MEDIARADAR STUDY: BUSINESS, TRUE CRIME, AND COMEDY ARE THE TOP CATEGORIES INCREASING FOR PODCAST AD SPEND
MediaRadar’s analysis provides insights into key categories and trends in podcast advertising spend
WHO: MediaRadar is an award-winning advertising intelligence and sales enablement platform. Their software tracks and analyzes ad campaigns across millions of brands through various media channels, including podcasts, online, TV, mobile, and print.
WHAT: So far in 2023, 42% of Americans over the age of 12 reported having listened to a podcast in the past month, indicating the medium’s enduring appeal. Through July 2023, MediaRadar’s sample data of U.S. podcasts shows ad spending increased 5% YoY, underscoring its broad appeal, authenticity, and lack of reliance on third-party cookies.
MediaRadar’s analysis further reveals that podcasts centered on comedy, true crime, and business experienced year-over-year growth. The top five programming categories were comedy, news, true crime, politics, and business, along with society & culture. The combined spending on these categories accounted for 58% of the total ad spend on podcasts.
“Our analysis provides valuable insights into how advertisers are leveraging the power of podcasts to connect with their audiences,” said Todd Krizelman, CEO, MediaRadar. “These insights can guide marketers in shaping more strategic and effective campaigns.”
Breakdown by key programming increasing ad sales:
Business: The ad revenue for business podcasts experienced substantial growth, rising by 30% YoY. This growth can be attributed to investments from Amazon, Athletic Greens (AG1), and Shopify.
Crime: Ad spending on crime podcasts saw a significant boost of 26% YoY (over one-quarter). Advertisers from HelloFresh, Progressive Auto Insurance, and SimpliSafe contributed to this increase.
Comedy: Advertisers from brands such as BetterHelp, Squarespace, and UNest increased their spending on comedy podcast ads, showing 10% YoY growth.
“To effectively monetize podcasts, it’s crucial to embrace the diverse range of genres and work with publishers or third parties capable of aggregating audiences across multiple podcast titles,” said Paul Kelly, CRO of AMA – the global leader in dynamic creative and personalization for digital audio advertising. “Whether it’s True Crime, Comedy, or any other genre, leveraging a comprehensive catalog of shows ensures optimal monetization and meaningful engagement with the intended audience. By shifting our approach from cherry-picking popular genres to embracing the true value of podcasting as a channel, we can elevate the industry’s ad tech infrastructure to mirror the sophistication of the wider digital media landscape.”
Methodology: MediaRadar analyzed ad spend on various podcast genres between January 1, 2022, and July 31, 2023. The study covered ad spend across key categories, including comedy, news, crime, politics, business, society & culture, and others.
WHERE: For more information on MediaRadar, visit: https://mediaradar.com/.
ABOUT MEDIARADAR
MediaRadar offers a suite of tools that provide sales intelligence and enablement directly to media and ad tech sales personnel, as well as new business development executives at agencies. The company tailors its products to support broadcasters, dotcoms, ad tech companies, magazines, newspapers, mobile media companies and events.
The platform’s intelligence capabilities are powered by a proprietary combination of AI and machine learning. Through its technology, MediaRadar distills multi-channel campaign intelligence into actionable competitive insights, brand analysis, and prospecting reports, all in one easy-to-use platform. Ad sales teams leverage these insights to identify the best prospects, build and nurture stronger relationships with clients, and close more business.
About AMA
AMA is the leader in Dynamic Creative for audio. We deliver customized, data-driven, dynamic ads on the world’s largest audio platforms.
By using any combination of contextual and audience-level data we can dynamically serve the most relevant and actionable ad to each listener. With over 10 billion ad impressions served to date, our platform automates the delivery of ‘platform-intelligent’ ads across all audio formats including streaming, podcast, and broadcast radio.
Founded in 2015 with offices in New York and London, we have delivered personalized ads across the globe for leading brands such as Google, Walmart, Target, Uber, Amazon, McDonalds, American Express and Meta.
