Nova Entertainment has locked in an exclusive Australian partnership with one of the world’s biggest podcasts, The Diary of a CEO, which will see the show join the Podcast Ranker — and host Steven Bartlett doing local ad reads.
The deal will see Nova become local brand partner, distributer, and advertising representative for the podcast — as well as for Bartlett’s production house Flightstory, which features a growing stable of podcasts covering mental health, spirituality, and business.
As Nova’s chief growth officer Adam Johnson reveals to Mumbrella, the deal will also see Bartlett do Australian sponsor-reads for “a relatively small” number of partner brands, with plans to expand this sponsorship further into video content, and social media tie-ins.
The Diary of A CEO is one of the world’s most successful interview podcasts, boasting 60 million monthly downloads and having cracked over a billion streams. It has 25 million podcast subscribers, and an addition 11 million Youtube subscribers. Past guests have included Michelle Obama, Jimmy Fallon, Gabor Mate, and Jordan Peterson.
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In addition, it’s one of the most-listened to shows in Australia — currently sitting at #5 on the Apple Podcast charts, behind four true-crime shows. When it joins the Australian Podcast Ranker for July — which includes overseas podcasts with local sales representative — it will likely debut in the top slot, dislodging The Mel Robbins Podcast, represented locally by SCA’s Listnr.
Steven Bartlett
This strategic partnership is the first of this kind for Bartlett, who touts a shared commitment to “independent ownership, creative innovation, a collaborative mindset, and the belief that this partnership will make one plus one equal three” in a release announcing the deal.
Christiana Brenton, Flightstory’s CRO said the company is testing “a new model of strategic distribution” with Nova, and praised the networks “shared values of independence, 1% mindset and pursuit of excellence”.
Such an integrated partnership is also rare for Nova, as Johnson tells Mumbrella, and comes after close to 18 months of “end-to-end deal making” with Bartlett and his team.
“We’ve been looking for partners to grow the network for the past couple of years,” Johnson said. “We’ve been relatively selective in terms of who we’ve brought on board, but Flightstory have always been in our sights, for a number of reasons.
“Obviously, Diary of a CEO is the jewel in the crown, so to speak, in terms of size and scale, but even just their approach to how they make, distribute, monetise their podcasts, is something that we’ve been really aware of.”
Johnson says the partnership with Flightstory is more than a simple distribution or sales representative deal, and therefore offers far more scope for brands.
Adam Johnson
“Certainly where the magic happens — where the fun is — is with a more deep integration into the show – working with Steven and his team in terms of brand endorsements. And then, on ‘how do we take that stuff off platform?’ Into video, into socials and even third-party media where The Diary of the CEO turns up.
“I think it’s really exciting that Australian brands will be able to actually integrate into this environment, when they haven’t been able to do so before.”
Nova will be keeping the partnerships limited, in number.
“We’re not selling many,” Johnson said. “We’re going to keep it relatively small in terms of the number of brands we work with. When brands come on board, he will be doing reads within the podcast. And then — depending on the depth of the deal — extending that into off-platform environments.”
Given the untested nature of such a deal, the network had “provisional conversations with partners”, prior to signing Flightstory to see if the financials stacked up.
“This has been a while in the making, this deal,” Johnson said. “So we wanted to test the water, of course, before we went too far along the path. We wanted to make sure that we could deliver what we thought the revenue potential of this content was, in this market.
“And early indication would suggest there’s going to be a lot of interest in it.”