BNY Mellon Made an Extra-Slow Podcast Ad That Sounds Normal to Speed-Listeners

So, apparently there’s a thing called “podfasting,” where listeners play podcast episodes at a higher speed so they can finish them quicker. Some studies have suggested up to one-quarter of listeners do this.

BNY Mellon and agency Havas New York had some fun with this phenomenon recently by recording a 15-second ad, slowing it down to 30 seconds, and running it in the middle of the Economist’s Money Talks podcast. To regular listeners, it may have sounded a little weird, but to podfasters it sounded normal.

See how it worked here:

“Because the ad is in service of BNY Mellon’s ‘Consider Everything’ brand platform, which is all about finding value in different perspectives, we believe this execution becomes a nice conceptual fit,” says Nick Elliott, creative director at Havas.