Recession fears, inflation, and soaring interest rates left investors in uncharted territory last year. But Morning Brew’s audience could once again rely on a trusted, knowledgeable resource to help them navigate the investing landscape: Fresh Invest, a podcast created in partnership with Fidelity Investments and hosted by Morning Brew Executive Chairman and Co-founder Alex Lieberman. After three successful seasons, Fresh Invest returned with a focus on helping listeners set themselves up for long-term financial success.
A pre-production survey revealed that 90% of Morning Brew’s audience was concerned about the long-term impact of inflation on their finances. As a result of this concern, 30% planned to seek professional financial advice—a telling insight considering only 32% of respondents were currently using a financial advisor. As economic turbulence pushed our audience to seek professional help, Morning Brew saw a major opportunity to connect and integrate Fidelity with this eager-to-learn audience. This opportunity aligned seamlessly with Fidelity’s key goals of brand awareness and account opens, since the target audience was actively seeking financial advice from experts.
In season 4, Morning Brew seized the opportunity to evolve Fresh Invest into multimedia channels that hadn’t been explored before. It started with the expansion into a video episode format that enabled our audience to engage with both the content and Fidelity’s SMEs through social media channels. A new social media handle was created to house behind-the-scenes footage and social-first video cutdowns from each episode. These video snippets will continue to be posted for 9 months after the season ends, extending listener engagement beyond the season itself and encouraging new and existing listeners to explore and revisit the podcast.
To promote and drive awareness to the podcast on launch day, Morning Brew leveraged OOH activations. We created a fully custom coffee cart in Boston, where Fidelity is based, and Fresh Invest returned to the Nasdaq with another billboard, following the success of season 3’s Times Square advertisement.
To provide the most extensive reach for Fidelity’s brand awareness and maximize the content’s value for listeners, we featured our in-house finance content creator, Money with Katie, on two of this season’s episodes. With her, Katie brings a fiercely loyal audience of over 175k, the majority of whom are women, a key demographic for Fidelity.
After seeing success with gamified elements and listener-generated content in previous seasons, Morning Brew refined and elevated these same elements. How? At the start of the season, we opened up a hotline for listeners to call in their investing questions. That was bookended with an Investing Personality quiz where listeners could win prizes and receive Fresh Invest content suggestions from current and previous seasons.
Production required lock-step collaboration between the Morning Brew creative teams and our Fidelity clients. Applying learnings from previous seasons, Morning Brew developed a production plan that evolved the Fresh Invest series with a new season to meet Fidelity’s objectives for 2023.
Producing relevant themes, exploring new formats, and tailoring season 4 of Fresh Invest to our audience’s needs required creativity and an always-on mentality, especially given the constantly changing financial landscape that could impact the timeliness and relevance of our content. This required us to be extremely nimble with both scripting and production.
These challenges and opportunities paved the way for the most successful iteration of Fresh Invest yet.
The results from this season reveal the continued success of Fresh Invest, with no sign of audience fatigue. Using interactive and dynamic approaches, we are tracking at 126% to goal on overall campaign impressions.
The podcast saw a 40% increase in total impressions and a 35% increase in account opens from this season to last. To date, we are 183% to goal with the OOH coffee cart promotion in Boston, and season 4 delivered 8% greater downloads than season 3 in the first 13 weeks YoY.
By the numbers, this season of Fresh Invest is even better than the last.
