More Than This: Vox Creative x Straight Talk Wireless

With More Than This, a custom podcast series for Straight Talk Wireless, Vox Creative sought to answer Tracfone’s brand-building request to position itself as a partner in their key audiences’ quest to live life on their own terms and conditions. Taking an innovative approach on personal storytelling formats, we created a six-episode custom podcast series from the ground up featured on Vox Media’s premiere Podcast Network and an accompanying campaign hub that housed all content. From overcoming daunting odds to taking chances on new businesses, each episode’s subject, hunted in collaboration with Epic Digital, spoke to the human hunger for connection.

An opportunity to reach audiences in groundbreaking ways was revealed when speaking with guest and singer-songwriter Mandy Harvey. Harvey, a member of the deaf community, was eager to participate but expressed that contributing to podcasts was always underwhelming because she couldn’t enjoy the final product.

Podcast transcripts, while compulsory, aren’t ideal vehicles for storytelling, as they lack emotion, senses of time and place and sonic identity. To create a transcript that honored the audio world we created, and to serve Straight Talk’s audience and the US’s population of 37 million deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, we set out to capture these essential elements in a visual translation.

Vox Creative’s audio and design teams and a cohort of D/deaf and hard-of-hearing creatives partnered to develop a new transcript experience that translates auditory storytelling for a non-listening audience on our content hub. By manipulating typography, fonts and colors, we captured pacing, emphasis and the passage of time for our transcript’s audience. Illustrations of essential story elements contributed further weight to key moments from the audio, resulting in an immersive transcript that is faithful to the podcast in tone and tempo.

Through a robust media plan that included strategic media distribution, podcast ads for contextual alignment paid social and PR, we received positive results and recognition from the podcast industry for the first-of-its-kind experience. NiemanLab called it ‘gorgeous’ and Apple highlighted it on the front page of Apple Podcasts.