The Podcast

Return of the Mac is a podcast produced by Blackpoint Cyber, starring their VP of Security, MacKenzie Brown, as the host of the show. MacKenzie welcomes expert guests to demystify cybersecurity and get real about breaches, incident response, and the people in the middle of it all. 

The Ask

Blackpoint Cyber’s objective with the podcast was to amplify brand awareness by using MacKenzie as a voice for the company, contributing to a larger goal of becoming the go-to thought leader in the cybersecurity space. As Creative Director I drove the brand strategy and project launch timeline from start to finish. Working with MacKenzie, our content team and creative team, we established a unique identity for the podcast, that reflects Mac’s clever and hilarious personality. 

As Creative Director I also spearheaded the distribution plans for the podcast, which involved promotions through the company website, social, email, and digital channels. 

The Approach

Almost 50% of adults in the United States say they have listened to a podcast in the past 12 months, according to a survey by Pew Research Center. For Return of the Mac to gain an audience and lead to increased brand awareness for Blackpoint, we needed to stand out in the crowded market. 

Return of the Mac isn’t any old boring technology podcast though. MacKenzie has a dynamic and funny personality (see for yourself!) and it was important to have that clearly established with the visual identity. The bold color palette and modern typography, paired with grunge textures, cutout images, and abstract shapes set the tone for our audience. Whether a listener’s first touchpoint was a YouTube short, or a LinkedIn promotion, I ensured consistency and uniformity across all assets and channels. 

Along with the visual identity, I collaborated with Sunstone Recordings to develop a custom theme track, entirely exclusive to the podcast. I also managed the production process and provided creative direction to the team who executed on the video edits, animations and promotion graphics for every episode. The final result is truly a memorable podcast, where I can guarantee listeners will walk away having both learned and laughed. 

In addition, our distribution strategy involved publishing Blackpoint’s first-ever YouTube shorts, and upon implementation, we saw over 40K views in one week!

Return of the Mac’s color palette is bold and eye-catching, to stand out amongst the sea of podcast marketplace. Clash Display and Rock Salt were established as the main brand fonts because they have personality, just like the host, MacKenzie.

Every episode features custom imagery that is related to the topic being discussed, and styled to look like a cutout sticker for more uniformity. The use of grunge and paper textures, combined with fun accent shapes, makes each and every episode feel unique and innovative.  

As a Blackpoint Cyber podcast, every episode was hosted on the company’s website to draw traffic in and further engage with the Blackpoint brand at large. Every episode was also distributed on all major podcast platforms, as well as YouTube. Promotions were carried through on social networks as well as paid channels, such as Reddit.

With the addition of the podcast to our YouTube channel, we developed a YouTube Shorts strategy that upon implementation, increased our subscriber rate by over 130% in one month. One YouTube short saw over 40K views in less than one week, and we continue to see the company’s YouTube channel gain traction with our audience. 

In order to build hype for the podcast’s launch, we created a suite promotion deliverables – including social graphics, carousels, animations, video clips and email assets. 

With every episode that is released, a suite of promotion assets are created for distribution on social, email and digital channels. As Creative Director, I provided direction to our animator on the creative team to develop the final video edit as well as promo videos and graphics.

I also collaborated with the content team to identify clips for promotion across organic and paid channels. 

If you’re curious to see more of the content and creative, here are a few of the full podcast episodes available on YouTube!