Educating a new generation of entrepreneurs.

Synchrony needed to show value to the next generation of would-be entrepreneurs. Its core audience was aging out.

The ask was to become valuable to them before they were actually entrepreneurs.

Millennial entrepreneurs grab all the headlines. The perception is that they think they should be running the world, thank you very much.

But a lot of the people thinking about starting a business were riddled with debt and doubt. They were afraid of failure. If you’re not the next unicorn, why bother?

What they lacked in confidence, they made up for in curiosity.

They wanted to hear from those who knew what they were doing.

Like literally hear.

The idea was a podcast. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and Initialized Capital, would travel around the country meeting an older generation of entrepreneurs and learning how they built their businesses.

We called it Business Schooled.

Someone who had already built a famous business was going back to school. And the people doing the teaching had built businesses worth learning from, even if they weren’t grabbing all the headlines.

The line did the explaining:

A Silicon Valley business guru gets all up in other people’s businesses.

It told you who he was, what he was doing, and what made the show worth listening to. It also gave a financial services brand permission to have a little personality.

The name and line carried into the launch campaign, including creative for subway and commuter rail advertising.

Business Schooled broke into the Top 50 podcasts on iTunes and the Top 10 business podcasts.