More Than Meets The Ear Series – Case Study: How We Did It

For Molson Coors, successful podcast advertising starts with getting “a can in the hand” of a podcast host.

Two years ago, Molson Coors made a big decision: It decided to leap into podcast advertising as part of a concerted effort to shake up the beverage company’s traditional marketing strategy. Molson Coors turned to ARM to help them navigate this relatively new avenue, where marketing messages are entwined with podcast hosts’ unique personalities, and advertising opportunities can expand well beyond a static 30-second spot.

Kevin Welsh, Molson Coors’ senior marketing manager, explains what was behind the company’s foray into the podcast space, and why this personality-driven medium can offer brands a unique way to reach new consumers.

What was the genesis of Molson Coors’ podcast strategy?

When Michelle St. Jacques joined the team as chief marketing officer, she set our marketing team on an inspired journey rooted around a new market vision. A key pillar of that was enabling our brands to move at the speed of culture and doing things worth talking about. That led us to see podcasts as a space that could deliver on many of those areas for us. Podcasts were a wide-open space—many of our competitors weren’t there yet—and we saw that consumers were spending more and more time listening to podcasts.

Which consumers are you trying to reach?

Our core target is those people that are already drinking our products, and they could really skew at any age. But as we try to build our brands for the future, we need to allocate a good portion of our plans to recruiting a growth consumer. For most brands, that’s going to be a little younger consumer.

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