Audience Connection

Casual
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  • Marketing
  • Updated weekly

A podcast series focusing on audience engagement through visual storytelling and  behavioral principles that influence emotion, memory, and decision-making. A 360 view on connecting with the audience that matters to you, whether that’s consumers, clients, stakeholders, or employees. Through entertaining and practical conversations with experts from various industries and disciplines, listeners will gain valuable insights and tips on how to engage with the audiences that matter to them.

  1. 4 days ago

    Acts over Ads: Stories that are on Brand with Raelene Metlitzky

    Lydia Chan sits down with Raelene Metlitzky, Head of Content and Editorial at IAG, Australia's largest insurer, to explore why brand storytelling isn't the story of your brand, but a story that's on brand. It's a distinction Raelene has built a career on, moving from theatre to radio journalism to leading brand storytelling inside a 100-year-old insurance business. The centrepiece is A Fire Inside, the feature-length documentary Raelene drove about Australia's Black Summer bushfires. Funded by an insurer, it reached over 50 million people, became a number one film on a major streaming network, and grew into an ecosystem of 900 pieces of content, a book, a school curriculum, and a movement to build the country's largest organisation of helpers. Raelene explains how it started not with a piece of content but with a community: "what we wanted to build was a community, an advocacy piece, a shared value system." The conversation gets specific about the attention deficit economy. Raelene cites the drop in human attention span from 12 seconds to 8.2 over a decade, now below a goldfish, and McKinsey's finding of a roughly 25,000% rise in content volume over ten years while watch time per person stays flat. Her answer is to narrowcast, not broadcast, and to treat acts over ads. She walks through the Queensland "Bruce Highway Helpers" campaign, an advocacy play with a heritage media partner that delivered the brand's first lift in consideration in 20 years. Along the way: why brands should become the show rather than interrupt it, why staff pride is an underrated metric, and why trust should be treated as a strategic growth lever. Her through-line is a challenge to every marketer chasing eyeballs: "instead of fighting for attention, let's fight for alignment." This one is for marketers, creatives, leaders, and internal comms teams who want to earn attention rather than take it, and build loyalty that lasts. Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

    Acts over Ads: Stories that are on Brand with Raelene Metlitzky

  2. 27 Jul

    The magic word that makes you say yes with Nancy Harhut

    What if the biggest barrier to your marketing isn't your budget or your production values, but the fact that you're speaking to the 5% of the brain that's actually paying attention? Oliver Atkinson sits down with Nancy Harhut, author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing and founder of HBT Marketing, to explore why the same campaign, with a little science layered on top, can perform dramatically better. Nancy has built a career on turning behavioral science into double and triple-digit lifts, and she brings the receipts. She walks through the life insurance campaign that drove a 469% sales lift using extremist aversion, the pull of the magnetic middle. She unpacks the nationwide reciprocity play, a framed New Yorker cartoon with the recipient's name in the caption, that generated $68 million in incremental revenue. Along the way she breaks down the power words that quietly move people: why "because" is an automatic compliance trigger, why "small $5 shipping fee" beat "$5 shipping fee" by 20%, and why the BYAF technique ("but you are free") can double response. She and Oliver get into the autonomy bias behind disabled crosswalk buttons, the labeling effect that lifted voter turnout by 15%, and why emotional B2B headlines still outperform rational ones. If you're a marketer, creative director, or brand strategist, this one is dense with tactics you can test tomorrow. The through-line: most people decide on autopilot, so stop writing for the conscious 5%. Learn more about Nancy Harhut: 🌐 https://www.hbtmktg.com/ 📸 LinkedIn: Nancy Harhut Follow Audience Connection Podcast: 🌐 Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international 🦋 BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

    The magic word that makes you say yes with Nancy Harhut

  3. 7 Jul

    Taking Risks in leading with Story: Lessons from the LA Times Brand Studios with Kristen Berke

    In this episode of Audience Connection, Lydia Chan sits down with Kristen Berke, VP of Entertainment and Branded Content Partnerships at LA Times Studio, to unpack a campaign that on paper shouldn't have worked, and absolutely did. The campaign, Diaries of Transformation, was produced for enterprise AI company Publicis Sapient, a brand whose website talks about agents, production-grade software, and IT automation. Instead of a product tutorial, Kristen's team put out an open call for filmmakers, received over 100 submissions, and selected five short documentaries (a wildlife photographer, the last of the lighthouse keepers, an environmentalist) where the brand appeared only in the title card as a co-executive producer. No product placement, no features, no paid media. Kristen traces how branded content has shifted from "presented by" to genuine EP credit, why she leaned on editorial's passion-point data as a "guiding light," and how the films' earned reach came almost entirely from a fiercely supportive filmmaker community resharing each other's work. She's candid that it was partly "lightning in a bottle," but the framework is turnkey: start with the brand's four-to-seven-word mission, then find the human story that ties back to it. With a 147-year-old newsroom that has 45 Pulitzer Prizes behind it, Berke makes the case that most teams over-invest in impressions while starving the work itself, and that trust, not scale, is the real product. Her closing takeaway: bigger risks tend to bring greater rewards. https://www.latimes.com/diaries-of-transformation Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

    Taking Risks in leading with Story: Lessons from the LA Times Brand Studios with Kristen Berke

  4. 23 Jun

    The Trillion-Dollar Blind Spot with Tori Jackson

    Lydia Chan sits down with Tori Jackson, Senior Manager of Partnerships and Commercial Strategy at Sundial Media and Technology Group — home to Essence, Refinery29 and Beauty Con — to explore how brands earn real loyalty from multicultural audiences they've historically underinvested in and misunderstood. Tori's central argument is a refusal to flatten: a Black woman from Harlem and a Black woman from Kansas City are not the same consumer, and a strategy that can't tell them apart has already lost both. Drawing on a deliberately non-linear career — Harlem, music labels, fashion PR, cannabis, and now multicultural media — she makes the case for "pick a lane and stay in it," arguing that Black women are simultaneously the most cynical and the most loyal consumers, and that any drift from who you said you were reads as betrayal. She holds up Skims as a masterclass in reaching audiences with a general distaste for the face of the brand but who "can't deny the product," dismantles the "cultural moments trap" (the Juneteenth-then-silence pattern), and champions diversity in the room over diversity in the asset. Her creative test is refreshingly human: will someone cry? One participant said a campaign call "felt like a therapy session" — exactly the connection she's chasing. With Black spending power near $1.6 trillion yet only roughly 5% of marketing spend reaching Black, Latino and Asian audiences (per a 2023 report), the cost of getting this wrong is enormous. For marketers, brand leaders, and strategists, it's a clear-eyed playbook on segmentation, consistency, and building for longevity over quick hits. Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

    The Trillion-Dollar Blind Spot with Tori Jackson

  5. 11 Jun

    The 265 Signals That Drive Human Choice with Bill Harvey

    Oliver Atkinson sits down with media pioneer Bill Harvey, creator of Resonance Media Theory (RMT), to explore why understanding human motivation beats chasing attention, and how a breakthrough audience measurement system is reshaping the future of marketing, media and AI. Bill shares the remarkable story behind a lifelong quest that began when he experienced flow state as a child performer and led to decades of research into how audiences really make decisions. Discover how a project that started with 13,000 psychological descriptors was refined to 265 “value signals” that predict what people connect with. He also unpacks why media and creative should never be separated, comparing media to the rocket and creative to the payload. The conversation dives into Wharton’s largest-ever neuroscience study, where RMT proved a stronger predictor of brain synchrony than three out of four EEG measures, challenging long-held assumptions about attention, persuasion and effectiveness. With marketers under increasing pressure to deliver measurable outcomes, this episode offers a fresh perspective on why motivation matters more than demographics, why context can reduce wasted media spend, and how future AI systems may need to understand human feelings before they can truly help people. Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

    The 265 Signals That Drive Human Choice with Bill Harvey

  6. 28 May

    Nobody Believes You: The Leadership Comms Problem with Jenni Field

    Oliver Atkinson sits down with speaker, consultant and author Jenni Field to explore why so many people inside organisations have quietly stopped believing their leaders, and what it actually takes to earn that belief back. Drawing on her book Nobody Believes You, Jenni traces how trust erodes not through one dramatic moment but through small broken promises that accumulate over time. She explains why low engagement scores are almost always a trust problem in disguise, why flooding teams with more communication when confidence is already shaky tends to make things worse, and why you simply cannot message your way out of a credibility problem. She also introduces the "royal visit" effect: every interaction a leader carries more weight than they realise, which means showing up with integrity, support and genuine vision has to be a deliberate choice, not an afterthought. The conversation goes further into why "authenticity" has become a slippery and sometimes weaponised word, what genuine behaviour actually looks like day to day, and why AI-written leadership messages risk widening the very distance they are meant to close. With Gallup finding only 21 percent of US employees strongly trust their organisation's leadership, and that number falling steadily since 2019, this episode is full of practical thinking for leaders, communicators and culture-builders who want to guide people through change without losing them along the way. Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

    Nobody Believes You: The Leadership Comms Problem with Jenni Field

  7. 18 May

    The Story Your Audience Is Already Living with Kristian Aloma

    What if the biggest mistake brands make isn't saying the wrong thing, but not understanding the story their audience is already living? Oliver Atkinson sits down with Kristian A. Alomá, PhD, Founder & CEO at Threadline, whose work on narrative economy explores what's really being exchanged between brands and the people they serve: not information, not value propositions, but identity, meaning and belonging. Kristian traces his path from pharmaceutical advertising, where a doctor rejected a concept because he hated the model's shoes, to the insight that changed how he thinks about marketing altogether. He breaks down the difference between story and narrative, explains why the audience has to be the hero (not the brand), and shares his STORY framework for understanding what people are genuinely reaching for when they buy something. Along the way there are memorable examples: RadioShack's "You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers" campaign and why a good promise made to the wrong infrastructure falls apart fast; Southwest Airlines and what happens when you trust frontline people to act like humans; and the simple but powerful idea that you're not selling the cake, you're selling the ingredients people use to make it themselves. In a market flooded with AI-generated content and brittle trust, this episode gives marketers, creatives, leaders and internal comms teams a practical way to build loyalty, sharpen positioning and create work people can genuinely see themselves in. Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

    The Story Your Audience Is Already Living with Kristian Aloma

  8. 1 May ·  Bonus

    How Olly wowed the crowd at Adfest

    In this episode, co-hosts Lydia Chan and Olly Atkinson recaps his talk at AdFest 2026 in Thailand titled "Making People Care: Storytelling in the Age of AI,” where he strapped biometric trackers on 50 unsuspecting audience members and measured their brain activity in real time. What happened next revealed something most marketers don't want to admit: the content we think is working, often isn't. From a curiosity gap that spikes immersion in 30 seconds flat, to corporate messaging that tanks it just as fast, Olly unpacks what the neuroscience actually says about why some content sticks and most gets filtered out. Plus, a whiskey brand that ditched their assumptions, rewrote their entire creative strategy, and saw a 56% revenue jump in three months with no extra media spend. If you create content, brief it, approve it, or sit in rooms talking about it, this one will change how you think about all of it.   Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.

    How Olly wowed the crowd at Adfest
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About

A podcast series focusing on audience engagement through visual storytelling and  behavioral principles that influence emotion, memory, and decision-making. A 360 view on connecting with the audience that matters to you, whether that’s consumers, clients, stakeholders, or employees. Through entertaining and practical conversations with experts from various industries and disciplines, listeners will gain valuable insights and tips on how to engage with the audiences that matter to them.

Information

  • Creator
    Casual
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    46
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Audience Connection

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