Clubhouse Scores Exclusive TED Talks for Social Audio Apps
Social audio app Clubhouse will host exclusive events for TED, the group best known for its series of TED Talks. The arrangement adds another well-known brand to Clubhouse’s list of collaborators as it attempts to leverage its explosive growth into a long-term audience.
TED’s Clubhouse
The first TED show is called Thank Your Ass Off and is hosted weekly by author and TED speaker A. J. Jacobs and former music industry executive Mir Harris. Harris and Jacobs, best known for his books about reading the whole encyclopedia and living as biblically as possible, spent the first show discussing the concept of unsung heroes and those who match that description in their lives before opening up the floor to questions and stories from the audience. More Clubhouse-sponsored shows on the official TED Clubhouse room are expected to be announced soon.
“TED’s mission has always been to share ideas and foster discussion around them,” Carla Zanoni, TED’s director of audience development, added. “When ideas and people come together to engage and debate, that’s when the real impact happens.”
Brand Talk
After its incredibly rapid growth in user numbers this year, Clubhouse is now pushing to expand and support content that will keep people interested in the app and the conversations on the platform. The NHL’s recent deal with Clubhouse is another recent example. The TED partnership is not too surprising considering that Clubhouse made TED’s head of conferences, Kelly Stoetzel, its thought leadership programming leader in May. She likely helped ease streamline signing the deal, though no specific monetary or other transactions were mentioned as connected to the partnership.
“For nearly forty years TED has brought the world’s preeminent ideas, imaginations and voices to audiences,” Stoetzel said in a statement. “This partnership will bring those minds into a dialogue with the millions of creators who make up the Clubhouse community.”
The partnerships are a logical way for Clubhouse to compete with the growing number of social audio rivals and their various content plans like Twitter Spaces, Discord’s Stage Channels, Spotify’s Greenroom, or Facebook’s new Live Audio Rooms. Clubhouse isn’t relying on established brands either. The company’s Creator First program is all about finding new shows on the app to support that it thinks will be of interest to users, and Clubhouse recently added Brazil and India-focused additions to the program.
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