Tracing The Path Partnerships
Tracing The Path partners with iconic brands and organizations to tell the surprising stories behind the products, people, places, and moments that shaped our lives.
We don’t believe the best sponsorships interrupt a story. We believe they become part of one.
Five years of finding the bigger story
For more than five years, Tracing The Path has followed those roads—connecting familiar products, forgotten inventions, remarkable people, and seemingly unrelated moments to uncover the bigger stories hiding behind them.
Along the way, we’ve produced more than 80 episodes and built an audience that comes for curiosity, nostalgia, surprising connections, and the joy of discovering something they never knew they wanted to know.
Your history isn’t ancient history to our audience
Our listeners remember when photographs came from Polaroid cameras. They remember carrying notebooks to school, riding Schwinn bicycles, unfolding Rand McNally road maps, opening Hostess snacks at lunch, and gathering around the television for Jeopardy!
The products and companies that shaped the 20th century aren’t abstractions to our audience. They’re memories. That’s what makes heritage brands such a natural part of Tracing The Path.
Our audience
Tracing The Path reaches curious, educated adults with the life experience to remember many of the brands we explore, and the curiosity to finally discover the stories behind them.
Explore partnership opportunities
Traditional advertising asks consumers to stop enjoying the story for a moment so a sponsor’s message can be heard. We think there’s a more interesting way.
When there’s an authentic connection between a brand and the history we’re exploring, we build partnerships around the story itself.
Become the presenting sponsor of a limited series built around the subject your company operates in. Series like “The Tools That Taught America” (about our education system) to “The Foods That Built the Lunchbox,” the subject always comes first. The right brand simply makes it possible to tell the story.
Sometimes one remarkable historical story creates a natural connection with one remarkable company. We identify those opportunities and develop sponsorships around individual episodes.
Your company may have a remarkable story customers have never heard. Together, we can explore the people, inventions, accidents, decisions, and cultural moments that helped make it what it is today.
Not every story belongs exclusively in a podcast. Partnerships can extend into articles, video, historical research, educational content, physical artifacts, live experiences, and special projects.
We’ve been telling brand stories all along
Long before we began developing formal brand partnerships, companies and products were already appearing throughout Tracing The Path. Some of the best historical stories begin with ordinary things: a box of crayons, a loaf of bread, a sewing machine, a camera, a grocery store, a bottle of soda.
Follow their histories far enough and they lead to innovation, advertising, suffragists, education, technology, migration, childhood, popular culture, and the changing American experience.
Hear what we mean
If you’ve never listened to Tracing The Path, these are a good place to begin.
Featured episode
There is so much history wrapped into how Lloyd’s of London came to be.
Listen to the episode →
Featured episode
What Piggly Wiggly did to change the world truly changed the world.
Listen to the episode →
Featured episode
The origin of nachos is one thing, but how that created Ricos is another.
Listen to the episode →The Tracing The Path Artifact Series
The Artifact Series turns selected stories from the podcast into physical pieces designed to be held, shared, collected, and remembered.
A small physical reminder that history isn’t something that exists only in books. It’s all around us. And if one of these artifacts arrived with the letter that brought you here, now you know why.
Meet the storyteller
Creator & Host, Tracing The Path
Dan R. Morris is the creator and host of Tracing The Path, an award-winning history podcast built around finding unexpected connections between the people, products, inventions, and moments that shaped the modern world.
His work begins with research, but the goal isn’t simply to explain what happened. It’s to discover the larger story hiding underneath it.
Every investigation begins with the same question: Why does this story still matter?
What story could we tell together?
If you’re interested in presenting a series, partnering on an episode, exploring your company’s history, or simply talking through an idea, I’d love to hear from you.
Email Dan directly:
dan@lettersfromdan.com
Prefer to talk?
Call me at (615) 804-2846
Or send a note using the form below.