I am an original-ish Morbid listener (2020) and have and will always continue to listen to this podcast, but there is a serious problem with their handling of advertising. I’ve compiled a list of my major issues.
As a prelude, whenever you’re an influencer your likeness and niche often becomes your brand. Your brand and likeness is important to your audience and as soon as you jump into SELLING products completely outside your brand or selling products at all, you risk disconnecting you from your audience. Simply put, a good brand is partnering with products strategically to further your own business, and Morbid just continues to shoot themselves in the foot.
- Morbid ads disconnect the listener from the story. Although there is transition music between ads, especially on Spotify’s older episodes, new ads can be spliced randomly into episodes without any transition or music. This can startle listeners and is unpleasant generally when revisiting old episodes.
- Morbid has lost its brand. Why is my true crime podcast instead of being a vessel for storytelling trying to literally sell me shampoo, wine, and subscriptions for clothing stores? This is bad branding period.
- Some ads are in extremely poor taste. Specifically ones targeting “wow you just listened to some crazy gross stories how will you ever wind down, wow cheap wine subscription”. Obviously a marketing tactic but just tasteless when you’re not talking about a ‘difficult story’ true crime is actual crime and people.
- Ads don’t belong in a true crime podcast, or at least not randomly spliced into the middle of episodes. True crime is already a sensitive topic as a “genre”, but simply monetizing off stories of the suffering of others is morally dubious enough, further profiting and interrupting OTHER people’s stories with an attempt to distract and sell you something is in poor taste.
- Finally, do we need the ads? I don’t honestly know about their respective financial situations but are the ads actually necessary for themselves or an extra support? I obviously know certain brands require ads at certain time stamps, but eliminating ads or advertising at the ENDS/ONLY BEGINNING of episodes could honestly do at least something.
I do think advertising CAN be done in well, honestly leaning into the true crime side when it comes advertising CAN help this podcast with money if is an issue (which mI doubt). Partnering with company A that donates profits to [ crime related issue] or company B that sells self defense classes.
In short this is a fixable thing, just another bullet point to the growing faults this podcast has.
Edit: guys I wrote this at 2am cus I didn’t want to skip ads, I don’t actually care at all and just wanted to argue a side. To clarify I don’t share the opinion of half the things I wrote. 😭