When podcasts become proxy battlefields, time to hit ‘mute’

THE C-suite already has your eyeballs, but now it wants your ears. Earlier this month, hedge fund Elliott Investment Management took its proxy fight with Southwest Airlines to the podcast world as it angled for shareholder support. Each episode of the podcast, called Stronger Southwest, would feature the one of eight board nominees that Elliott was trying to get on Southwest’s board.

Perhaps this was an inevitable waypoint on the medium’s soaring trajectory. Podcasts – once intimate and idiosyncratic – have been steadily turning a shade of corporate beige, evolving from niche audio spaces into prime-time platforms.

Last year, more than 144 million Americans listened to podcasts regularly. This year, podcast ad revenue in the US alone is projected to grow 12 per cent, surpassing US$12 billion. Worldwide, some 500 million podcast listeners are expected to tune in this year, almost doubling from 2019. The sector’s heavyweight, streaming firm Spotify, posted record quarterly profits in July, up 45 per cent from the year before.

In its boardroom fight with Southwest, Elliott’s podcast move was a savvy one. While activist investors usually only need to bend the ears of about a dozen major shareholders to sway voting decisions, Southwest has many individual retail investors. A podcast would’ve bent all those investors’ ears at once and sidestepped traditional media to boot.

Yet for podcast fans, the corporate advocacy that inexorably accompanies mainstream acceptance must produce dread. When corporations invade, it often signals a medium’s cultural tipping point. Blogs are a prime example. They started out as edgy and unfiltered spaces for discourse some 30 years ago, only to devolve into a dumping ground for this fatuous thing called “content marketing”. (“Are you crushing audience engagement in 2024? Here’s how!”)

But surely, you might think, podcasts are different from the wider Internet where it is now impossible to avoid commercial search-engine-optimised dreck. Just steer clear of the podcasts you dislike and stay subscribed to your beloved true-crime ones.

However, as with any other industry, the people and money that circulate in the podcast realm exist within an ecosystem. The money that flows into a corporate-shill podcast will divert creative talent and resources towards high-paying, brand-sponsored gigs, away from independent projects that could have been the next Serial – much like how Silicon Valley’s brightest minds are engineering the “like” button instead of curing cancer.

In any case, Southwest and Elliott reached a detente last week, resulting in five of the hedge fund’s nominees joining the airline’s board. Since then, Elliott’s Stronger Southwest podcast appears to have been stood down. Its two existing episodes can no longer be downloaded, so I have not had the pleasure of sampling them.

To give it the benefit of the doubt, perhaps listeners were deprived of an unexpected delight. Maybe we missed hearing a podcast with the dulcet tones of Ira Glass, the entertaining combativeness of All-In and the punchy irreverence of Hard Fork, all at once.

Then again, this corporate ceasefire may not hold. The Southwest-Elliott truce doesn’t prohibit the latter from launching a fresh offensive at the 2026 annual general meeting. If it needs to reach the little guy again then, the hedge fund should consider this new-fangled thing called blogs. They really are marvellous for audience engagement. (“Are you crushing readers’ souls in 2026? Here’s how!”)