Audible sparks listener imagination with Contentful

The Monday morning commute, mowing the lawn, sorting the mail, waiting for a doctor’s appointment. While these tasks might be unavoidable, they’re not all altogether inescapable. With some earbuds and an Audible Original, podcast, or best-selling audiobook, those everyday moments transform into something magical, your imagination free to run beyond the confines of that train car, fenced-in yard, desk, or waiting room.

Audible aims to bring this same sense of endless possibility and excitement to its marketing content — which serves as the first touchpoint for many soon-to-be subscribers. As a subsidiary of Amazon, the world’s largest ecommerce company, Audible shares the company’s affinity for leveraging technology to enhance employee and customer experiences. But, here’s where the plot thickens: the premium audio storytelling company’s monolithic CMS was difficult to work with, limiting how agile and creative marketers could be as they developed content for audible.com, blogs, and landing pages. 

Eager to deliver on what the company affectionately calls “blue-sky” ideas — ones that get readers hooked on listening to content instead of simply reading it, Audible began to reconsider its technology. To open up a world of creative possibilities and streamline collaboration, the company needed a more flexible and agile content platform — one that would also meet Amazon’s standards for delivery, security, and reliability. This led them to Contentful.

Closing the book on a rigid system and stagnant content

The composable content platform seemed capable of reversing the rigidity of Audible’s old solution. Like most monoliths, its former CMS required a certain level of technical dexterity to make even the smallest content changes and additions, suspending Marketing projects for however long it took engineers to eventually address them.“We struggled to make changes at any scale. It was really frustrating for our creative teams. They’d dream up these great ideas but we didn’t have the tools or capacity to apply them so they were sent to the creative graveyard,” shared Abby McInerney, Senior Creative Director, Brand Creative at Audible.

“We really needed something that would allow us to take bigger swings and work more cross-functionally to carry them out,” she added, nodding to the company’s looming brand refresh.

Outside of setting up preliminary content models and content types, Contentful promised no-code content management, which would help them go to market more quickly. The platform’s extensibility (i.e., support for integrations and customization) and knowledge base use case offered other points of attraction. The Audible team hypothesized that the capabilities offered by new apps and a framework for its brand guidelines could bring ideas from the creative graveyard “back to life.” With some cross-functional collaboration and encouragement from McInerney and her engineering counterpart Nate Cook, Global Marketing Director of Web Development, use of the platform began to spread.

Starting a new chapter with composability

Since adopting Contentful, Audible has used the platform to optimize its five largest marketing pages, develop stunning audiobook-specific landing pages, build 19 region-specific blogs, and localize them for various languages. 
“New pages, new features, more functionality — it’s all possible in Contentful. It’s this editable database that can be manipulated with front-end tools enabling our team to build with speed and with fewer boundaries,” McInerney said. 

Contentful’s content models give the Audible team guardrails and a starting point from which to create content, increasing speed to market and consistency. Cook likens content types to different book genres: The elements that make something a “mystery” are the same — a crime, a victim, and suspects. What changes are the details of those elements. Comparatively, Audible’s “blog” content type has the same elements — a hero image, body text, author information, what changes between posts is the actual media and words added to this structure.

Keeping the creative juices flowing with structure

Shortly after adopting the platform, the company completed a brand refresh that unified its global identity with an updated personality, refined color palette, and bolder graphics. Communicating these updates across an organization can be difficult to do with success, often resulting in inconsistent messaging and design.

The company has leveraged Contentful’s knowledge base capabilities to sidestep these concerns, however.
The new brand guidelines now live in a dedicated Contentful space and the tone of voice section has been translated into German, French, French-Canadian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese — an important consideration as the connotation of certain words can vary from one country to another.

“Having these parameters in place gives us a safe space and framework to create from. No matter who’s creating the content, it will have that same ‘Audible’ look and feel,“ pointed out McInerney. “There are moments for dazzle and surprise but they fail to exist without a common baseline.”

Testing the way toward page-turning experiences

More than being innovative and consistent, the content Audible creates must ladder up to meeting larger, company-wide goals and KPIs — which explains why Cook is so passionate about testing and data. With Contentful, his team is able to easily integrate familiar, market-leading tools including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target to make data-backed decisions about which “blue-sky” ideas spark the most engagement and opportunities to optimize the digital experience further. These tools and processes have been instrumental in bringing Audible’s refreshed brand to market.

Following an iterative approach, Abby and Nate have been injecting bolder text, images, and color into existing landing pages and reviewing data to determine what is yielding positive results and where Audible can make its creative voice even louder.

“It’s not enough to simply take a creative idea to market, you need to look at how it is actually affecting customers,” Cook stated, regarding these surprise findings. “We don't want to create a bunch of new patterns and components that don't jive with the experience customers have when they log on, buy a new audiobook, or start listening, because it's not authentic. We want to sell them the entire Audible brand — not just a landing page,” he added.

Telling better stories, together

Contentful is also improving how teams come together to build these experiences. Contentful’s no-code editing capabilities and user-friendly interface are behind this. 
Creative team members now have the autonomy to do everything from updating a line of copy to building an entirely new page without technical expertise. This enables them to easily tap into their creativity and deliver “blue sky” ideas without an overreliance on developer support.

“Contentful is a magnet. It’s really bringing teams together — creative, marketing, product, UX, and engineering. We’re able to go after the blue sky ideas that demand a stronger, cross-functional relationship,” shared McInerney. “We rally around customer obsession and we’re now able to work together in a more informal, fun way. The platform enables us to share ideas, conceptualize them, and collect feedback that informs in-house creativity and product development in the future.”

What’s more, it’s been relatively easy for users to get a handle on. “The general consensus: Everyone likes using the platform. It's pretty straightforward so people rarely reach out for help — which sort of speaks for itself,” said Cook.

Writing the next sequel with Contentful

While Audible is already using Contentful to satisfy many use cases with positive results, Nate and Abby feel their story with the technology is far from over. 
“In some ways, it feels like we’ve only dipped our toes into what Contentful can do. I'm excited to really dive in and see where we can take it,” McInerney shared. McInerney and Cook envision a future where more internal teams are utilizing the platform, shrinking technology silos across the company. 

Until then, it’ll be business as usual — which means continuing to chase those blue sky ideas. According to Nate, “Audible will always be reimagining what it means to experience a story and how we can best portray that while making it seamless for subscribers to listen, learn, and imagine."