Condé Nast

Bringing standardization and consistency to the podcast experience across brands. 

Problem

In 2022 alone, Condé Nast had 16 active podcasts across 7 brands, released 500+ episodes, and grew downloads by 17%. But with inconsistent treatment of podcast content across brand sites—and sometimes within a brand—discovery was muddled and user journeys were confusing, resulting in low user engagement with podcast content within the platform.

Objective

Partner with Audio Development, Audience Development, and Editorial teams to establish a suite of features, functionality and best practices for organizing the podcast content type across brand sites, elevate the overall discoverability of each brand’s podcast offerings, and better integrate these key touchpoints into the Condé Nast ecosystem.

Key Results

After one month, we exceeded our target of +25% UVs to the podcast listing page, and saw an average increase of +35% UVs. 

Additionally, by establishing dedicated details pages for podcasts we created O&O recirculation paths which led to increased time spent as well as new ad and sponsor opportunities.

After launching on Vanity Fair, these capabilities have since been rolled out to 8 more brands and counting.

Background

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.

Product Definition

After a thorough audit and several hands-on workshops, our cross-functional team established a framework for organizing a global content type for podcasts and their attributes. Our work included bringing automation and consistency to the population of podcast listings pages, establishing dedicated podcast details pages, and building supplementry recirculation components.

Navigation & Discovery

We also made critical UX updates to improve overall user journeys by establishing a consistent organizational structure for podcasts and adding entrypoints 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 dedicated place for users to find all of a brand's podcast offerings.

Podcast Detail Pages

We streamlined the design of 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. 

Now, as a global content type with a dedicated detail page, podcasts can be cross-promoted and shared in articles, newsletters, and on social.

Product Analytics

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.

Another small but critical update we made during this phase of our work, 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.

Documentation

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. 

Outcome

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

© 2025 Kristina Pedicone