Podcast advertising amplifies consumers’ brand awareness and affinity and boosts their interest in making a purchase from that brand or searching for more information about it, according to a new study. 

The study, titled “Podcast Ad Effectiveness: Best Practices for Key Industries,” consolidates the findings of 610 separate studies conducted by Nielsen to measure how ads inserted into podcast episodes affected several performance metrics, including brand familiarity, brand affinity and brand awareness. It also measured consumers’ intent to search for more information about the brand; purchase something from the brand; or recommend the brand to others. 

These studies occurred over the past four years and involved over 147,000 respondents, making this synthesized report the “largest ever” study of podcasting advertising’s effectiveness, according to a press release from IPG Mediabrands’ investment and intelligence unit Magna, which commissioned the study. 

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“Podcasting has kind of been a hot space in recent years,” Brian Hughes, Magna executive VP and managing director of audience intelligence and strategy, told Ad Age. “When we took a look at the overall media picture ... we saw that overall time spent with media is actually declining, but podcasting is one of the few areas where it’s been maintained or grown.”

Methodology

The studies, conducted by online panel, exposed participants to podcast clips—some with ads and some without. Afterward, they were surveyed about a brand.

Podcast spots, the study found, were effective in increasing all six observed brand metrics among respondents whose podcast listening experience included the ad versus those who didn’t. Aided brand awareness saw the biggest increase: 79% of participants showed a lift in awareness that were exposed to podcast ads versus only 64% of those in the control group. Additionally, nearly half of the respondents who listened to the ads said they intended to seek more information about the brand, compared to 41% of respondents who didn’t hear the ad. Respondents exposed to the spot were also more likely to recommend the brand or purchase from it than those in the control group. 

Podcast ads are slightly more effective among those aged 50 or older, especially in driving brand affinity and interest in searching for information about a brand, the study found. 

Longer works better

Nielsen’s report found that spots longer than 35 seconds “generally drive better results than shorter creative”—likely because these longer ads are more “customized” and designed to “fit the [podcast] environment,” rather than being repurposed from radio or another medium, Hughes added. A larger number of brand mentions (eight or more) in an ad also increased performance metrics across the board. Ads placed at either the start of or in the middle of a podcast episode were equally effective, but both performed better than those placed at the end of an episode. 

Additionally, podcast ads largely had the same impact whether they were read by the podcast host or they came from the brand. In fact, custom ads—which typically involve the host sharing their personal experience with the brand, according to Hughes—were generally less effective than those that didn’t feature the podcast host. The report points out that “custom content may not be worth the price of creation given it lags in performance.” 

The study also narrowed in on the effectiveness of podcast ads in five specific industries: auto, packaged goods, telecom, retail and financial services. Podcast advertising performed best among brands in the retail, auto and packaged goods categories, leading to large boosts in brand awareness as well as smaller gains in affinity, search intent and other metrics. Ads for telecom and financial services companies, on the other hand, generally had a below-average impact on these metrics. 

The number of Americans who listen to podcasts has steadily increased over the past eight years, climbing to 41% in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. Platforms like YouTube and Spotify are encouraging brands to expand their advertising into podcasts, with YouTube last week announcing new opportunities for audio advertising.