Kasia Leyden, CMO of the investing app Acorns, told Marketing Brew that she deliberately stopped optimising for urgency. No more countdown timers, no more scarcity language, no more “act now before the market moves.” Instead, Acorns is building campaigns around optimism and long-term trust, on the premise that people investing their money for the first time don’t want to be scared into it. They want to believe the decision will still look right in ten years.
That’s a specific bet against a specific playbook. Urgency converts. It’s the default lever in performance marketing because it’s measurable and fast. Leyden is arguing that for a category where the customer relationship is measured in decades, not sessions, urgency is the wrong tool, and it may actively work against retention. Fintech has spent a decade A/B testing fear. Acorns is testing the opposite.
Urgency Is A Rented Emotion. Trust Is Owned Ground.
Urgency works exactly once. You scare or rush someone into a decision, and the moment they’ve clicked, that emotional trigger is spent. It doesn’t compound. You have to manufacture a new deadline, a new scarcity claim, a new reason to act “now,” every single cycle. That’s expensive, and it trains your audience to distrust your own marketing, because they learn the urgency was never real.
B2B has the same problem, just slower. Every “limited time demo slot” and “book before Q3 pricing changes” email is the enterprise version of the same trick, and buyers on six-to-eighteen-month cycles see through it fast. What they’re actually evaluating is whether your company still believes what it’s saying six months from now, when the renewal conversation happens and the champion who bought you in has moved teams. Urgency doesn’t survive that. Trust does, because trust is built cumulatively, episode by episode, not manufactured in a single send.
This is the entire case for a podcast over a campaign. A podcast can’t fake urgency, there’s no deadline to a conversation. What it can do is show up on the same schedule, with the same rigour, for a year, two years, five. That consistency is the mechanism, not a side effect. It’s the same discipline we bring at B2B Better, the podcast agency behind this blog, when we tell a client their first season needs to run at least twelve episodes before they’ll see any pipeline signal: trust doesn’t show up on episode three.
The Measurement Industry Is Catching Up To This
The timing here isn’t incidental. The AMP Task Force paper, due out today, is attempting to formally define what a “podcast” even is for measurement purposes, alongside standard consumption metrics. Acast’s Q2 numbers, released this week, show average revenue per listen up 26% even as total consumption rose only 2%, which tells you advertisers are paying more for less volume because they’ve decided the attention is worth more. The market is quietly repricing podcast listening as a higher-trust format, not just a bigger one.
That should reframe how you evaluate your own podcast internally. If your finance team is asking for download counts as the primary KPI, they’re measuring the wrong thing for the wrong reason, the same reason Leyden abandoned urgency metrics at Acorns. Downloads measure reach. They don’t measure whether a prospect trusted you enough to take the call. You need a different scorecard: are the same accounts coming back episode after episode, are sales reps hearing “I’ve been listening” on discovery calls, is the show shortening the education phase of your pipeline. None of that shows up in a vanity download chart.
What To Do With This
If your current content plan leans on urgency, a countdown to a webinar, a “limited spots” gate, a fear-based subject line, audit it against a simple question: would this still feel honest in a year? If not, you’re renting attention you’ll have to keep repurchasing. Building a podcast that shows up reliably, without a manufactured deadline, is how you start owning trust instead.
