Mailchimp monkeys with the unions

• One of podcasting’s biggest early advertisers, Mailchimp has pulled out of a Pineapple Street podcast because “the new Mailchimp contract required all work on the series to be performed by non-union workers”, says The Verge. Pineapple Street unionised in October 2022. The WGAE has a webpage to contact Mailchimp.

  • Mailchimp is now owned by accounting software firm Intuit, which owns QuickBooks and TurboTax. Intuit has spent more than $2.8mn this year lobbying the US government to make filing taxes difficult enough to require software - something it’s lobbied for more than twenty years. If you’re interested, Podnews uses Sendy (affiliate link) to send email; other hosted alternatives are EmailOctopus or Beehiiv.

• Surveying 500 media buyers across five countries, Acast reports that marketers rank podcasts as the top performer for accurate targeting and unduplicated reach. Only 16% expressed concerns about excessive advertising on podcasts.

• Pacific Content sent us an audio podcast christmas card. That was nice of them. It contains “The Most Wonderful Podcast This Year”, which is a fun parody. (Is it CanCon though?)

• The Podcast Show in London has vacancies - they’re looking for a Head of Conference Programming and an Exhibition Marketing Executive.

We have lots more news today - but after a big storm, local internet and electricity is in short supply where we are. Apologies for our late delivery. We’re back on Monday.