CANCELLED PLANS
LET'S HEAL (LAUGH THROUGH IT) TOGETHER
Podcast | Brand Launch | Video Editing | Social Campaign
Gen Z is "more mentally ill than ever", at least according to every article that comes across our phones. But despite the rising diagnoses and awareness, folks who actually fall into this community report feeling more isolated than ever. Especially when all the advice they see is spouted by flawless, in-human influencers, who's advice often doesn't work, or doesn't apply to someone with their checklist of maladies & trauma. That's why we decided to say F*%$ perfection and share the actual stories & advice that helped us survive it all and pull us back from rock bottom. Because, not to sound cheesy, nothing heals like the power of friendship, finally feeling understood, and a good laugh after a hard time.
Cancelled Plans is an internet podcast hosted by two long-time best friends determined to find the humor in the madness & mental illness of their twenties while they share their tried, true, and totally unfiltered advice about everything from grief and trauma to dating and diet culture. Ready to get real? Come join us, Bestie!
THE TALE OF TWO BESTIES
Sophomore year of college at the University of Colorado, two weird, goofy ladies wound up at a party together and the rest is history. Since 2017, we have been best friends through the highs and very low-lows of navigating life in our 20s while working through years of complex trauma.
From losing family members to suicide, to dealing with various forms of abuse, anxiety, depression, late-diagnosed ADHD, and bad relationships, life has put us through the ringer. But through it all we've found the silver lining, stability, and real, deep friendships that make it easier to laugh through the hardest of times.
After years of hours-long talks on couches, in cars, and over the phone we finally decided to let folks like you in on the drama, the stigmas & reality of living with mental health struggles, and all of our surprisingly great advice to grow through it. With combined passions in TV, comedy, advertising, branding, and design we transformed our interests (and love of a lazy day spent talking with friends) into Cancelled Plans.
Our mission is to bring laughter and joy to topics that typically make our hearts hurt and help others do the same. Let's break the stigma by talking about mental health openly and honestly. We're no experts, we've only lived through it - and we're excited to share our years of tried & true tactics to survive and thrive with our new "besties". So cancel your plans and come be human with us.
This is a glimpse at some of our most recent video Thumbnails. In addition to filming, editing, producing and starring in the podcast ourselves, we also design all of the other brand elements such as thumbnails, social posts, and merchandise.
THE WONDROUS GROWING PAINS OF A NOT-SO PODCAST
We don't do things like other podcasts. Sure we use fancy microphones and release a new episode once a week, but the similarities end there. When creating Cancelled Plans we wanted this to be a place to foster our creative expression and exploration, in addition to being a source of hope and laughter for our audience.
But a bigger concern was sustainability and making sure those episodes actually did go out once a week. And for two busy girls with full time jobs and fuller lives, burnout was something on our minds. So we decided to structure our podcast differently. Yes, we would release one new episode a week BUT we would borrow inspiration from the TV world and split our podcast into 20 episode seasons, with a month long break in between. Giving us time to rest, go on vacation, live our lives, and actually plan out future seasons.
We also decided to be a visual/video-based podcast and post primarily on YouTube, since we knew it was the place to grow an audience for longer-form content. Also with the rise of influencers, podcasts, and traditional media moving to YouTube, particularly for the monetization aspect, it seemed like the best place to start to grow. Especially if the podcast evolved into more of a variety show style in the future, given our love of bits and comedy (see for yourself in our highlight reel above).
However, as someone with a background in this area I knew we were making several choices that acted in opposition to the "holy algorithm", such as taking breaks from posting between seasons, variable video length, etc. That said, our podcast was built around the concept of advocating for, and working WITH our mental health accommodations, real lives, and intentionally making efforts to build in sustainability and work-life balance. But who are we kidding "doing things the wrong way" was the story of our lives, so when it came to our quirky unique podcast, we took the dive, put our content out there, and kept tweaking our strategy along the way. Here's how...
A BIG AUDIENCE
V.S. THE RIGHT ONE
When we first started Cancelled Plans we wanted it to grow quickly so we could find our community and start making an impact as soon as possible. But over the course of 12 months, 3 seasons, and 50+ episodes we discovered that while we had been growing to over 3,500 subscribers in less than a year, they weren't all the right fit for Cancelled Plans. Anybody is welcome to come learn, listen, or laugh, but despite our large following, our watch time and engagement weren't improving, and feedback via comments told us that we were largely attracting men who were uninterested in earnestly engaging with our content rather than reaching more women like ourselves.
So as we launched Season 3 in August of 2024, we decided to stop running ads entirely, allowing our content to attract only our most loyal followers back for the newest season. We did this to 1) save money 2) focus in on our core audiences so we know what they actually like & respond to 3) retrain the algorithm based on more accurate engagement metrics. While pausing ads resulted in an unsurprising drop in views, watch time, and pretty much every metric... at first, it lead to far more valuable insights about what was REALLY working for our core target audience.
WHERE THE
GIRLS AT?
As mentioned, when we launched the podcast we started running ads soon after. These ads were meant to bring awareness to the podcast and help us find our audience until it was large enough for the algorithm to do it on it's own.
The problem was that despite our targeting, we were being shown to mostly men. While our podcast welcomes everyone, it was largely meant to target other women in their 20s and 30s like ourselves, particularly those who were on their mental health journey, since it aligns most with our content and experience. This mismatch resulted in our first season having the highest views of any of our videos, but some of the lowest engagement and connection with our desired audience. After seeing similar results in season 2, we decided to stop advertising entirely for season 3 to reconnect with our core following and retrain the algorithm on who our target audience is.
Since making that change we've seen the gender balance of our audience reach a more healthy equilibrium, with an 11% increase in female viewers as well as more comments from women on each video this season.
KEEP IT SHORT
After running the podcast for a year and building a community thousands strong, most people still had no idea who we were. Even close friends and family members admitted to seeing nothing from the podcast and rarely watching it. We knew something in our awareness strategy was missing, and that was posting more clips of our podcast on social media like Instagram and TikTok.
Truthfully part of the reason this was so slow to ramp up was because we were doing everything ourselves, and on top of hours of editing the actual episode, we struggled to create clips for social media in our remaining free time.
However, as soon as we did, we started to see massive bumps in views, followers, engagement, and short-form content directing people to watch our full videos. After we started posting more, those same friends and family started randomly talking to us about videos or clips they'd seen and getting really excited to watch more of our content.
So in Season 3, since we stopped advertising, we pushed even more on organic social platforms and saw the results start flooding in. We had more viral videos than ever before and the increase traffic told the algorithm to push us even more. You can see a chart showcasing the spike in views from one of our most viral videos on the right. To this day our largest driver of organic traffic to our videos is shorts (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram).
