IN CLEAR FOCUS: Jen Moss of JAR Podcast Solutions explains how brands can create podcasts audiences love. Jen reveals why most branded podcasts fail—they’re boring and too promotional—and shares her “JAR” (Job, Audience, Result) system for success. Using case studies from clients like Amazon, she details how to offer true value instead of a sales pitch. Learn how to choose between audio and video, engage specific audiences, and achieve measurable business results through strategic storytelling.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
Jen Moss: You know, it’s just not advisable for brands to go too heavy-handed with their approach to podcasting. What they want to do instead is offer something of true value to their target audience. What is something that they want or need, or a problem that you can help them solve through your expertise, through your access to experts, through your desire to make a difference in a particular larger conversation that’s going on in society?
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. While many companies have experimented with content marketing through blogs and social media, an increasing number are discovering the unique breakthrough potential of branded podcasts – audio-first content that serves both audience needs and business objectives without feeling like an advertisement. The opportunity lies in creating branded content that serves audiences first while achieving business objectives. Our guest today is an expert in this area. Jen Moss is co-founder and chief creative officer of JAR Podcast Solutions, a Vancouver-based agency that creates branded podcasts for enterprise clients, including Amazon, Cirque du Soleil, The Wharton School, and RBC. With a background as an award-winning CBC Radio producer and interactive story producer for the National Film Board of Canada, Jen brings both editorial integrity and marketing strategy to every campaign. She’s also a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing, teaching podcasting and new media storytelling. To discuss how brands can create podcasts that audiences actually want to consume while achieving measurable business results, I’m delighted that Jen is joining us today from Vancouver, British Columbia. Jen, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Jen Moss: Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Adrian Tennant: Jen, before we dive into branded podcasting, I’d love to hear a bit about your background in journalism. Now, as I mentioned in the intro, you spent years as an award-winning producer for CBC Radio, creating audio documentaries. How did that experience shape your approach to branded content?
Jen Moss: Well, in a very profound way, I was very lucky to have some excellent mentors when I started as a storyteller. And I feel like I should name them because they were so excellent. There was a man called “Dick Miller.” There was a woman called “Yvonne Gall.” There was a woman called “Kathleen Flaherty.” Another woman called “Sheila Rogers”, who’s a well-known national broadcaster. These are people I was just very privileged to sort of learn under and they taught me a lot of different things about how to treat an audience with respect, how to hold attention throughout a piece of content. how to change up your pacing in order to not bore people, and really how to lean into the potential, particularly of audio storytelling. So treating it as more than just a vehicle for conversation. Yeah. Yeah.
Adrian Tennant: Well, you co-founded JAR Audio, as it was then called in 2017, but you recently rebranded as JAR Podcast Solutions. So Jen, why the rebrand?
Jen Moss: You know that feeling where your outsides don’t really match your insides? It was that. It was just that. We had been, for many years, really since our inception, we had taken a platform and format-agnostic approach. So what I mean by that is we would look at whatever the client need was, the business problem, essentially the reason they needed to make a podcast or wanted to make a podcast. So what was the job that they were trying to have the podcast do? And we would try to tailor our approach to serve that goal. That was sort of our starting place for strategy and investigation with every client was “why are you doing this and for whom?” Right? So the audience became a very important part of the conversation early on. And then we would build an idea that we thought would both serve the brand goal and serve the audience needs simultaneously through the use of creative storytelling techniques. And so we’ve always done that. We’ve always done that. It is treated our podcast like essentially a solution to a problem or challenge that a brand might be facing. So we’re not just telling great stories for the sake of telling great stories. It’s not art for art’s sake. It’s art with a purpose, and that purpose is very concerted and clear. So we just thought that JAR Audio didn’t really quite capture all of that. We’re audio lovers. We’re dyed-in-the-wool audio storytellers. But we also do video podcasting and increasingly, recently, that’s been something that clients have been looking for. Either they want a video podcast that’s full-length to go on YouTube, or they want some combination of an audio podcast and a video podcast. And so we were already delivering those solutions, but we wanted the world to know it. So we thought having a clearer name that actually stated what it is that we really do and how we go about things would be “Derriger.” So that’s why we changed our name. Yeah.
Adrian Tennant: Great. Well, when we were preparing for this interview, you mentioned to me that most brand podcasts are boring.
Jen Moss: Oh yeah, they’re terrible. A lot of them are terrible, like 80% of them are bad.
Adrian Tennant: So what makes them fail? And you know what I’m going to ask next? How is your approach different?
Jen Moss: Well, it’s challenging to do effective storytelling in a branded space because, you’re serving a lot of goals, you have a lot of pressure. Your boss is probably breathing down your neck saying, “Talk about the new product. Talk about this rollout we’re doing. Talk about why our company is great, that we spend a lot of time and money developing.” And so there’s this pressure to almost sell yourself as a company, sell your brand through the podcast. The problem with that is that audiences are smarter than that. And audiences have a lot of choice. Tom Webster, I believe it was, told me this idea, and I’m not sure if this is his idea or he got it from somewhere else, but Tom Webster is a big influencer in the podcasting space. He works for Sounds Profitable, and he said at a certain point, “The audience doesn’t owe you anything. They do not owe you their attention, right?” I think that’s probably an idea that’s been circulating, but I think it’s very powerfully true, and it’s often forgotten. especially in the branded podcasting space. So it’s sort of like, well, of course, we’re jazzed about our new product or service. And we assume everybody else is going to be jazzed about it, too. So we’re going to talk about it ad nauseum. Our CEO is going to come on and talk about it ad nauseam. We’re going to get everyone in our company to talk about it because we’re really smart and we know a lot about this thing. And how can I put this? It’s like if you run a company, you have to drink your own Kool-Aid. You have to believe in what you’re doing. Otherwise, why are you even there? So you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, the audience has not. And they’re suspicious of Kool-Aid, right? A lot of them have seen the strings at the puppet theater, like they know what lies in store for them if they drink the Kool-Aid is that you’re going to try and sell them something. So they don’t want to be sold to, particularly not in the podcasting ecosystem, which is a story driven, learning based, long form, nuanced, intimate, authentic space and if you don’t respect the nature of that space and you get a little too tipped over into the advertorial territory, immediately you’ve got people ripping their earbuds out, flicking to another thumbnail on YouTube, whatever it is, however they’re consuming you, they’re going to move on if they feel they’re being barked at in a way, or oversold, or something feels overly branded, overly one-sided, it’s ignoring a big part of the conversation that’s out there in the zeitgeist. You know, it’s just not advisable for brands to go too heavy-handed with their approach to podcasting. What they want to do instead is offer something of true value to their target audience and you have to spend a lot of time thinking about what that might be. Like what is something that they want or need or a problem that you can help them solve through your expertise through your access to experts. through your desire to make a difference in a particular larger conversation that’s going on in society. It could be about equality. It could be about climate change. It could be about, you know, like just solving big problems that we all face. It could be about family, whatever it is that your brand is well-positioned to facilitate and further the conversation of something that people actually already care about. And then by doing that, you have people go, “oh, wow, I heard that amazing podcast about what it’s like to raise teenage kids.” And it could be an athletic brand, it could be a book publisher, it could be an online counseling brand or something like that. But what they remember is that you’re a brand that cares about something that they already care about. And so that’s the connection that you’re looking to make. It’s not a selling opportunity. And if you view it as such, you will not succeed.
Adrian Tennant: Jen, you’ve developed something you call “the JAR system.” Can you walk us through this framework?
Jen Moss: Sure. Yeah, it’s pretty simple. So JAR itself stands for “job, audience, result.” So the first thing we do is we look at like, “why is this podcast being made? What’s it the job it’s trying to do?” So, you know, we work with a lot of nonprofits and organizations as well. What is their goal in making this podcast? Is it to demonstrate their thought leadership in a particular area? Is it to court a new younger audience that they are worried about the future viability of their brand and they need to start speaking to Gen Zed or Gen Z? Is it education because they make a product or service that’s really not well understood? It could be something a particular type of computing that most people don’t understand for example. that requires some explanation and some education around it to facilitate that general knowledge. What is the sort of ROI that they’re looking for? And so a lot of them will say “reach and awareness” and that can be part of the job. That’s a valid goal, but we tend to view reach as a byproduct of really strong engagement. So your podcast will grow if you’re giving the right content to the right audience. So that’s the important part is understanding the job. And then audience is the A in JAR, and that’s who it’s for. Not only who it’s for in the broad sense, like it’s for Gen Z, but who it’s for really specifically, like, you know, “it’s for college students who are about to graduate, who are looking at a career in tech and are not sure if you know, they need to go back to school and study AI or if they should step out into the job market right now.” That’s the kind of specificity that we’re looking for from an audience so that we know exactly who the core target is. And then we also look at who is just outside of that group, who is curious. One way to think about it is who is peering over the fence in that topic area who kind of wants to know more. And then what level of information are you pitching? Is it people who are already experts in a particular area or is it people who are thinking of going to school in that area but they’re not sure where to start? So understanding where at what level you’re pitching the content and who it’s for and what they need. All of that. Then result. So how will you know that you’ve succeeded with this podcast? So will it be when your grandkid comes up to you and says, “Hey, I listened to an episode of that podcast for people my age, and it was actually really funny. Good job, grandpa.” Is it that? Or is it more you’ll know you’ve succeeded when you suddenly start seeing an uptick of engagement with your brand on social because, people are responding to something they’ve heard on the podcast, right? Is it reach? Is it like absolutely just a numbers game for you? Is it sales? Is it conversions on your website? So, we want to know if X number of people listen to the podcast and then go check out our running shoes on our website that we’re selling. Is that how we measure success? So we can monitor all of those things, track them, and report on them as the podcast is going on. Table stakes for us is, is the audience enjoying what you’re doing? Are they picking up what you’re putting down? And if they’re not, then what we do is we look at that data and we figure out exactly where we’re going wrong and we go back to that part of the podcast and we try to fix it. So we take a very audience data-driven approach. So that’s it, job audience result. And that’s a successful formula. We’ve been using it for some time. But I guess with our new branding, we’re just talking about it more.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent.
Jen Moss: Yeah.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Jen Moss, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of JAR Podcast Solutions, about creating branded podcasts that audiences actually want to consume. As regular listeners know, we love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So Jen, could you share a couple of examples of brands or corporate clients who’ve achieved success through their branded podcasts?
Jen Moss: Yeah, one is a company called Staffbase. So they’re a German-based company, but a strong presence in the U.S. And they make a kind of a digital platform, sort of like Slack. It’s designed to connect employees across great distances and facilitate internal communications and things like that. So, their target audience is people who work in internal comms, and so they came to us with an idea that they wanted to reach those people and offer them something of value that would present Staff Base as a fun place to work, a place that got it, a place that had depth and heart and community. And so they had a big intranet quite active intranet of employees. Do we started there we ask them what would they like to see and a lot of them said they would like to see a show that or hear a show this time it was an audio podcast that didn’t feel like work. But where they still learn something valuable. Cause a lot of people think, well, we’re going to do a podcast for our employees and it’s going to be all about work. But if you’re realistic, like in your spare time, what do you want to listen to? You want to listen to something that speaks to your passions that might be related to your work, but you don’t necessarily want to listen to a podcast about work necessarily. So this approach we took was to create a very fun show called “Infernal Communications.” And what we did was we got all of their intranet community to tell us, “what are the things that bug you about your work? What are the things that drive you crazy?” So things like bad bosses saying dumb stuff in the press after a crisis. Or it’s mostly to do with bosses being dumb. So bosses coming to them and saying, “oh, we’ve got 15 minutes before this meeting. Can you just take this document and make it pretty?” So that make it pretty is like any designer will tell you is the least actionable guidance that a boss can give. Or just, “here, I made this memo. Please circulate it to all 2,000 employees. And it’s in Comic Sans font.” you know, and the designers just like stabbing their eyes out with a fork. Or things like how to communicate bad news, like there’s bad news at the company and you’ve got to let everybody know, how do you do that in a sensitive way. How do you tell a story that isn’t totally predictable, Eurocentric and dull? You know, these are all kind of questions that they had. So we did a series of episodes that were funny. We used fiction in sections. So we had an episode, for example, called “The Trial of Comic Sans,” where we actually had voice actors acting out different fonts, putting Comic Sans on trial. Helvetica was the prosecutor, I think. If there’s time for another one, I could tell you another one. Okay, Amazon is obviously a behemoth. So I’ll talk about them because I think they’re a nice kind of counterpoint to this Staffbase one. So Amazon Small Business Accelerator, that’s the sort of small business wing of Amazon, is an organization within the organization that exists in order to service small business sellers on Amazon. Because what a lot of people don’t realize is that over 60% of the sellers on the Amazon platform are small businesses. So you think of Amazon as the antithesis of small business, like they’re bad for small business, but in fact there are many, many small businesses that would not exist without Amazon because Amazon elevates them, brings them to their customers, makes shipping easier and has all kinds of tools and advice and resources for small business owners like people don’t even realize. People don’t think about Amazon in the context of small business. So this was a problem for them. They were like, “we’re doing all this excellent stuff, but we still have this reputation of being just this behemoth that doesn’t care. So how do we deal with that?” And I mean, I will say that the small business department at Amazon is full of very caring people who are really trying to help people find solutions. And I know because, I’ve worked with them for a number of years. So we worked with the host of the show. They had already hired the host when they brought us in, so that was interesting. So we had to figure out, you know, who was she and what could she bring to the storytelling. So we worked with her. Her name is “Andrea Marquez.” She’s a wonderful storyteller and interviewer. She happens to be the daughter of a long line of Mexican entrepreneurs, an immigrant family that’s hardworking and entrepreneurial. She is not herself an entrepreneur she’s a writer and interviewer but she feels this pull and pressure and kind of family tradition to become an entrepreneur. So what we did is for the first few seasons we just made her journey of learning like what does it take to run a small business, to make that personal journey transparent to the audience so that she was learning along with the audience what it takes. So that way we’re catching people who are just at that entry point where they’re like, “Hmm, I have a side hustle. I’m thinking of turning it into a real thing or I’m working at a job I don’t like, but I really, I’ve had this idea for starting a business and I need that little push just to actually do it. But what should my first steps be?” Right. So we did a lot of that in the first few seasons, like establishing who she was and what an entrepreneur needs in order to succeed. We had mentors, we had sellers from the Amazon platform. So these are real people, though, with real stories who took real risks, put second mortgages on their homes and all these things in order to run small businesses. And so we just had these very kind of candid, honest conversations. And then we did a brand list study to see how that worked in terms of Amazon’s goal and the job of the podcast which was to reach the audience of small business owners and the desired result would be for them to view Amazon as a small business friendly place. And the results of the Brown List study were very, very clear. Very, very clear that after listening to X number of episodes of the podcast, people ranked Amazon higher in terms of favorability to small businesses. So it was across the board, very clear. And so Amazon is a very data-driven organization. So once they saw that, they were prepared to invest further and we’ve now been making that podcast for, I think we’re going into our seventh season with them. And we’re moving to video soon because that’s something they want to get into. So yeah, so it’s just an evolving picture. We look at audience data, we try to present useful information to small businesses and it works.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. At JAR Podcast Solutions, you work with everything from Fortune 500 companies to nonprofits. And as you just mentioned, you are seeing more clients wanting to include a video component. Jen, how do you determine whether audio only or video podcasting is the right solution for a particular brand?
Jen Moss: I’m so glad you asked that question because there’s an assumption going around right now that’s very much sort of, uh, well, we can do both. We’ll just do both. And like people treat it like it’s a no brainer. It’s not a no brainer because for example, if your target audience is older C-suite executives, Like Newsflash, they’re not hanging out on YouTube rabbit holes all day, right? That’s not where they are. Maybe they’re catching an actionable, informative, very focused podcast as they’re doing their 15 minutes on the Stairmaster. So those sorts of shows, we tend to recommend an audio-first approach. We also record a lot remotely, so if we’re recording remotely, it’s very easy to record both audio and video. So what we’ll do is we’ll pull clips from the recording that are video and use those on social media to drive interest and traffic back to the main audio podcast. However, YouTube is a thing, right? The discoverability on YouTube is massive. So if it reaches your goal, and particularly if you’re trying to reach younger people, because when I survey my classes at the University of British Columbia, like, “how do you kids listen to podcasts?” Most of them find their podcasts first on YouTube. When I further survey them though, “do you also consume those same podcasts as audio?” Most of them also say “yes.” So they’ll sort of like, depending on where they are in their life, if they’re commuting to UBC on the bus or they’re walking their dog, they’re going to want to consume it as audio. If they’re sitting at their desk, ostensibly doing homework for my class, but actually looking at YouTube videos, They’re gonna discover the podcast on YouTube. So there is a strong reason for brands and organizations to think about being on YouTube. But there are a couple of caveats there. It’s great for discoverability. It’s less great for consumption rates. Like, they’ve done studies and they’ve shown that the same content consumed on YouTube and in an audio format, that same content, the listen-through rates on YouTube will be lower. So what that means is people are listening on average to less of the content. They’re not making it as far into the episodes. And the reason is, if you think about how YouTube is laid out, it’s just got nothing but distractions all down the side of the page. Thumbnail, thumbnail, thumbnail, all the other things you could click on, little click-baity headlines screaming at you every five seconds to click on them. So somebody making a decision to stay with your content on YouTube is sort of rare. And the other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of times people have it on YouTube, but they’re not actually watching it. It’s six windows deep while they’re writing an essay for my class, right? So you really have to think about who is your audience, where do they naturally hang out? You also have to think about your goals. Is it reach or is it really more engagement? Because, if it’s about engagement and consumption rates, then audio can be a deeper way to connect with people. Audio also stimulates the human brain in different ways, it’s a more active participatory action when you listen to a podcast versus when you sit back and watch a conversation. Your brain does different things, lights up in different ways. And then budget you gotta think about budget especially if you’re a smaller organization so yes you want to be on youtube, in order to get a podcast that looks half-decent on YouTube. And that’s an if, because not everybody cares about that. But if you care about that, and a lot of brands do, then you need a designer, and you need some decent lighting for yourself and your guests, and you need decent microphone kits, and you probably need a video-savvy editor, and those folks don’t come cheap. Maybe you want to enhance the storytelling with a little bit of simple animation or some b-roll. And once you get into b-roll, now your budget’s really creeping up and not everybody can actually handle that. So there’s budgetary concerns with video podcasting. There’s consumption rate concerns with video podcasting, and I think there’s also basic audience mismatch concerns with video podcasting. So you really have to probe what are the goals, what is the audience, what results are you looking for, and then make your decision accordingly. And sometimes video is the right answer, and sometimes the right answer is both. And sometimes the right answer is audio first with supplementary video content. You can also put obviously an audio podcast on YouTube as an audio podcast, which many people do that, just that as a moving waveform that way you’re quote unquote discoverable technically. There’s also something, I mean, I think there’s a certain kind of podcast that has a kind of casual behind-the-scenes flair where you want to see, I don’t know, Jennifer Aniston sitting around in her pajamas talking to her friends, right? And that’s part of the appeal is that authentic behind-the-scenes voyeuristic flair that some video podcasting really embraces. What we’re starting to see in the industry though, that’s interesting is some brands getting involved and going, “well, we want a video podcast, but we don’t want it to look like crap TV. So we need you to up your game. We want a three camera shoot. We want this, we want that.” And at that point you’re making a TV show, right? So then, okay, fine. But then that’s the budget. Yeah.
Adrian Tennant: Great insights. For marketing leaders listening who might now be considering a branded podcast, Jen, what’s your advice for getting started?
Jen Moss: Well, my advice for getting started is to do a little soul searching about what you want to really look into the different styles of podcasts that are out there. So don’t necessarily assume that your only option is an interview-based podcast. There are a lot of formats out there. There’s something called “narrative podcasting,” for example, which is a kind of a combination of a host narrating a story direct-to-camera or direct-to-mic, direct-to-audience. With clips dropped in, so it could be active clips that are recorded on scene or clips from interviews, but kind of woven through with narration, so what we have seen anecdotally in our company is that that kind of content tends to have higher consumption rates, meaning people listen to more of it. Because you’re changing the pace more often. You’re not just having a conversation that goes on and on and on. And so when you change the pace more often, it’s sort of like dangling something shiny in front of the audience. Like they just sit up and take notice a little bit. It just tricks their brain into continuing to listen or watch. So thinking about the potential of both media too, like audio has this immersive quality. You can build a theater of the mind. You can take people armchair travel to Peru. You can armchair travel to the moon with podcasting. You can create a sense of being surrounded by an experience with audio podcasting. And that has a value that can really create a bond with an audience. The thing about video, of course, is that you can demonstrate complex processes through animation. You can see people’s expressions to kind of humanize them a little bit. So there’s lots of advantages to that form as well. So as an artist and as a creator, I just encourage brands to lean into the media or medium that you choose and consider its potential rather than just have a checklist of bullet points that you want to get across and call it a day. Think about what your audience is going to respond to. Think about surprise and delight. Think about what you can offer them like a little jewel that they’re going to value and make an appointment to come back and check out every week or every two weeks, right? So be consistent. Be generous in your approach. Don’t be afraid to talk about the problems, too. Be honest. Because a lot of the issues that brands face when they try to do storytelling is they’re regulated, they’re worried about looking bad, they need to be perceived to have all the answers. Look, nobody has all the answers. People know that you don’t have all the answers. And so if you’re not willing as a brand to kind of discuss some of the downsides of what it is that you’re doing and then maybe counter those points with your own arguments and beliefs, you’ll be seen as less legitimate.
Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. If listeners would like to learn more about JAR Podcast Solutions or connect with you directly, what’s the best way to do so?
Jen Moss: Well, jarpodcast.com is our website, and we’re absolutely reachable through there, and people can always email me at jen@jaraudio.com. I haven’t changed my email address yet. I need to do that.
Adrian Tennant: Jen, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Jen Moss: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you for the insightful questions.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Jen Moss of JAR Podcast Solutions. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com, just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00: Introduction to Branded Podcasting
0:39: The Value of Branded Podcasts
1:57: Guest Introduction: Jen Moss
2:17: Jen’s Background in Journalism
3:31: Rebranding to JAR Podcast Solutions
5:00: Common Failures in Brand Podcasts
6:02: The JAR System Explained
13:29: Case Study: Staffbase Podcast
15:11: Case Study: Amazon Small Business Accelerator
22:03: Choosing Between Audio and Video Podcasts
27:53: Advice for Marketing Leaders on Starting a Podcast
30:55: Closing Remarks and Contact Information
