The branded series that are still cited years later have three things in common: a subject the audience wanted anyway, a host or narrator with a real reason to be there, and a brand that sat inside the premise rather than interrupting it. Inside Trader Joe's, eBay's Open for Business, McDonald's The Sauce, Mailchimp Presents and Red Bull Media House each got there a different way, and each is documented well enough to learn from. Only Mailchimp shared an audience figure, so the others are judged here on what they did and how they were made.
Inside Trader Joe's: answering questions customers already ask
Trader Joe's launched Inside Trader Joe's on May 1, 2018, as a five-part series hosted by company executives and crew members. The episodes answered common customer questions and told stories from the company's history (PR Newswire, May 1, 2018). The show is still listed on the Trader Joe's website (Trader Joe's).
The questions came from customers, so the audience already wanted the answers, and the hosts were the people best placed to give them. The brand was the subject, told through the things people were curious about: how products are chosen and why the stores work the way they do.
Trader Joe's has not published download figures, so we cannot say how large the audience was. What we can say is that a company-hosted show built on customer questions has an obvious first audience, the customers, and an obvious place to promote it, the stores.
Open for Business: a subject next to the brand
Open for Business is described on its Apple Podcasts listing as "a branded podcast from eBay and Gimlet Creative, about building a business from the ground up." Its second season ran from March to April 2017 (Apple Podcasts).
The subject sits next to eBay's business without being about eBay. People starting a business are a natural audience for a marketplace, and a show about the practical side of building one gave the brand a reason to be present without making every episode about its own product.
The Sauce: using the brand's own story
McDonald's The Sauce was a three-episode, investigative-style podcast about the 2017 Szechuan sauce promotion that went wrong. It was made with Studio@Gizmodo and Onion Labs and premiered on February 22, 2018 (Marketing Dive, February 21, 2018).
The premise took a moment that had embarrassed the company and made it the subject, in a format, the investigative podcast, that listeners already knew and enjoyed. The brand was in every episode, which suited a story about the brand told with some self-awareness. No performance figures were published.
Mailchimp Presents: a budget moved from ads to shows
Mailchimp built an in-house studio and launched Mailchimp Presents in June 2019, with original series, films and podcasts for entrepreneurs. Its head of brand told Digiday that much of the brand advertising budget had moved into making and promoting this content (Digiday, July 29, 2019).
Two details from that report are worth borrowing. The budget covered promotion as well as production, which is where many branded shows fall short. And Mailchimp measured the content against its customers: it told Digiday that people who engaged with the shows resembled its most valuable customers, paying more, paying sooner and engaging more. It also reported more than one million combined views and downloads between January 2019 and the June launch. That is a measure a finance team can follow, because it connects the audience to the business.
Red Bull Media House: the far end of the commitment
Red Bull Media House was founded in 2007 to produce and distribute content, and describes itself as a "globally distributed multi-platform media company" working across TV, digital, audio and print (Red Bull Media House).
Most brands do not need a media company. What they can take from Red Bull is the time horizon: it treated content as a lasting part of the business, with its own production and distribution, over many years. A single season will not build that, but a brand can decide at the start that a series is part of how it shows up for a long time, and fund the second season in the plan for the first.
Choiceology and Trailblazers: measured by how much people hear
Pacific Content made Schwab's Choiceology and Dell's Trailblazers. For branded shows it puts average consumption, how much of each episode listeners hear, ahead of downloads. Its figures: 92% average consumption for Choiceology, 98% for Trailblazers (Pacific Content, April 11, 2019). These are the studio's own figures about its own clients, so they are best read as an example of the measure rather than a benchmark.
Whatever the exact figures, consumption is the measure that shows whether people stayed with a show to the end, which downloads cannot.
What they had in common
Each of these shows started from a subject an audience already wanted: answers to customer questions, how to start a business, a famous mistake, the work of running a small company. The brand made the show possible, through access, money or its own story, and the subject gave people a reason to press play.
The people on the microphone had a reason to be there, too. Trader Joe's put its own crew in front of customers' questions, and McDonald's matched an investigation to an investigative format.
And the brands committed past a single release. Mailchimp paid to promote its shows and measured them against customer value, and Red Bull built a media company around its content over many years.
What this means for a series made in 2026
The examples above are mostly podcasts, and most are from before video became the main way people watch them. YouTube now counts one billion monthly podcast viewers (YouTube Blog, June 2025), and creators bring an audience that a new brand channel does not have. That is why we build most series with a YouTube creator as host and release them on the creator's channel first. The principles carry across unchanged: a subject people want, a host with a reason to be there, and a brand inside the premise. The formats page shows how each type of series applies them.
Source notes
- PR Newswire: Trader Joe's Launches First-Ever Podcast Series. May 1, 2018.
- Trader Joe's: Inside Trader Joe's Podcast. Viewed 5 Oct 2026.
- Apple Podcasts: Open For Business. Viewed 5 Oct 2026.
- Marketing Dive: McDonald's dips into podcasts for another Szechuan sauce promo. February 21, 2018.
- Digiday: Mailchimp has cut back on traditional brand advertising to invest in producing original shows, podcasts. July 29, 2019.
- Red Bull Media House: About us. Viewed 5 Oct 2026.
- Pacific Content: Podcast Metrics We All Should Talk About. April 11, 2019.
- YouTube Blog: Neal Mohan at Cannes Lions 2025. June 18, 2025.