Inside iHeartMedia's Human-Led, AI Accelerated Podcast Campaign Launch with Jasper

The Challenge: Launching a Genre-Bending Podcast to a Fragmented Audience

In order to successfully launch Cardiac Cowboys, a scripted series hosted by Chris Pine, the iHeartMedia team needed to deliver a creative identity and multi-channel campaign as unconventional as the story itself - Cardiac Cowboys blends historical drama, medical innovation, and character-driven storytelling - making it a uniquely challenging title to market. 

The team wanted to reach a wide spectrum of listeners: fans of Chris Pine, true-crime enthusiasts, medical-history buffs, and even communities personally affected by heart disease.

To succeed, the team was tasked with:

• Developing a unified creative identity that reflected the emotional tone of the podcast
• Building a multi-channel content engine capable of supporting broadcast, podcast, digital, and social activations
• Personalizing messaging for different audience segments
• Producing and iterating on campaign assets at a rapid clip
• Maintaining brand consistency across all content formats

Creating these launch assets manually would have required weeks of coordination across producers, strategists, designers, and marketers. Instead, iHeartMedia turned to Jasper’s AI-powered technology to accelerate insight generation, creative ideation, and campaign production—without sacrificing the creativity that the iHeartMedia team brought to the table.

The Solution: An AI-Powered Creative Partner for Faster, Smarter Campaign Production

To kick off creative ideation for the launch campaign, iHeartMedia, OSO Studios, and Jasper convened for a full-day collaborative build and brainstorming session—bringing together creative producers, AI specialists, strategists and marketing leaders. Throughout the process, Jasper’s AI acted as a creative partner accelerating ideation, surfacing new directions, and freeing up the team to focus on the uniquely human elements of storytelling. Using Jasper, the team developed the launch campaign’s core theme, brand identity, positioning, and multi-platform content plan in a single day.

How Jasper Powered the Campaign

1. AI-Accelerated Campaign Creation
By loading the Cardiac Cowboys creative brief into Jasper, the team instantly generated a full campaign bill of materials—from messaging and taglines to social cadences, audio scripts and promotional concepts. What once required weeks to create only took hours.

2. Automated, On-Brand Asset Production
In collaboration with Jasper’s marketing content automation workflows, iHeartMedia produced high-quality, consistent campaign materials across every channel—including broadcast spots, podcast promos, social series and experiential concepts.

3. Personalized Audience Segmentation & Insights
Jasper quickly surfaced audience personas and identified tailored angles for reaching listeners by interest - true crime, historical fiction, medical innovation, or Chris Pine, for example.

4. Rapid Creative Iteration
iHeartMedia’s writers, producers and marketers asked Jasper for variations, expansions and alternative creative directions—reducing review cycles and unlocking fresh ideas at scale.

5. Human Creativity, AI Enhancement
As Jasper CMO Loreal Lynch shared on the partnership, “We’re bullish on keeping humans at the helm. Jasper accelerates and enhances human creativity—it doesn’t replace it.”

What came of the build was a fully integrated, AI-enabled campaign that maintained artistic integrity while delivering at unprecedented speed and scale.

The Results: A Breakthrough Campaign That Redefined iHeart’s Launch Playbook

Leveraging Jasper, iHeartMedia produced one of its most efficient and successful podcast campaign launches ever—setting a benchmark for future marketing operations across the organization. This launch proved that when AI is used to amplify, not replace, human creativity, brands can achieve operational excellence.

Key Outcomes

• Campaign production cycle reduced dramatically—from weeks to a single accelerated build session
• Hundreds of assets created across formats including social, audio, broadcast, and experiential
• Stronger personalization through AI-driven audience insights and tailored messaging
• Higher creative confidence among writers and producers who felt more empowered and agile
• Record performance: Cardiac Cowboys became the most successful binge podcast of the year for iHeartMedia

“Jasper became an extension of iHeartMedia’s marketing operations—automating workflows, scaling production, and maintaining brand integrity across every format.”
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— Rahul Sabnis, President & Chief Creative Officer, iHeartMedia

Looking Ahead

The success of Cardiac Cowboys marked a turning point for iHeartMedia: a demonstration of how human creativity and intelligent automation can work together to build campaigns that are both emotionally resonant and operationally scalable.

With Jasper, iHeartMedia now has a blueprint for future AI‑powered launches—driving faster production, smarter audience strategy, and stronger creative execution, anchored by Guaranteed Human.

This initiative set a new standard not only for podcast marketing, but for what’s possible when brands embrace AI as a creative and strategic partner.