Condé Nast Podcasts – Kristina Pedicone

Condé Nast

Podcast Discovery and Standardization

Overview

Following podcast growth trends and internal development efforts, our product team partnered with the Audio Development and Audience Development teams to establish a suite of features, functionality, and best practices to bring this major off-platform touch point for brands, into the Condé Nast ecosystem.

Key to this work was establishing a global content type for podcasts, bringing automation and consistency to directory pages, creating dedicated podcast detail pages with O&O recirculation opportunities, and improving overall user journeys. Along with unifying the Condé Nast podcast experience globally, as brands rolled out these new capabilities they saw an average increase of 2-3x in UVs, as well as an increase in time spent.

Key Services

UX/UI

Design System

Audience Growth

Strategy

Additional Info

Objective

Podcasts are an increasingly important channel for Condé Nast brands to connect with their audiences. In 2022 alone, CN had 16 active podcast series across 7 brands, launched a new slate of podcasts, released 500+ episodes, and grew downloads by 17%. Following those growth trends, our internal task force—comprised of the Audio & Video Development, Audience Development, and Vanity Fair Product and Editorial teams—set out to explore ways to bring consistency to this key content type across brand sites, and elevate the overall discoverability of each brand’s podcast offerings.

Process

Our work began with a thorough audit of how podcasts were currently being treated across the major brands to bring our key opportunity areas to light. From there, through several hands-on workshops, our multifunctional team worked towards establishing a global strategic framework for organizing the podcast content type and its attributes, plus supplementary components, to be used by all brands.

We made critical UX updates to improve overall user journeys by establishing an all-podcasts listing page and elevating this page to navigation menus. This allowed us to unify the URL structures for the individual podcast detail pages for SEO and deep-linking improvement, as well as provide one central and consistent place for users to find all of a brand's podcast offerings. Additionally, we introduced streamlined podcast detail pages, that are automatically populated by both the podcast content type and editorially controlled content tags. Along with information about the podcast itself, the detail pages also surface owned-and-operated recirculation links—like related articles—which lead to increased time spent, plus new ad and sponsor opportunities, leading to increased revenue.

Another small but critical update we made was codifying the language used in the various CTAs to better align with user expectation—in particular, more clearly differentiating between listening and subscribing actions. Importantly, we also implemented Chartable's SmartLinks which provide trackable URLs that automatically route listeners to the podcast in the app or player native to their device, as well as provide detailed analytics on both clicks and downloads.

Result

After a month of implementing these new capabilities on Vanity Fair, we exceeded our target benchmark +25% UVs to the podcast listing page, and saw an average increase of +37%. And since the initial launch of these capabilities on VF at the end of 2022, they have subsequently been rolled out to 8 brands and counting—across both domestic and international markets.

Being able to bring this major off-platform touch point into the Condé Nast product ecosystem was a win, not just for improving metrics and revenue opportunities, but also for improving how we track and monitor user engagement with podcasts as a whole, unlocking a lot of potential for the future growth and expansion of these capabilities.

Podcasts are an increasingly important channel for Condé Nast brands to connect with their audiences. Following growth trends, our team set out to explore ways to bring consistency to this key content type across brand sites, and elevate the overall discoverability of each brand’s podcast offerings.

After a thorough audit and several hands-on workshops, our multifunctional team established a global strategic framework for organizing the podcast content type and its attributes, plus supplementry components to be used by all brands.

We made critical UX updates to improve overall user journeys by establishing an all-podcasts listing page and elevating this page to navigation menus. This allowed us to unify the URL structures for the individual podcast detail pages for SEO and deep-linking improvement, as well as provide one central and consistent place for users to find all of a brand's podcast offerings.

We streamlined the podcast detail pages as well, which are auto populated by the podcast content type as well as editorially controlled content tags.

Along with info about the podcast, these pages also surface O&O recirculation links—like related articles—which lead to increased time spent, plus new ad and sponsor opportunities.

We also implemented Chartable's SmartLinks in our CTAs, which provide trackable URLs that automatically route listeners to the podcast in the app or player native to their device, as well as provide detailed analytics on both clicks and downloads.

With an eye towards global consistency, along with our product documentation we also produced step-by-step guides for editors to eliminate confusion, keep teams aligned, and accelerate the adoption of these new capabilities.

Being able to bring this major off-platform touch point into the Condé Nast product ecosystem was a win—not just for improving metrics and revenue opportunities—but also for improving how we track and monitor user engagement with podcasts as a whole, unlocking a lot of potential for the future growth and expansion of these capabilities.