Podcast Movement brought its flagship conference to New York City for the first time, and it made a week of it. The Sounds Profitable Business Summit kicked things off at Terminal 5, putting publishers, platforms, and buyers in one room before the main conference took over.
AdsWizz was there alongside SiriusXM Media, which hosted MrBallen for its session, The Fandom Effect: Turning Passion into a Multi-Platform Brand. Few creators fit that title better. The former Navy SEAL built a large YouTube following with his true crime stories, then carried that audience into podcasts, social media, and live shows without losing the voice and trust that won them over.
MrBallen showed what a single creator can build: a devoted audience that followed him into podcasting. For brands looking to reach audiences like his across platforms and formats, the challenge is bigger than landing a deal with one show. The other panels and my conversations throughout the week brought that challenge into focus: buying across publishers at scale, serving ads that fit the listening moment, and measuring what happens afterward.
Here’s how buyers can put each of those capabilities to work, starting with how they buy audio.
Tom Webster, Partner at Sounds Profitable, took the stage to unveil “The Podcast Landscape 2026,” breaking down crucial new data on shifting listener habits and platform rankings.
Audio is a scaled media channel
For years, podcast advertising meant negotiating one show at a time. That worked for the shows, but made life hard for buyers. It doesn’t hold up when a brand needs national reach across hundreds of publishers, or when a trading desk wants audio sitting in the same plan as display and CTV, bought the same way, on the same timeline.
Programmatic access changes that. AudioMatic, AdsWizz’s DSP, gives agencies, trading desks, and ad networks access to premium podcast and streaming radio inventory through a single audio-focused platform. Buyers can work through direct sales, private marketplaces, programmatic guaranteed, or open auction depending on what the campaign needs, and reach major audio publishers without stitching together a dozen separate relationships.
Bring audio into the programmatic plan
If your audio investment still lives outside your programmatic workflow, bring it in. Start with a private marketplace or Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) deal with the publishers you already trust, so you keep the quality you’re used to and buy it alongside everything else in your plan.
Precision and control are no longer optional
Reach is the easy part, but precision is where audio campaigns can still miss. As cookies and device IDs fade, the signals replacing them work differently, and audio already has one built in: what someone chooses to listen to. What’s in a listener’s podcast queue says more about their state of mind than their browsing history ever could.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Predictive Audiences, powered by Comscore, maps more than 450 segments to real listening behavior, letting you reach the right podcast listeners without cookies.
- Contextual signals like weather, mood, location, and time of day match the ad to the moment, so a hot chocolate offer lands right when the temperature drops.
- Multicultural targeting uses signals such as music genre, content language, and audience interests to help brands reach diverse audiences across premium publishers.
- Listening environment is something few channels can match. You can target someone alone on their phone separately from a smart speaker playing to the whole household.
Precision only pays off if you also control where the ad runs and how often. Premium positioning lets you lock in the first, second, or third spot within a pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll break. And since longer episodes carry several mid-rolls, you can pick which break your ad runs in, like the first instead of the fifth. Brand safety settings keep messages away from content that doesn’t fit, and frequency management keeps them away from listeners who have already heard enough.
Test one new signal in your next campaign
Look at what’s steering your current audio buy. If the answer is age, gender, and a genre list, pick one contextual signal, such as weather or time of day, and run it against your standard targeting. Or test targeting at the episode level, which places your ad in episodes where the conversation matches what you sell. If one test pays off, planning season is the time to rethink the rest of your targeting.
Our new guide breaks down the full range of signals available today, what to prioritize, and how to put them to work together.
Greg Leader, VP & Head of Podcast Brand Partnerships at SiriusXM Media and John Allen (MrBallen) took the main stage for “The Fandom Effect: Turning Passion into a Multi-Platform Brand.”
The buy isn’t finished until the impact is measurable
Audio will not win a larger share of budget on story alone. Buyers need to see what happened after the ad played, and they need to trust the numbers.
AdsWizz’s attribution platform brings conversion tracking and third-party measurement together and follows performance from first listen to purchase. Say a listener hears your ad in a podcast on their morning commute, then buys on their laptop that night. For example, AudioPixel, built specifically for audio campaigns, connects the two moments, tying the purchase back to the podcast ad that earned it. And because it runs in the same platform that delivers the ad, you can optimize mid-flight. AdsWizz is also pulling data from agencies’ own third-party validation partners into the platform, so every number they rely on lives in one place.
Those numbers only matter if buyers can trust how they’re counted. AdsWizz is certified under IAB Podcast Measurement 2.2, which means an independent audit has confirmed that downloads and ad deliveries are measured to the industry standard, with bots and duplicate requests filtered out. We treat that as the minimum buyers should expect, and as the standard evolves, we’ll keep pace.
Set the bar first
Define the outcome you’re measuring before launch, then hold every audio partner to three checks: certified measurement, attribution tied to delivery, and data you can act on mid-flight. Get all three, and you’ll walk into the budget review with the numbers to ask for more.
Podcasts belongs in the plan
Podcasts have earned their place on the same plan as every major channel, and choosing New York for this year’s Podcast Movement was the industry saying so out loud. For buyers, that’s the opening. The biggest creators bring loyal audiences across audio and video, and the tools to reach them with programmatic scale, precise targeting, and measurement that holds up are already in place. Brands that make podcasting a core part of the plan now stand to gain the most.
If you want to start with targeting, download our guide, Innovative Targeting in Digital Audio Advertising.
Ready to build or optimize your audio campaign? Get in touch and we’ll help you find the right opportunity for your brand.
by Garrison Dua, VP of Demand, North America
