Merging Into Life is a biweekly podcast launched by AAA Northeast, intended to capture a younger Millennial and Gen-Z audience. Each episode is devoted to a single topic covering themes relevant to a younger audience, providing practical information for all those things that don’t come with an owner’s manual. Through stories and interviews with internal and external experts, Merging Into Life entertains and educates new and existing audiences on the full breadth of AAA services and taps into our extensive knowledge base. We want to address those crucial pain points for younger generations who often feel overwhelmed and underprepared when navigating major life decisions around car ownership, travel planning, and financial management. By delivering this information in an accessible podcast format that younger audiences prefer, we meet them where they are and break down complex topics into digestible, actionable advice. Our podcast continues to show the general public that AAA is more than just roadside assistance, by shining a light on the brand's expertise with events at all stages of life.
This podcast was years in the making. Since the initiative was a first of its kind at AAA Northeast, we enlisted outside agencies to assist with getting it off the ground. We wanted to leverage the knowledge and trustworthiness of the AAA brand to reach newer, wider audiences, and we felt that the podcast medium would do just that. Our leadership was supportive, and supplied the necessary resources to launch our successful first season.
The challenges were many, as this was truly a from-scratch project. Along with educating ourselves on how to produce a show, there was also the daunting task of getting it in front of its intended audience. To do this, we’ve left no delivery method untried. Merging Into Life is available on all major platforms, our website and YouTube, where we post the video versions. We also support the podcast on all of AAA Northeast’s owned social media channels, through our employee advocacy program and to dedicated emails to our almost 7 million members.
We measure our success with the podcast through standard metrics like downloads and consumption time. We have been very pleased with our efforts so far. We are concluding the second season this fall, and our consumption rate has averaged 68% and our downloads have increased dramatically across platforms. Internally, while we can’t directly attribute revenue to the podcast, a very successful year indicates that Merging Into Life has been an extremely effective way of raising awareness and garnering new members for the Club, and at the same time, spreading good, reliable information on the life issues we all deal with.
