The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2023–2024
Recipe sells Alan Partridge's Audible series 3 via a scripted meeting with Adam Buxton
For From the Oasthouse series 3, Recipe wrote Alan Partridge into Adam Buxton's opening walk — a bespoke audio ad that plays like a crossover scene.
Audible
What it had to solve
Recipe had to promote series 3 of Audible's Alan Partridge podcast, From the Oasthouse, on The Adam Buxton Podcast, where a conventional ad break would be skipped. The hook: both Alan and Adam are from Norfolk, and Adam opens every episode walking through the countryside.
How it works
Audible's From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast needed to reach the audience of The Adam Buxton Podcast, and the brief was an ad this listenership would not skip or resent. The insight came from format: both Alan Partridge and Adam Buxton come from Norfolk, and Adam opens every episode walking through the Norfolk countryside.
Instead of a separate spot, Recipe scripted fiction: as Adam walks, Alan Partridge appears to bump into him, seemingly by accident, and the two talk — the promotion of series 3 arriving as in-character chat rather than an advertising break. Steve Coogan performed Alan, Acast produced the piece, and Buxton called the format a 'hybrid advertorial sitcom'.
The ad's medium is its argument: it is heard as a crossover scene between two Norfolk characters, so the sell never sounds like a sell. D&AD preserved the work in its Radio & Audio awards archive; the page records no audience numbers, and the case travels through the mechanism — promotion written into the host's own world.
Why it lands
- The host's fixed opening ritual, the countryside walk, gave the fiction a stage listeners already know.
- The shared Norfolk background makes the encounter feel plausible rather than a planted plug.
- Performing the promo in character turns a sales message into entertainment the audience wants to hear.
- The 'hybrid advertorial sitcom' label names a repeatable format: the brand's world and the host's world collide on air.
What it did
The promo reaches Buxton's listeners as entertainment rather than advertising — an 'accidental' meeting that promotes the podcast without feeling like an ad. D&AD preserved the work in its Radio & Audio awards archive, which records no listenership figures.
What you can take
Before writing an ad for a show, read the show's ritual: when a host has a fixed opening habit and a shared world with the brand, script the sell into that moment so the format does the persuading.
Since then
The piece became a D&AD Radio & Audio archive entry, and its 'hybrid advertorial sitcom' framing travelled as a case-study label; the archive page records no audience metrics. What transfers is format reading: find the host's signature moment, give the brand a character who belongs there, and let the meeting itself be the advertisement.
Sources
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