Telling good stories is one of our favorite things to do. Combine that passion with our love of technology, media, travel, interesting subject matter and what have you got? The perfect recipe for podcast production.
An informed direction
The sheer amount of stories Hormel has to share along with the incredible people at those stories’ hearts seems tailor made for an audio medium. There’s a personal connection you get when you experience real people conversing that can sometimes be missed in other forms of storytelling. That personal connection and transparency is something we and Hormel value and are actively working to elevate both in our large scale projects and in our everyday communications with consumers. From early on in the process it was obvious that creating a podcast made a lot of sense.
Story hunting
Our team has quite a bit of experience in podcasting and radio (in fact, one member of the ASM team recently hopped on a plane to Alaska to run a radio station there full time). This knowledge base, along with our past experiences and relationship with the Hormel team, allowed us to hit the ground running and start finding the sort of impactful stories we knew were perfect for this project. Once we decided we wanted to tell stories that highlight the people at the heart of Hormel Foods and their diverse and interesting experiences, we got to work tracking them down.
Journalist and Futurist Ethan Watters took the lead and got in touch with several of these persons of interests, capturing their thoughts, opinions, and stories on tape. From the awe inspiring fields and farmland of the midwest to the immaculate vineyards of the west coast, from the bustling streets of Chinatown in New York, to the majestic mountains of Colorado our team went and interviewed passionate people of all backgrounds, titles, and professions. From those interviews, the first season of Hormel Foods’ “Our Food Journey Podcast” was born.
The cutting room floor
Interviewing folks and gathering audio is by no means the end of the process, of course. Once all of that material has been collected, you’ve got to put it together. We like to do that thinking on paper first, and once we’ve got a plan totally drafted up in writing, we cut it all together into a complete stand-alone piece of content. This is when it gets fun for some of the more technically inclined members of the Attention Span crew. There’s nothing more satisfying for an engineer or designer than starting out with raw materials and constructing something out of them that really works.
3… 2… 1… Launch!
The last, and realistically most important part of the podcasting, or any artistic, process is sharing your work. Making sure that people have access to it and can experience and share it themselves. Along with planning and helping execute an internal launch of the podcast which included; digital and print signage, events, and more, we also helped plan, create, and execute the external launch which involved all the classics. Social media outreach, making it available on all the major podcasting platforms, and a press release, along with some newer hits like direct to fan communication using our custom built web app Fanatical.
Now that the podcast has launched and our work is complete, it’s time to get back to work and develop season 2 and beyond!