2026 has already been a busy year for the business side of podcasting. For an advertiser’s perspective on everything from brand safety to Netflix entering the world of video podcasting, Bryan Barletta spoke to Gretchen Smith Dubois, VP of Media at Ad Results Media.
If you could snap your fingers and make one metric matter more than any other metric in podcasting, what would it be?
I would prioritize measuring true incremental reach at the household level. As audio investment has grown, so has this skepticism, especially from the brands that are heavily investing focused on reach and efficiency outcomes more so than performance outcomes. For example: streaming has been a paid media channel for decades, but we really only recently have truly deterministic data to show what it delivers, who it delivers to.
Ad Results Media did a study recently where we looked at the household-level delivery across both podcasts and streaming audio to answer how the channels work together and drive incremental reach whenever you plan them in parallel vs. two separate media plans that may be overlapping. So that insight has really shifted how our clients build into their 2026 plans. And it was something that ARM brought to clients more so than clients asking us. I want more clients to start looking at incremental reach at the household level.
Where does podcast IP travel best right now— video, live events, streaming, books, or social? Or somewhere else?
My hot take is that the strongest podcast IP actually doesn’t travel at all, it just expands.
You know, the creators have multiple platforms. We have multiple apps on our phone. Creators have many ways they stay in touch with their audiences. So we see the biggest impact whenever every single part of the ecosystem is activated and treated like an ecosystem, not just one channel. If a creator has a video live event, streaming, or even a book, like how do we integrate into each aspect of that?
So the future really belongs to brands that build unified audio, videos, social events, strategies. Not just siloed executions. I think that the birth of podcasting had a lot of what we describe as “spots and dots,” where you test one or two spots to get one sign of life, feel good, and then you go into a repetitive process from that. Those days are gone. The future of it really is going to be about collaborating with the creators as true partners and not just as a distribution vehicle that you pull up a number into a media mix model.
What’s the biggest mistake creators make when they try to expand beyond audio—and what should they do instead?
Audio’s power comes from intimacy, repetition, and emotional connection. Display ads don’t have those traits. That’s why audio is so powerful in the first place. When creators expand without remembering that’s why audio works, they really lose what attracted that listener and the audience in the first place. And they’ll lose them in the other channels in the ecosystem.
Creators should absolutely focus on protecting the role that those three emotive powers come into their audience’s routine. If it’s audio, or outside of it, great. But they need to make sure that every channel that they expand into has those three pillars. Ensure that video, social, live formats, etc. really deepen that bond and not just dilute it.
Does Netflix focusing on podcasting’s cadence-driven engagement validate the long standing notion that podcast consumption creates habits? Is their push into podcasting a hedge against subscriber churn, rather than a content play?
I don’t think that Netflix is entering podcasting as any sort of creative experiment. It actually is just applying what data already proves that podcasting is one of the few media formats that exists that earn repeat and predictable attention. And why wouldn’t every video provider try to capitalize into that?
I think that many people are calling podcasts a “modern talk show” and YouTube has really proven that video already has built an enormous audience for those audio-first podcasts. Netflix is very smart. They’re just using the data versus trying to go with what they’ve always done. They’re expanding to what consumers expect to see.
The move really reflects a broader shift of video platforms that reorganize around audience behaviors because that’s where the attention lives from the customers. So with that, I think that this is not the last shift that we’re going to see with subscriber consumption types. Certainly they will get some subscribers. Certainly there will be some people that say, “hey, maybe I hold onto Netflix a bit longer”, but it’s really just them opting into the channel that so many of our brands are investing in and seeing the power of what customers want.
Last month YouTube reversed years of restrictive policy, declaring that content about abortion, suicide, and domestic abuse is now eligible for full ad revenue. Their justification cited creator feedback and an internal review—but no advertiser input, no brand lift studies, no data showing these adjacencies were ever actually risky. If a policy this significant can be flipped without any evidence that brands asked for it or that the original restrictions ever protected anyone, is brand safety actually about data—or is it about managing the comfort level of the person spending the money?
What policies like this reveal is that brand safety is often designed to protect the buyer, not the brand. And I say this having been a buyer for over 15 years. It doesn’t mean that safety doesn’t matter, but it’s been oversimplified and is really protecting the people in charge of the brand’s decisions, not the actual brand.
Context is everything in audio and audiences engage in the voices they trust. They go out of their way to choose to watch their podcast or on Netflix or listen to it on Apple Podcasts. They’re opting into it. And that trust that they have doesn’t disappear because a topic is complex or uncomfortable, certainly in a highly political environment. People actually are seeking guidance from creators they believe in and brands have an opportunity to show up thoughtfully, not avoidantly next to that.
The real job is really just doing smarter pairings with creators. So as creators start to talk into what may be considered not safe content, how do we align the right brands with the right creators? And if they initially were opted into a creator that has decided to speak up about an issue in politics or even go on a rant that might be considered dicey by some, what does that mean long-term for the brand? Because there’s ways that you borrow equity and there’s times that the brand is independent of the equity that creator gives.
It’s a lot of nuance, and navigating that nuance really requires understanding the ecosystem. That’s why brands are trying to do it directly and on their own. They take shortcuts and they use things like brand safety as a way to stop making a bunch of nuanced decisions. And that’s where experts like Ad Results Media come into play to help navigate what’s always going to be a very complex ecosystem.
