The objective of the Discover Universal podcast is to educate and entertain Guests and Fans who enter our gates every day. We wanted to innovate how we tell stories and bring our parks to life for our audience at home, or in their travel to our destinations.
We set out to create Discover Universal as a multi-media hub that focused on video, blog, and podcasts to help our guests learn as much information as possible before coming to the destination and establish Discover Universal as the most trusted, visited and valuable source of entertainment and information for Universal Parks and Resorts.
We started with a set of planning episodes with a full guide to each theme park and slowly started to move into more niche episodes like specific rides and Halloween Horror Nights.
We also tested a sub-series from our famous Halloween Horror Nights events called, Haunted Tales where we dove deep into the stories of the individual haunted houses and a scare zone for fans to learn even more about the details.
We saw positive sentiment across the board about the storytelling and attention to detail in the series and guests wanted more.
The impact has been tremendous! In our 1st year of fully producing an original podcast in-house we published 30 episodes with over 150,000 listens, all totally unaided by paid media, and we have even bigger plans for 2023!
Multiple times throughout the year we were top 10 in Apple's Travel podcasts rankings. We have almost 5 stars on nearly 100 reviews on Apple Podcasts, and our Average Percentage Listen across the entire series is 73%.
Some of the comments are AMAZING!
-"I love everything about this show: the format, the hosts, the guests… everything. And better yet, it’s helpful!"
-"This podcast is so funny, factual, and flat out fabulous. For real."
- If you’re planning a vacation at Universal, this podcast contains tons of essential information. The hosts are so engaging… They make the process fun and I love playing along with the games!"
