Story as a strategic asset.
How a partnership podcast became a full-funnel content ecosystem — moving customers from awareness to conversion through premium storytelling.
The best brand content does two things at once: it earns attention, and it moves business. The Way Up with Guy Raz was designed from the start to do both.
We partnered with acclaimed podcast host and How I Built This creator Guy Raz to launch a video podcast profiling six resilient local businesses powered by Square. Each episode explores the founders' transformative journeys — the significance of community, the reality of challenge, and how Square's ecosystem supports their growth. The storytelling is emotional. The strategy behind it is rigorous.
THE CHALLENGE: Premium storytelling is easy to justify as brand theater. The harder question is how you connect an emotionally resonant series to actual customer behavior across the funnel. We needed to reshape perceptions of Square and its products — not just generate impressions.
THE APPROACH: We built a comprehensive multi-channel strategy around the series, mapping narrative deliberately across awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Distribution spanned paid media, organic search, organic social, and email — with Guy Raz extending reach through his own social channels, Substack newsletter, and a dedicated season of Wisdom from the Top. A subscription feature let us deliver episodes directly to subscribers as each one released, building an owned audience across the campaign.
The content ecosystem went deeper than the episodes themselves. We collaborated with each featured founder to develop supporting content that explored themes from their conversation with Guy — and produced case studies with each one demonstrating how they use Square in their business. Every piece served a specific stage of the customer journey.
THE RESULT: A content campaign that earns attention and converts it. The Way Up demonstrates that premium storytelling and performance strategy aren't in tension — they're the same thing, when you build the architecture right.
PROJECT DETAILS
Brand: Square
Format: Video podcast, editorial ecosystem, paid and organic distribution
Partners: Guy Raz (How I Built This / Wisdom from the Top)
Link: The Way Up
