Anchor announced Anchor Trailers. They put together a blog post about best practices for creating a trailer for your podcast.

When you record a trailer using Anchor, we’ll automatically transcribe your words into a beautiful, animated video that you can use to promote your podcast. Embed it on your website, post it on social, and share it all over the world. You never know where your future listeners may be.

Anchor Trailers is Anchor’s latest feature to help their podcasters get the word out about their podcast. Anchor says that trailers are a trademark of successful podcasts and a powerful way to share your show with new audiences. This new feature is an improvement over Anchor’s feature that allowed podcasters to mark episodes as trailers.

It appears that a podcaster who used Anchor Trailers to make a trailer for their show could use that trailer as their official trailer on Apple Podcasts. Anchor Trailers are one minute in length, and podcasters get a warning before their time runs out. It is possible to select some “smart background music” to go in your trailer.

Anchor notes that if the focus of your podcast changes over time, it is possible to create a brand new trailer for your show. Back in 2005, when I started podcasting, we called this type of thing a “promo” and passed them around to other podcasters to play on their shows. The difference is that Anchor Trailers involve animated video, which just wasn’t possible at the dawn of podcasting.

The only thing I find strange about Anchor Trailers is that they encourage podcasters to create a trailer before they’ve actually gotten started on their podcast. It might make sense for a show that has already recorded and edited several episodes to put out a trailer before the podcast officially launches. But, I cannot imagine how a person could create a trailer when they haven’t yet worked out what their podcast is actually about.