Taiste Talks

A monthly podcast that celebrates the people behind digital products by letting them discuss the topics that matter to them. The results are insightful – often with a moving and personal twist.

The series is highly relatable for anyone working in the field. However, it is approachable for anyone – making it a human-centric window to topics that affect us all.

Watch/listen here:

Name of the entry

Taiste Talks

Design

Taiste

implementation

Taiste, Brave Teddy, Kobra

Client

Taiste

Grand One category

Paras podcast

links

YouTube

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Real talk

Digital societies are built by humans. Yet, we don't give the stage to most of them nearly as often as we should.

Taiste Talks is a video podcast series that brings together a wide variety of digital experts and lets them discuss the topics they know inside out, uncensored and uninterrupted. The results are always insightful – and sometimes surprisingly moving and personal.

In doing so, the show serves both the digital community and anyone with an interest in how these professionals view their work and the world around them. It also has significance as a piece of oral history. The Finnish digital industry has traditionally done a good job in documenting the outcomes and results of projects – but that leaves out the stories of those who worked on them.

Episodes released

872h

Watched/listened (YouTube & Spotify)

35m 39s

Median play time (Spotify)

12%

Avg.% of duration watched (YouTube)

Background: marketing as community service

The idea for Taiste Talks was born from a very practical need. As a fast-growing but still a relatively small company, we have limited resources when it comes to creating content. At the same time, we'd always rather focus on substance rather than filling our social media feeds with fluff. A video podcast would allow us to not only create high quality content for YouTube and Spotify, it could also be further utilised as blog posts, bite-sized Instagram stories. and so on.

Seeing ourselves as a part of the digital industry community, we are eager to contribute. That being said, we felt that even the voice of our team members was underrepresented in our marketing materials. Understandably, these people were often too busy to write lengthy blog posts. At the same time, we knew they possessed a wealth of insight and had interesting, diverse stories to tell.

The realisation that this was an industry-wide problem was the biggest a-ha moment for us. From that point on, it felt like the concept of Taiste Talks practically created itself.

The concept: making it personal

The tech world loves its flashy Keynotes and rehearsed presentations such as the TED Talks. While there's nothing wrong with those formats, it gives the illusion that in order to successfully communicate ideas in this realm, one needs to be an experienced performer. But people who don't necessarily fall into this category are so much more interesting to listen to than we give them credit for. So is their capability to talk about their work life.

We selected a collection of very broad themes and invited a number of our own team members and guests who we knew to be knowledgeable in the said topics. Then, we had a preparation session with each group explaining the format of our video podcast, asking them what they would like to add to the conversation based on their own real-life experiences.

There would be no interviewers. Instead, we instructed the guests to be curious and ask each other as many questions as possible – this created a more natural and less stressful environment. The focus was on the participants sharing their own perspectives and stories, representing themselves rather than companies and organisations. This resulted in many funny and entertaining moments – but also ones where the discussion got much deeper and reflective than it otherwise would have.

Episode highlights

Matti Vahtera from Different joins Taiste's Ikaros Ainasoja and Eeppi Nieminen in this funny and brutally honest discussion about personal worklife crises. A podcast episode or a group therapy session? Why not both!

Watch here

Meeri Haataja, an expert in AI ethics sits down with Taiste's Design Director Sami Sorvali. The two have an insightful talk about the possibilities and threats that artificial intelligence poses – and what we as professionals should think about it.

Watch here

Every agency in the world claims to be efficient. But what the word even means is far more complex and messy than that. Antti Akonniemi, stand-up comedian and tech CEO joins Taiste's Aleksis Tulonen and Pyry Liukas in this hilarious episode about what goes on behind the scenes.

Watch here

Social media strategy

Taiste Talks is aimed at everyone orbiting the fields and design, from people working in related positions all the way to students. As such, our target audience is quite specific in terms of interests, but broad in terms of age and lifestyle.

In our multi-channel social media strategy, we used bite-sized, short teasers of the episodes. These would then lead to a dedicated blog post that lets the reader choose whether they'd prefer to watch the episode on YouTube or perhaps listen to it as a podcast on the go. The results of this approach have been great: after the first year, Taiste Talks already has a dedicated audience who don't shy away from long-format content, indicated by the impressive average watch times.

The team

Taiste Talks has been a collaboration between Taiste and video production company Brave Teddy. They have been responsible for the video shoots and editing, whereas we developed the concept and took care of project management side of things.

The visual identity of the show is based on Taiste's brand created together with Kobra Agency. The round shapes, lively custom font and colourful, nature-inspired identity fits the curious, humane and approachable nature of the show.

Taiste Talks has been an excellent platform for many of our people to refine their speaking skills and share interesting insights with the world – which would otherwise have stayed within their private peer circles. Many participants have grown as speakers by stepping out of their comfort zone. It has been great to witness the evolution of the series both in terms of content and production. Let us bring more Taiste Talks into the world!

Ville Kaisla

Design Director, Taiste

Participating in Taiste Talks was a fantastic experience! We got to share some truths with the other guests – and it was cool to get to witness a slice of Taiste's culture that enabled their employees to boldly share their views on the show. Taiste Talks is one of the best produced podcasts that I've been a guest at. The show offers fabulous takes on software development by people who work in this business – to the point where I was challenged to rethink my own views on the topics we discussed during my visit.

Antti Akonniemi

Founder & Evangelist, Kisko Labs