge to every marketer chasing eyeballs: "instead of fighting for attention, let's fight for alignment." This one is for marketers, creatives, leaders, and internal comms teams who want to earn attention rather than take it, and build loyalty that lasts. Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

What if the biggest barrier to your marketing isn't your budget or your production values, but the fact that you're speaking to the 5% of the brain that's actually paying attention? Oliver Atkinson sits down with Nancy Harhut, author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing and founder of HBT Marketing, to explore why the same campaign, with a little science layered on top, can perform dramatically better. Nancy has built a career on turning behavioral science into double and triple-digit lifts, and she brings the receipts. She walks through the life insurance campaign that drove a 469% sales lift using extremist aversion, the pull of the magnetic middle. She unpacks the nationwide reciprocity play, a framed New Yorker cartoon with the recipient's name in the caption, that generated $68 million in incremental revenue. Along the way she breaks down the power words that quietly move people: why "because" is an automatic compliance trigger, why "small $5 shipping fee" beat "$5 shipping fee" by 20%, and why the BYAF technique ("but you are free") can double response. She and Oliver get into the autonomy bias behind disabled crosswalk buttons, the labeling effect that lifted voter turnout by 15%, and why emotional B2B headlines still outperform rational ones. If you're a marketer, creative director, or brand strategist, this one is dense with tactics you can test tomorrow. The through-line: most people decide on autopilot, so stop writing for the conscious 5%. Learn more about Nancy Harhut: 🌐 https://www.hbtmktg.com/ 📸 LinkedIn: Nancy Harhut Follow Audience Connection Podcast: 🌐 Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international 🦋 BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

In this episode of Audience Connection, Lydia Chan sits down with Kristen Berke, VP of Entertainment and Branded Content Partnerships at LA Times Studio, to unpack a campaign that on paper shouldn't have worked, and absolutely did. The campaign, Diaries of Transformation, was produced for enterprise AI company Publicis Sapient, a brand whose website talks about agents, production-grade software, and IT automation. Instead of a product tutorial, Kristen's team put out an open call for filmmakers, received over 100 submissions, and selected five short documentaries (a wildlife photographer, the last of the lighthouse keepers, an environmentalist) where the brand appeared only in the title card as a co-executive producer. No product placement, no features, no paid media. Kristen traces how branded content has shifted from "presented by" to genuine EP credit, why she leaned on editorial's passion-point data as a "guiding light," and how the films' earned reach came almost entirely from a fiercely supportive filmmaker community resharing each other's work. She's candid that it was partly "lightning in a bottle," but the framework is turnkey: start with the brand's four-to-seven-word mission, then find the human story that ties back to it. With a 147-year-old newsroom that has 45 Pulitzer Prizes behind it, Berke makes the case that most teams over-invest in impressions while starving the work itself, and that trust, not scale, is the real product. Her closing takeaway: bigger risks tend to bring greater rewards. https://www.latimes.com/diaries-of-transformation Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

Lydia Chan sits down with Tori Jackson, Senior Manager of Partnerships and Commercial Strategy at Sundial Media and Technology Group — home to Essence, Refinery29 and Beauty Con — to explore how brands earn real loyalty from multicultural audiences they've historically underinvested in and misunderstood. Tori's central argument is a refusal to flatten: a Black woman from Harlem and a Black woman from Kansas City are not the same consumer, and a strategy that can't tell them apart has already lost both. Drawing on a deliberately non-linear career — Harlem, music labels, fashion PR, cannabis, and now multicultural media — she makes the case for "pick a lane and stay in it," arguing that Black women are simultaneously the most cynical and the most loyal consumers, and that any drift from who you said you were reads as betrayal. She holds up Skims as a masterclass in reaching audiences with a general distaste for the face of the brand but who "can't deny the product," dismantles the "cultural moments trap" (the Juneteenth-then-silence pattern), and champions diversity in the room over diversity in the asset. Her creative test is refreshingly human: will someone cry? One participant said a campaign call "felt like a therapy session" — exactly the connection she's chasing. With Black spending power near $1.6 trillion yet only roughly 5% of marketing spend reaching Black, Latino and Asian audiences (per a 2023 report), the cost of getting this wrong is enormous. For marketers, brand leaders, and strategists, it's a clear-eyed playbook on segmentation, consistency, and building for longevity over quick hits. Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.