The Global content and media team at BlackRock develops, produces, and distributes high-quality, engaging and shareworthy content that shares the firm’s economic insights, reflects our purpose around financial well-being, explains our business and humanizes our brand.
The Bid, BlackRock’s podcast, is a key component of our content strategy. Each episode breaks down what is happening in the markets and explores the forces that are changing investing. The Bid aims to help listeners, which include both financial advisors and end investors, learn more about developments in the markets through storytelling from thought leaders in and outside of BlackRock.
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The Bid breaks down what’s happening in the markets and explores the forces that are changing the investing landscape. The Bid helps listeners learn more about economic and market developments through dynamic narrative from thought leaders in and outside of BlackRock. We have developed formats to include narrative and more immersive sound design elements to prolong engagement and we have seen an increase on average of 15% since introduced.
We found that topics such as global outlooks, megatrends and technology are strong performers in terms of downloads and consumption, and the optimal length of each podcast should be between 15-20 minutes. We analyzed these insights and used them to develop mini-series featuring these topics.
We leaned into these insights and developed a mini-series format that allowed us to dive deeper into top performing topics, book external guests who are leaders in their fields and create a story arc between episodes, where each episode builds off the prior episode. Mini-series episodes have a connective thread such that audiences know what to expect and what to look forward to for the next episode.
In order to reach our target audience and engage prospective new listeners, we promote each Bid episode with paid media to reach our target audience and engage prospective new listeners. To reach our target audience of thought leaders, we ran audio ads within podcasts including The Daily from the NYT and NPR’s Planet Money, strategizing that listener of these podcasts would like a similar show to what they were already listening to.
We continue to test new formats and expand our distribution methods - curating thoughtful conversations and innovatively using our existing library to draw in more listeners.
Since launch, The Bid has generated over 1 million downloads, with an average of 11K downloads per episode. 2022 was an especially strong year for The Bid, with 300K total downloads, +18% YoY, and a 70% average consumption rate, +20% YoY. The top episodes last year spotlighted market trends and topical events, including “Larry Fink on the Power of Capitalism” with 15K downloads, “2022: A Stock Market Outlook by the Generations” with 13K downloads, and “Larry Fink on the Ukraine Conflict” with 13K downloads.
The Bid plays an important part in our overall efforts of not only reaching our target Opinion Leader audience, but also in driving favorability amongst this audience. Based on our YouGov reporting, which measures how Opinion Leaders are perceiving and interacting with BlackRock, we found that those who have listened to a podcast from BlackRock not only skew overwhelmingly favorable towards the firm, but they are also more likely to recommend the firm to others.
(Source: Art19, YouGov Q4’22 report)
