Audience Connection

A podcast series focusing on audience engagement through visual storytelling. 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.

Audience Connection is a business podcast hosted by Casual, with 45 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Casual hosts Audience Connection, a business show with 45 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #31

  The magic word that makes you say yes with Nancy Harhut

  Jul 27, 20261h 13m

  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.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #30

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

  Jul 7, 202645 min

  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 and 45 Pulitzers behind her, Kristen makes the case that trust, not scale, is the real product. This one is for brand leaders, marketers, and filmmakers weighing whether to invert the usual model and spend on the story rather than the impressions. Her closing takeaway: bigger risks, greater rewards. 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.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #29

  The Trillion-Dollar Blind Spot with Tori Jackson

  Jun 23, 202648 min

  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.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #12

  The 265 Signals That Drive Human Choice with Bill Harvey

  Jun 11, 20261h 12mS2

  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.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #28

  Nobody Believes You: The Leadership Comms Problem with Jenni Field

  May 28, 202646 min

  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.

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Audience Connection. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.