Podcasts are growing in cultural influence, and while this has yet to translate to high growth trends in global advertising spend, more than half of global marketers (55%) plan to increase their podcast ad investment in 2025. They key trends in podcasts are:
- Podcasts are becoming more important to political discourse. Podcasts played a much stronger role in the U.S election last year with Donald Trump winning in what some have termed the ‘podcast election’.
- Podcasters are becoming more omnichannel creators. According to Cumulus Research, YouTube is used to consume podcasts by a third (34%) of those it surveyed in the U.S. The behaviour is most prevalent among Gen Z users.
- Annual growth in worldwide podcast ad spend is forecast to be 7.9% in 2025 and 6.5% in 2026. Research by WARC and Audacy found that, while podcast listening accounts for 4.5% of all ad supported US media consumption, the channel only receives 1% of total U.S. ad investment.
- More than half of global marketers (55%) plan to increase their podcast ad investment in 2025,according to a WARC survey.
- As the medium matures, mainstream brands are increasingly nudging Direct to Consumer players aside to top the podcast spend rankings. According to podcast analytics company Magellan AI, the top 10 podcast spenders in the US recently included brands such as Amazon, T Mobile, Capital One and Toyota.
- Recent studies have found that episodic ads placed in a single podcast episode tend to outperform ads dynamically inserted across podcast shows. In the case of host reads ads, Podscribe research found that, as ad length increases, visitor rates to advertisers’ sites also increase. On average, a two minute+ host read ad out performs a 60 second or shorter read by c20%. The effectiveness of non host read ads depends on broader range of elements, including creativity, targeting and contextual relevance.
