A podcast for a journalist who makes media about media
Every journalist specializes in something.
Brian Morrissey turned the lens of his career in journalism onto the media themselves. After building his company Digiday into a media industry standard publication of record and becoming known as the voice of its podcasts, Brian rode the wave of indie journalists becoming Substack entrepreneurs. But of course the newsletter is not the product alone.
The Challenge
Brian needed to create a new podcast to expand his organic reach and build his real product, the community of affluent listeners and the high-ticket intimate events The Rebooting sold along with sponsorship packaging. That core audience of media execs listening to him and his guests dive deep into subjects that are esoteric to a few people who control many dollars, could become a million dollar funnel if designed, built and nourished with care over time.
The Branding
Brian had established a visual aesthetic to represent the brand of The Rebooting — Astronauts. In his teams’s view they symbolized the kind of evolving technological frontier that had befallen and lay ahead for the media industry as a whole. So TRB’s imagery employed, at first, real photos from NASA, then evolving into AI renderings of those same astronauts in a wide range of metaphorical scenarios.
The Musical Identity
So Jay approached the design and composition of TRB’s podcast soundtrack with this aesthetic in mind, using analog synthesizers to invoke that era of the past in which we first became fixated on the future. Guitars echoed like showers of slow motion sparks. And unlike the “tsunami of shit” Brian talked about as part of the advent of AI, TRB’s music was 100% original and made by humans.
The Social Strategy
While Brian chose to keep TRB podcast audio-only for the most part, the team produced weekly social videos featuring excerpts from the full episode. They were optimized primarily for LinkedIn and X. LinkedIn feature videos were mid-length, offering the top of the funnel audience a chance to engage with the content and move them further toward become regular listeners.
And of course from one episode come many social clips…
The Results
In just two years TRB climbed, first to low sig figures, then high sig figures, eventually cracking the seven figure milestone with a team just a fraction of the size it had taken to build Digiday.