FOR a brand seeking to reach the podcast-listening public, there is one thing better than sponsoring a hit series: creating your own. General Electric pulled it off last year with its quaintly named GE Podcast Theater. Its eight-part science-fiction thriller “The Message,” produced with the Panoply podcasting network, hit No. 1 on the iTunes podcast chart and had nearly five million downloads.

Now comes “LifeAfter,” a futuristic 10-episode drama, the first installment of which was released this month. It tells the story of a low-level worker at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is obsessed with the traces of life his dead wife left behind on social media, particularly a fictional audio service. The first episode kicks off with what sounds like an ad for that service — but perhaps that’s a wink of sorts. As with “The Message,” a notable detail in this branding experiment is that the sponsoring brand is, by design, almost never mentioned.

Distributing and helping create such “sponsor content” has been part of Panoply’s business for a while. Think of it as a variation on the so-called native advertising or branded content now so familiar online — material flagged as having been paid for, but crafted to resemble editorial content. According to Matt Turck, Panoply’s chief revenue officer, the company has produced more than 100 episodes of custom podcast series for brands including Purina, Umpqua Bank, Prudential and Starbucks.

“It’s been an important part of our business,” he said. “It generates revenue and differentiates us in the marketplace.”