The podcast network’s fractional CMO tells Tim Healey how politics, history and football became mass-audience hits, why strong editorial can outperform traditional marketing and why the best ideas often defy common sense.
You have worked at MTV, Cafe Nero, Vice, Asos, LadBible, and since November 2024, you have been in your marketing role at Goalhanger. Please walk us through your career to date.
I tend to go into businesses that have strong editorial but who have not had a marketing team before. I then do my best to understand how to pair marketing and content elements to drive the commercial narrative, increase their brand love, and essentially find ways to improve and increase perception of their businesses.
Before Goalhanger, I was working on a business that I pitched to ITV. It was a 360 Gen Z wellness marketplace. The idea was to use content and e-commerce to drive a new revenue model for media. After working in marketing and media for an extended period, I noticed one trend. Budgets were reducing, and the opportunities for growth were limited.
The business lasted two years and though we had cultural impact, we realized that being tied to a big conglomerate like ITV wasn’t conducive to building a startup. When that ended Sam Oakley reached out to me.
Sam, someone who I worked with at LadBible, had stalked Rory Stewart, one of the hosts of the Goalhanger show ‘The Rest Is Politics’. That led him to email the co-founders. He said: “I’m a social media expert. I think I can transform your podcast brand into kind of a digital ecosystem.” He did that for a few years, which essentially shifted the business from an audio brand to an increasingly visual medium. When that happened, he reached out to me and asked me to help them build a brand and that’s how I was introduced to Goalhanger.
This was a business that had never really done any marketing, but had built a massive audience through word of mouth, the credibility of the talent and through the quality of the shows. It was a really compelling brief. I mapped out the weaknesses, the untapped strengths, and the moments where marketing could genuinely change the trajectory of the business. From there, I built a brand and marketing strategy designed to prepare Goalhanger not just for what it was but for what it could become.
It laid the foundations for the next phase of the company: a media ecosystem with a clear audience proposition, a stong commercial engine, and a roadmap for long-term growth.
What is the offer at Goalhanger?
For audiences, Goalhanger is an ecosystem of intelligent content, built around passion points such as politics, history, football, money and entertainment and culture. Goalhanger has this unusual skill: they take subjects most people think of as niche and turn them into blockbuster conversations. They attract audiences that wouldn’t normally go near those categories.
‘The Rest Is History’ is the number one podcast show in the UK. It has a massively young and diverse audience. It overindexes on people that are educated and influential but also has a wide range of people from different demographics. What’s fascinating, especially coming from youth culture, is just how rare it is to get young people to commit to 40 minutes of anything. Attention is the most contested currency we have. And if you were working purely from the data, you’d never predict that history would be the thing to break through. But that’s the power of Goalhanger.
We also know that 77% of our audience consumes Goalhanger in video form on YouTube and across social, alongside audio. That shift changes the scale of what our shows can do. From a product perspective, how brands and marketers can work with Goalhanger until now has been largely untapped. When I started working with Goalhanger I didn’t expect such mass audiences – and I didn’t recognize how influential the hosts were, especially when it came to things like influencing purchasing decisions. Goalhanger presents a para-social opportunity.
Your advertising revenue grew 63% year over year. What’s coming up for you and your team in 2026?
We’ll be focusing on helping advertisers better understand how they can reach our valuable audiences through on offer at Goalhanger. Alongside the shows themselves, we have our live events. We have a load planned for 2026. That’s just one example of how brands can really integrate with our passionate communities in real life.
There’s also the evolution of our video product, too. We recently launched our ‘Beatles Special’ for ‘The Rest Is History’. That’s a special event episode that we’ve done in collaboration with Disney + and Conan O’Brien. It is a completely new way to consume our podcasts. It’s audio but it’s also undeniably a video-first product. Not necessarily something that you would expect from what was a traditional podcast company.
How is your marketing team structured?
I’m a fractional CMO for Goalhanger. At its core, I am a one-person marketing team with an art director. As and when we need, we work with creative studios like Otto Studio, who did our recent rebrand.
Everyone in the Goalhanger team is a marketer in some way. They’re all content creators. The social team are always thinking about hooks, what’s going to drive engagement, what’s going to increase watch time. Our producers are all thinking the same way.
There is an element of audience engagement that’s baked into the entire business. Our team will evolve by leveraging these inherent skills to drive specific brand narratives, more concentrated campaigns and to essentially be more structured in terms of the messaging.
Goalhanger is growing so rapidly and there are so many opportunities. We now need to carefully consider what is most useful for each of our segments. That might be our super-fans driving our membership proposition or our commercial partners and new brands working with us.
We also take great care around our passive listeners. There’s a real opportunity to bring them on board and enable them to engage with our shows and maybe with the master brand as well.
How do you maintain your marketing team? It sounds like you’ve got a slightly unconventional setup. You mentioned there’s a social team. Is that like a separate team? Who reports to who? How does it all work?
Sam Oakley leads all of our digital propositions. The social team reports to him and I work alongside him. Lately, I’ve been focused on the recent rebrand. For that I was closely aligned with the producers of the shows and also with the founders and our art director.
We will be evolving the marketing team, with a focus on CRM, paid social – the things that drive conversion or attention. With our brand marketing, we’ll be developing integrated systems that the business can kind of work towards.
Having a fractional CMO allows us to be agile and it also allows us to bring in the skills that we need right now versus bringing in people as long-term hires and trying to make them fit all the skills that we need.
How do you manage to surf the tidal wave of marketing technology?
For me, I embrace technology when necessary because I don’t think every piece of technology or every advancement is for every market or for every brand. When people were going on about the metaverse, it didn’t feel like it had enough substance to it. I definitely considered it, but I thought, ‘let’s just wait a few years and see if it lands’.
I bet you are glad that you did?
When marketers jump on trends, it can appear disingenuous. Suddenly everybody at every conference is talking about that thing, whether it’s relevant to their brand or relevant to their audience or not. And then it just feels a bit performative.
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
The first myth is that everybody knows how to do it. Marketing is one of those departments or business functions that everybody has an opinion on because they’ve been exposed to it.
The other myth that is tied to the first is that everyone has an opinion on marketing. A common misconception is that every piece of marketing work needs to serve all of the business objectives and the key performance indicators.
This view can be frustrating because those individuals are not thinking holistically. Marketers that lack confidence find it hard to push back when they are criticized in this way. That in turn leads to sub-standard work. Their messaging becomes jumbled because those marketers end up trying to say too many things to everyone.
Would you be able to describe a moment when your instincts and the data pointed in different directions? How do you decide and what was your takeaway from the experience?
Having done a lot of work on myself, I am now 100% instinct and then I identify the data to support my view and get the buy-in from the business. Every single time I’ve achieved something of note, it has contradicted every bit of common sense that most people have.
At LadBible, I transformed it into a brand that was driven around social change by building the campaigns ‘Trash Isles’ and ‘UOKM8?’ At the time, I wanted to get people to think that the LadBible audience was valuable, engaging and considerate – not just a bunch of lads who only care about memes and videos of people falling over.
I looked at what would make this content work on social and resonate with our audiences. Next, I put a layer of the brand storytelling on top of it to make it more considered. We brought them together to create a movement. Instinctively, I knew that humans aren’t ‘a segment’ – they are nuanced and they contradict themselves.
I also knew that we could do something that was both unexpected and that would fundamentally change the way people perceived our audience and our commercial proposition. Research and audience insight would have pointed you towards a campaign based around humor. There was humor in some of our campaigns, but the campaign wasn’t humor-based.
‘Trash Isles’ was not a corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaign. It took every facet of the brand ecosystem of LadBible and made it work: the community aspect, the humor, the way that we communicate, the way that people got really passionate about things once they were spoken to in the right way, the way that we didn’t dumb things down.
We took all those elements and made them into a movement that had a CSR element, because then it was allowed us to kind of have tangible proof points to make arguments around kind of who our audience is and what they care about.
Could you tell me about one significant activity you’ve deliberately stopped? What capacity did you release and what have the results taught you?
I have stopped doing the things that I’m not the best at. I realized that there are certain things that my ADHD brain absolutely nails. In contrast, there are things that don’t chime with my way of thinking. My time should be spent leveraging the strengths that I have and not doing things where others excel. In my case, that might be finance and project management – all these things can be outsourced.
I used to think I had to do everything. Say yes to every task. Prove I was a team player. Avoid looking like I thought I was above any job.
Then I realized the truth. Doing work I’m not great at cost me more time, more energy and more weekends than anything else. I was spending double the hours on things other people could do in half the time.
A simple example. When I was a founder without an assistant, I ran my own diary. Endless back and forth. Missed slots. Wasted hours. All energy that would have been better spent doing the work only I could do. It didn’t work and it didn’t need to.
If you had one piece of advice for mid-weight marketers looking to become marketing leaders, what might that be?
My advice would be to work with small to medium-sized businesses. You want to get your hands dirty; you want to be able to have impact on campaigns and lead campaigns that you can point to. Before you start a new job, know what you want your narrative to be.
For example: by the end of this project with this business, I want to say that I was able to engineer a rebrand and it increased reach by X% – or that I was able to double engagement.
Maybe you will be able to hit the business objective – whether it’s commercial or brand metrics. Next, make sure that everything you do is building up to the narrative you want to be told. Once you achieve that narrative, leave that job and find another challenge.
The other thing that I have learned is that you need to speak about the work that you’re doing. I was under this naive belief that the harder you work, the more acknowledgment you would get. It took me close to burnout to realize that that wasn’t the case and that actually nobody knows what you’re doing if you don’t talk about it.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?
What measures are they taking to ride the AI revolution?
Your question from the last senior marketer I interviewed: how do you ensure that your marketing team is staying culturally relevant in an ever-changing market?
You need to hire people that are passionate about the industry that they’re in. I think 70% of the success that I’ve had is because I worked in areas that have literally been my dream job – like working at MTV was a job that I had wanted since I was eight years old.
The reason why that is important is because – and maybe this is not very PC to say – you never stop thinking about what you are working on because you love it so much. And because you never stop thinking about it, you become a perfectionist. That drive, design, passion, and that love for the work is what makes something ‘OK’ become ‘excellent’.
It also makes sure that you’re always ahead of the curve because you’re genuinely so interested and passionate that it doesn’t even feel like work. I totally get this is a double-edged sword and this level of application may not be sustainable. A healthier version of this approach is to stay abreast with evolving culture.
The other thing is to be curious. I actively seek out and put myself in spaces that may on the surface feel not very relevant to what I am doing – but because I’m in a space that I shouldn’t be in, that very act might inspire something that some of my competitors or cohort isn’t thinking about. You just never know where a good idea might pop up from. You never know where a good relationship might cement the next biggest campaign of your life. In summary: stay curious and talk to people.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…?
Go against the grain to make a bigger impact. If I could summarize how I approach marketing, it would be: subversive innovation. I have a tendency to look at what the business needs, then to look at what everybody else thinks we should do and then figure a way to do the opposite. But this needs to be a way that ensures that things land. A way that still hits the KPIs and commercial objectives for the brand.
I have noticed that all the businesses that I love have done the same kind of thing. Take Netflix, for example. When they launched original programming, I remember thinking: ‘Wow – straight-to-video movies?’ The quality of that type of content had such a low bar at that point. But instead of low-quality shows, they launched excellent ones like House of Cards. They basically turned the category that had no credibility into a category that all of a sudden was competing with HBO.
It’s a similar approach at Goalhanger. Our founders Tony, Jack and Gary created a platform, one that was built on history, politics and football, all in one ecosystem. It is a platform that is loved by a massive and diverse demographic. As an initial idea – that doesn’t make sense. But it works.
What people miss is that everyone looks at things on a surface level, but actually, it’s the mechanics that are fascinating. It’s also being able to assess risk: being able to identify different routes where it could go right or wrong. Once you dig in here, you start to explore approaches that aren’t necessarily obvious.
You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.
This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.
