Manuel Bartual and Carmen Pacheco in front of Lake Lugano in Switzerland, during their trip in 2022 to prepare the ‘Podcast’ sponsored by ‘Blum’.Switzerland Tourism
The look usually evokes a desire to travel, to experience new tastes and smells. But the Spanish podcast also relies on sound to awaken this desire. It is an industry that continues to grow both in terms of content and business. It shows in the creativity of the sponsored content that chose to invest in the solid tourism formula. Tourist offices, airlines and other companies in the sector are using travelers’ own curiosity to position themselves in a format yet to be explored.
In Spain, 59% of brands use online audio in their marketing strategy, the Bookwire platform estimated last year. And the advertising linked to podcasts and digital radio ended in 2021 with a growth of around 38.5% in our country, according to a market study by Atresmedia Publicidad prepared by Price Waterhouse Coopers.
Turismo de Suiza decided to unite the concept of podcast, travel and branded content through a fictional story that would allow the listener to travel to several of its museums and cities. Clara Pastor, an art history student, disappears while writing her thesis on Ursula Blum, an avant-garde painter of the 20th century. Five years later, journalist Emma Castillo decides to travel to the Alpine country to continue Clara’s investigation and share what she discovers about the mystery surrounding the two women in a podcast. The nine-episode novel created by Carmen Pacheco and Manuel Bartual for the podcast and audio documentary label El Extraordinario won the Best Branded Award a few weeks ago at the second edition of the Ondas Globales Podcast Awards.
Sandra Babey, Suiza Turismo’s director for Spain and Portugal, explains that her company chose to give the podcast’s creators almost absolute freedom, so that the end result would be more organic than advertising and the content would become something very special that it would have want to release alone, even if it wasn’t sponsored material. “When creating branded content, we often tend to come under certain pressures and force the brand and logo to appear too strong. The wedge is tiring and invasive. As a brand, you have to trust and let things go while you contribute your knowledge,” she said in a telematics interview from Barcelona in mid-February.
The Tourist Office organized a personalized two-week trip to Pachecho and Bartual across the country in January 2022. They visited the nine cities and the ten museums that appear later in their fictional story. “How many successful films or novels have boosted tourism in their locations?” asked the head of the Swiss Tourism Association. “The brand doesn’t seem to be there, but it’s everywhere in an elegant and respectful way. It’s a today’s campaign for today’s audience,” says Babey. Its managers are already working on adapting to English in order to expand the market.
“It has a very different tone than the typical true crime. The script is perfect for the audio and together with the sound design they create a very attractive visual language. That’s important because it’s a branded podcast, the most subtle I’ve heard,” Las Raras Podcast sound director Martín Cruz Farga told the newspaper at the end of the year when asked about his best tracks was formatted to the year. The branding is so minimally invasive that it is only enhanced with the specific website created by MySwitzerland.com’s Spanish subsidiary on the route suggested in this sound story. Camila Scher, podcast director at Amazon Music, also voted it one of her favorites. His mixing with the genre of the experimental essay was striking. “It’s a sound fiction that makes us want to travel by train, visit museums and cross mountain landscapes without leaving the place. But perhaps most impressive is that it hypothesizes that plastic art goes beyond the visible and tests all of our senses. An exquisite execution,” he defended. The secret of Blum’s success, says Sandra Babey from her Swiss Tourist Office, is that she has aroused this curiosity about the truth and fiction of this story and, quite incidentally, about the country.
Hear from Japan
Destino Japón has two seasons funded by the Japan National Tourist Office in Spain and created by Podium Podcast. The premise is to help the listener get inspired to prepare for their next trip to an Asian country based on the real-life experiences of people who already know them. The first of five episodes was hosted by Paco Nadal, a travel journalist from EL PAÍS who visits the place one or more times a year. And in the second round, the journalist Marta del Vado, deputy director of La Ventana, who, unlike Nadal, prepares her first visit to Japan by sharing interviews with experts that last a little over 20 minutes, takes over.
Cover of “Destination Japan,” the sponsored “podcast” created by Podium.
José Manuel Dorado, Head of Branded Content at Podium Podcast, highlights that the new episodes “try to bring focus to a country that has many things to offer beyond Tokyo and through unique life experiences (that are personal and non-touristy). Proposing has less obvious destinations for the public, like Okinawa,” he pointed out in February from his office on Gran Vía in Madrid.
Podium Studios, the creative side of the Grupo PRISA company, has also created Aerolínea Momentos, which travels to the future to trace the history of Iberia.
“What you’re looking for with sponsored audio content is to inspire, but also to inform something useful to the client and their target audience,” concludes Dorado. “It is very important that the client understands that content needs to be generated that is interesting, relevant and coherent with their strategies, but where the logo is not the most important thing. That won’t differentiate its content from others, but if it manages to connect with everyone who hears it,” he defends himself.
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