Over at Arbor Networks there’s a hilarious podcast series going on about a credit company that gets blackmailed and its security team. Of course it’s 90% spin, hype, fud and lies but hey, it’s entertaining and at least we can officially class it as fiction. There’s commentary from the Arbor marketing ninja assassin squad but I do find the hammed up acting bits hilarious, if unintentionally so. Sure, it’s a marketing vehicle for Arbor but it is funny nonetheless, if a little reminiscent of Firewall. Of course, what is actually really interesting (and quite groundbreaking for me, anyhow) is the use of a commercial podcast to tell a story. As I said earlier, the quality of the material isn’t quite Radio 4 but I think there’s a lot of potential there for people to use fictional podcasts in marketing. So how would you get me to listen to one of these things? Well, you need:

• A compelling story
• Believeable characters, plot etc.
• No ‘commentary’ from the marketing team

That last bit is actually quite important. Where (in my humble opinion) Arbor have gone wrong is that they’ve formulated a story around a marketing plan then used their marketing team to comment all over it about how great Arbor are. If they’d have used advertising (at the start and the end and, if it was say 10 minutes long in the middle) rather than an infomercial-style approach, the fiction would be a lot better and people might actually listen to the podcast for the story. I for one think a 24-style security podcast about a worm attack could work quite well (only not entirely in real time, lets say 15 minute chunks) provided that we didn’t have marketing droids going on all over it.

What fiction podcasts do you listen to, and why?