ANDREW BRADY
Work
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Boston Scientific
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Leading the Charge
Client
My Contribution
If you're not a doctor, you'll find Boston Scientific's original content to be super boring. Heck, even if you ARE a doctor, you still probably will. So after seeing that their umpteenth research webinar wasn't getting many views, our S-ICD client had an idea: turn it into a podcast.
A webinar's basically a podcast, right?
The act of retrofitting a meandering conversation into a structured episode list was certainly a tall task. Our first order of business was finding a new host (Wyatt Stahl) and capturing new content with him in order to work around the recorded audio of the docs. I isolated the best soundbites from the docs (brevity is often a rare treat from researchers) and started to assemble the rough outline for a six-episode season.
Unsurprisingly, the production process was also atypical. After some initial phone interviews with Wyatt to get a gist of his perspective on the direction of each episode, we sat down in a recording booth together and just let the tape run. Episode by episode, I prompted Wyatt with quotes or big ideas—asking and re-asking questions to extract soundbites for some connective tissue. The whole approach was super loose; we definitely found each episode in the process of recording it.
And because Boston Scientific didn't want to pay any more than absolutely necessary, we couldn't afford an audio editor to cut and assemble the all pieces. Which means that the job fell to me. It was quite the jigsaw — splicing unrelated audio blocks together to simulate a real conversation flow was a lot harder than I anticipated.
All things considered, I think it turned out pretty well. Boston Scientific agreed, since they renewed the podcast for a second season within weeks of launch. No webinars to retrofit this time; just a season-long guest who speaks in paragraphs with minimal affect. Progress!
