When Tom Moylan and I were tasked with developing an audio fiction podcast for Bump’s Podcast Lab, we decided to meet up in the EU Quarter on a sunny Friday afternoon to co-create a storyline and make a plan of attack.

After dancing around a few ideas, we quickly decided that a murder mystery would be the easiest narrative format for our audience to grasp. After all, true crime is seemingly everywhere in podcasting – from Serial to The Apology Line to Crime Junkie, the list goes on and on (and on and on).

However, what I didn’t expect was for us to say the same thought at the same time…

“We should kill Brett.” (In the fictional podcast, of course.)

And with that, our one-episode-long podcast, Bumped Off, was set in motion.

We needed the right cast of characters to really make the story stand out, which is why I recruited two of our beloved clients and one of my (very funny) colleagues.

Tom and I then set out to develop a narrative that would weave in each person with their own perspectives and personalities, and create a fictionalised, monstrous version of Brett to tie it all together.

So, why did we do this? We wanted to test a few hypotheses with this project, and show how they can apply to our (weird, small, but incredible) world of policy communications:

1. Could we set out to entertain – breaking from the typical goals of educating or persuading – in a way that still relates and resonates with EU Bubble audiences? 
2. Could we further solidify this micro-community with niche humour and by featuring people they know and love? 
3. Could we develop an atypical variation of the three-people-on-stage panel event, with various formats our clients and policy comms audiences could riff on? 
4. Could we build brand equity for Bump and in doing so, show others how an execution like this could do the same for their organisation? 
5. Could we show the EU Bubble exactly how we did it – from outlining a script to casting clients to recording in front of a live audience to post-production? 

I don’t want to spoil too much of the story, so if you’d like to listen to the full 12-minute episode of Bumped Off, check it out below (or on Apple Music or Spotify) and hear it for yourself – and take a look at some of the photos from the Podcast Lab live recording session (photo credit: Romain Triollet).

Will Surman – kindest person you’ve ever met, or a cold-blooded killer?

Brett’s live reaction of the podcast – he didn’t know what the episode was about until we recorded it live in front of a theatre full of people 🙂

Elise Demaeght with her incredibly funny standout performance.

Habib’s improvised lines throughout his performance made the experience that much more entertaining.

Special thanks to Tom Moylan for collaborating with me on this podcast; to Will Surman, Elise Demaeght and Habib Msallem for being hilarious, brilliant guests; and to Brett Kobie for letting us poke fun at him, despite him not knowing about this until we actually recorded the episode – thank you for being a good sport and an amazing colleague! Infinitely grateful for your sense of humour, great vibes and wealth of insights/advice/guidance on pretty much everything 🫶

Written by Ali Colwell, Creative Strategy Lead