With podcasts, listeners grow accustomed to the theme music, hosts, segments, and even the artwork that shows up in their podcast feeds, so changing things can be risky.

But rebranding is not off the table entirely. In fact, at the start of this year, Wonder Media Network, a podcast company specializing in content surrounding social justice, decided to rebrand a couple of its shows, including Majority 54.

The political podcast—which WMN acquired from Crooked Media—underwent a rebrand for a couple of reasons, according to WMN CMO Shira Atkins: Not only did it switch networks after a two-year hiatus, but it also returned at a time when the country’s political tone had shifted.

Rehoming (and rebranding) a political podcast post-Trump

Back in 2017, Crooked Media, the network behind Pod Save America and other popular political and pop-culture podcasts, debuted Majority 54.

• The show featured host Jason Kander—the former Missouri secretary of state best known for nearly defeating an incumbent senator, Republican Roy Blunt, in 2016—guiding the 54% of the American voters in the 2016 election who did not vote for Donald Trump through conversations with friends and family on the other side of the aisle.
• But in August 2018, the show went silent. Months before, Kander announced that he would be running for mayor of Kansas City, but three months into his campaign, he stepped away to seek treatment for PTSD from his deployment to Afghanistan as an Army intelligence officer.
• Two years later, in June 2020, the show reappeared, this time as a WMN property.

Back at it: When it ended its original run, Majority 54 had hundreds of thousands of listeners per episode, according to Atkins. Now, a year and a half after its return, it’s getting about 50,000 “dedicated listeners.”

After its comeback, Majority 54 faced an issue: With Trump no longer in office, a show centered around conversations with his supporters seemed less urgent.

“We—like many other political shows—experienced when Trump left office, a huge decline in listenership, and had been trying all sorts of things to re-engage listeners from a content perspective, from a marketing perspective,” Atkins told Marketing Brew. “We’re slowly sort of climbing back up.”

New leaf: This year presents a new opportunity for the show to rebuild its audience, Atkins said, since it’s a midterm election year. So WMN rolled out the rebrand on January 13. The show kept its name, but gained a cohost—Ravi Gupta, a former Obama campaign staffer and co-founder and managing partner of The Arena—as well as refreshed cover art and new segments.

• The new segments were largely driven by what listeners told the hosts they wanted to hear, but also by Kander and Gupta’s own desires to re-engage with electoral politics, Kander, who is now president of the nonprofit Veterans Community Project, told Marketing Brew.
• “We realized we personally had an itch to use the podcast as a platform to be more deeply involved in the midterms, and in particular, to point people to races that we think are on the real frontlines of protecting democracy, but aren’t talked about on MSNBC and CNN and Fox [News],” Kander told us. That led to the creation of a “Road to the Midterms” segment on the show.

So far, the rebranded show has shown signs of success: Listenership has increased by 15%, according to Atkins.

Click here to read about other elements of the rebrand, including the podcast’s updated cover art.—AM

Amid all the excitement surrounding the Super Bowl and the Olympics (okay, mostly just the Super Bowl), you’d be forgiven for forgetting that the real drama is playing out across the country’s teleconference lines. Of course, we’re talking earnings season. Here are some highlights:

Twitter: The company ended the fiscal year with $5.08 billion in total revenue, up 37% year over year, with 217 million daily active users in Q4. It said any revenue impacts from Apple’s privacy changes were “modest” last quarter.

The Trade Desk: The demand-side platform, which recently said it will stop purchasing ads via Google’s Open Bidding tool, pulled in almost $1.2 billion in revenue last year, a jump of 43% compared to 2020.

IPG: Net revenue jumped nearly 13% year over year to $9.1 billion, largely thanks to the company’s “data capabilities, analytics, and precision marketing.”

Disney: The House of Mouse brought in $21.8 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2022 and reached almost 130 million subscribers to Disney+, beating analyst expectations. This is the way.

Airbnb: The company earned $1.5 billion in revenue in Q4 2021, “with stays of more than seven days now representing nearly half of all gross nights booked,” per CNBC.

Roblox: One of the original metaverse companies, Roblox fell short of investors’ expectations in Q4 with $770 million in revenue. Roblox reported 49.5 million daily active users during the quarter, up 33% from the year prior.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

I am not a robot: Twitter is helping users distinguish “good bots” from bad bots.

Meet me in the metaverse: 3D Instagram avatars are now available on Stories and DMs. More on that here.

Reply, edit, delete: Don’t let YouTube comments get the best of you. Become a “master of moderation” with help from this guide.

Media is a-changin’. Roundel by Target wants to make sure it changes for good. Built on the idea of using people-based (aka first-party) data and maintaining brand-safe environments, Roundel provides comprehensive marketing tools and programs that drive actual results. Learn more here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Is this an outtake from NYC Fashion Week 2022 or an ad from 1975? Who can say, really?

Every marketer likes a good giveaway and we thought our readers needed some love. What can we say… Cupid got us last week.

We scored a $250 Amazon card to give to one of you! Just click on any newsletter link this week and you are entered, it’s that easy!

Enjoy today’s newsletter and don’t forget to click.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Can TikTok save the Olympics?
• Mtn Dew’s bizarre Puppy Monkey Baby returns
• The sounds of Super Bowl ads, analyzed