Top Podcast Advertisers – June 2025
Magellan AI’s monthly chart of top movers & shakers and top overall spend by brands has been updated with June data. Sports remains a favorite investment for podcast advertisers, taking 11 of the top 15 advertisers’ top genre for spend. Disney, Linkedin, and T-Mobile are among the top 15 spenders last month (and they spent more than in May), but the #1 slot goes to Toyota with $5,710,000 spent in June. While more and more big brands get into podcast advertising, it’s worth taking a step back to recognize how far the industry has come from almost exclusively promo code-driven direct-to-consumer campaigns in the early days to Toyota dropping nearly six million on podcast ads.
This week the company says it will begin using machine learning to study the watch behavior of YouTube accounts to decide if the user is under the age of 18. If flagged as under 18, the account will receive a notification from Google and become age-restricted across all Google products. Ad personalization will automatically disable and age-sensitive ad categories (alcohol, gambling, weight loss products. etc.) are blocked. The early tests of this age assurance feature will target some signed-in users in the U.S. in the coming weeks. Adweek’s coverage does not mention what the process will be to prove false positives.
With a hectic first half of the year dominated by threats of a TikTok ban and on-again off-again tariffs throwing plans to the wind, influencer marketing is seeing some shifts. Micro and niche content creators are becoming more of a hot commodity with marketers as they shift away from targeting audiences that are a mile wide and an inch deep to the inverse. Authenticity and trust are key to ensuring ROI on influencer deals, and they’re hard to replicate at significant scale. Something the world of podcasting can deliver in spades.
The new tool, called Engaged Session, aims to measure user behavior after they leave the TikTok app without using pixel tracking. As of today, advertisers on TikTok now have the ability to target users who spend at least ten seconds on a website or retailer landing page after clicking on an ad within TikTok, with new engagement metrics like Total Engaged Sessions and Cost per Engaged Session, which the app aims to align closely with third-party analytics like Google or Adobe Analytics.
Podcasts become a strategic IP play for Hollywood talent by Alexander Lee
Podcasting is no stranger to star-studded casts and producers piloting IP concepts before committing to a full TV pilot, but now these test-bed podcasts have skewed even more Hollywood. Digiday covers the growing trend of established actors like Gina Torres and Ty Burrell headlining audio fiction productions that serve dual purposes as both creative outlets for the actors, and the launchpad for new wholly-owned intellectual property.
As for the rest of the news…
- JAR Audio is no more, with the company now rebranded to JAR Podcast Solutions along with a simple message to marketers: Podcasts should perform.
- Night Vale Presents, the podcast label containing everything from indie darlings like Dreamboy up to the legacy hit Welcome to Night Vale has signed a multi-year podcast partnership with Realm, who will exclusively represent NVP’s podcasts for ad sales, distribution, and live events.
- SiriusXM Media VP of Sales and Revenue Operations Gabe Tartaglia has a guest piece on Adweek focusing on elevating country-specific podcast sales.
- The true crime podcast Morbid is moving from Wondery to SiriusXM with a new multi-year deal giving SXM exclusive advertising rights for the video and audio versions of the long-running podcast.
- Nielsen has published The Record for Q2, a quarterly report card on U.S. consumers’ listening habits fielded with Edison Research.
- Analyst Adam Bowie has insights into the latest RAJAR quarterly report on audio in the UK.
- WNBA star Sophie Cunningham reportedly has signed a deal with The Volume, with Cunningham co-hosting weekly podcast Show Me Something starting this week.
