This June, at the 2015 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, McKinney chief creative officer Jonathan Cude will be joining the team behind the popular “Serial” podcast to talk about their serialised, real-time investigative reporting, which has captivated millions of listeners worldwide and reimagined the possibilities of podcasting. Host and creator Sarah Koenig, executive producer and co-creator Julie Snyder and producer Dana Chivvis will all be on hand to discuss the series, which Koenig has said is “About the basics: love and death and justice and truth. All these big, big things.” The series is a spinoff of the radio program “This American life,” and last month (April 2015), it earned the honour of being the first podcast to win a Peabody Award!
At this year's Cannes Lions, McKinney CCO Jonathan Cud will join the team behind the popular “Serial” podcast to talk about their serialised, real-time investigative reporting
On Friday 26 June, the creators of Serial will meet on a global stage to host a talk titled “Binge-Worthy Journalism: A Conversation with the Producers of Serial,” in the Grand Auditorium Theatre at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France. Koenig, Snyder and Chivvis will reveal what made Serial an addiction for an average of 7 million listeners per episode during Season One in the Autumn of 2014. Attendees to the panel will get a behind-the-scenes look at how creative storytelling combined with rigorous reporting reinvented a medium and turned the record-breaking podcast into a global cultural phenomenon.
Sarah Koenig
Since its launch in October 2014, Serial has been downloaded more than 86 million times, making it the largest audience of any podcast since the medium started 10 years ago. In April, after it became the first podcast ever to win a Peabody Award, Koenig was named to Time Magazine's list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” The New York Times said: “When you listen to Ms. Koenig slowly heating up a cold case, doing interviews that are built on conversations, not sound bites, and taking up to an hour to unfurl a single episode, you are getting aesthetic storytelling that feels like the best of public radio.”
Since its launch in October 2014, Serial has been downloaded more than 86 million times, and is the first podcast ever to win a Peabody Award
Before launching Serial, Koenig spent more than 10 years as a producer of the beloved public radio show This American Life. She's produced and reported some of This American Life's most popular shows, including “Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde” and “Habeas Schmabeas,” a Peabody Award-winning show about Guantanamo Bay. Cude returns to the Cannes Lions Festival for the first time since he and Cheil's then head of innovation Daniele Fiandaca presented “Every Company is a Media Company” in 2013. As CCO of McKinney, Cude's work has most recently won two Lions at Cannes for Big Boss Brewing's beer-dispensing arcade game, “The Last Barfighter” and Sherwin-Williams' “Chip It!”
Jonathan Cude
Snyder has been a guiding force behind two of the most successful ventures in audio broadcasting. Before creating Serial with Koenig, she was the senior producer of This American Life, which she ran side-by-side with Ira Glass. Snyder began at This American Life in 1997 and has produced many of the show's most entertaining and ambitious episodes, including “24 Hours at the Golden Apple,” “Notes on Camp,” and the Peabody-winning shows “Harper High School.” Chivvis reports, edits and produces Serial alongside Koenig and Snyder. Before she joined the Serial team, Dana was a fellow at This American Life. She also covered education as a reporter and digital producer for NBC News and AOL News and was a photo editor at National Geographic.
