Esurance, the insurance company for the modern world, partnered with Serial on Pandora, as a leader in audio, through a first-to-market launch sponsorship. The popularity of Serial comes in the midst of an Audio Renaissance. Over the last 10 years, podcast listenership has grown steadily, reaching almost 90 million U.S. listeners in 2015.1 Now, more than 4 in 10 Millennials listen to podcasts at least once a month.[2]

Esurance's Serial sponsorship on Pandora demonstrates a perfect marriage of brands. As a brand seeking to maintain its reputation as a trusted partner to current customers and insurance seekers, sponsoring the launch of Season Two was an opportunity to align with authentic, credible content.

For the duration of the sponsorship, Esurance owned 100% share-of-voice of the in-station experience. Esurance spokesperson, John Krasinski, recorded custom audio spots that welcomed listeners to the Serial station. The ad was written in the podcast style, promoting sponsor support and the brand’s tagline: Insurance for the Modern World ®. John’s voiceover talent brought brand equity to the experience and increased ad recall. Esurance also had persistent display branding on web, mobile, and tablet, so that listeners had the opportunity to learn more about the company at any moment.

The campaign drove positive lifts in typically hard-to-move brand favorability metrics.

• 11.7 million streams of the Serial podcast, creating significant time spent with brand messaging [3]
• 3X increase in sponsorship association [4]
• Positive increase in brand favorability and digital ad awareness [4]

1 Edison Research and Triton Digital, The Infinite Dial Study, 2015
2 Edison Research, The Podcast Consumer, May 2015
3 Pandora Internal Metrics 
4 Milward Brown Brand Study