Crop Science Innovation Summit
Event Design & Storytelling
We are a group of creative people who help organizations make their ideas beautiful.
An Apple Top-100 Science PodcasT FOR A LEADING VOICE IN CROP SCIENCE
The Tomorrow Farm
An Audio Experience to Reimagine the Future of Agriculture for the Future of Humanity
CHALLENGE
Increase awareness of Bayer beyond the creators of Aspirin, and explore new formats for the brand to expand reach and enhance company reputation.
SOLUTION
To help shape new perceptions of Bayer, we created The Tomorrow Farm, a podcast series that tells the stories of Bayer innovators and stakeholders who are reducing the effects of climate change through their nonprofit and academic networks.
SERVICES
RESULTS
73%
engagement rate
#65
in the science category on Apple Podcasts TopCharts in its first week
The podcast was supported with a landing page, social content and a robust paid media campaign resulting in a 73% engagement rate. It reached #65 in the science category on Apple Podcasts TopCharts in its first week, and has been downloaded in 46 countries.
“In all of my time at Bayer, this is one of the best examples we’ve done of showing examples of how agriculture helps the world. These episodes cover the breadth of agriculture in a way that is unlike anything we have done.”
HOW IT HAPPENED
Farming is so fundamental — and for some of us, so invisible — that many people have long since decided it doesn’t concern them.
But some topics seem to turn everyone’s head: dwindling resources, climate change, biodiversity, social equity.
It turns out, smarter, cleaner and, in some cases, more urban farms are offering unexpected solutions to the problems we all want solved.
We’ve been helping Bayer Crop Science tell this story in different ways for years, but we needed to make it easier for laypeople to absorb. How could we explore storytelling in a new way for the brand that could shift perception so subtly that the audience might not even notice we were doing it? With a podcast that cleverly tucked agriculture into a bigger, more relatable story.
Powerful technology and progressive biology collide on the quiet acres of our planet’s farms, and Bayer enables much of it. With The Tomorrow Farm, we wanted to convey this influence without sounding like we were marketing it. And because agriculture’s reach is so extensive, we had a wealth of compelling adjacent topics to explore. Topics with real emotional impact, like childhood nutrition, urbanization, gene editing, and climate change.
To tackle them, we crafted narrative arcs for each episode that could hook an audience, hold its attention, and satisfy Bayer’s communication needs.
After deciding what we wanted to cover, and how, we went on a worldwide search for guests. Because the stories we were telling were bigger than agriculture, we needed guests outside of Bayer to give the episodes relevance and context.
Across six different episodes, podcast guests included a diverse group of scientists, academics, policy influencers, farmers, entrepreneurs and Bayer experts. We coordinated and recorded interviews with experts from California to Ireland to Kenya.
The result was a podcast that felt as global as farming itself.
Our host, Vonnie Lea and our crew, coordinated and recorded interviews with experts from California to Ireland to Kenya.
The results were remarkable. With over 16,000 downloads and counting, The Tomorrow Farm proved to our clients we could turn big, technical, invisible topics into sleek, engaging audio that fit seamlessly into people’s lives. We put Bayer’s brand in thousands of headphones and car speakers — creating countless hours of brand exposure that people actually opted into.
For us, it’s about helping companies tell their story no matter how big, little, or obvious it may seem. It’s about learning an industry so well we become educators on it.
When it came to The Tomorrow Farm, the writing had to be sharp. The production had to be flawless. The promotion had to be enticing. And the agency had to be Paradowski.