Digital audio is one of the fastest growing channels in French advertising. Revenue jumped 25% in the first half of 2026, more than double the pace of the overall digital ad market, and programmatic audio grew 51%, according to the latest Observatoire de l’e-pub from SRI, the French trade body for digital ad sales. Listeners got there first: half the French population now listens to audio through digital platforms, according to French media regulator Arcom.
That momentum set the tone at this year’s AdsWizz Audio Days Paris, where publishers, agencies, and platform partners gathered to talk about how brands can turn audio’s growth into results. Across the sessions, a few trends stood out: smarter ways to buy audio, new places to reach listeners, and data that proves it pays off. Here’s what it means for your next media plan.
Buy audio with the same control as every other channel
Buying audio programmatically used to mean a tradeoff: you got scale but gave up control over where your ads ran. Curation is changing that. Agencies and holding companies now build their own premium audio packages, choosing the publishers, shows, and audiences that fit a campaign before a single ad runs.
Amnet France, dentsu’s programmatic buying arm, is one of the agencies leading the move to curation. In her session, “Curation and Audio,” Amnet’s Barbara Thuillier Romeri explained how the team now uses AI agents to carry out a brief written in plain language, so buyers keep control while moving faster. Its first campaign using this approach cut launch time by 80% and boosted video completion rates by 25.7% for French meat and livestock association Interbev according to IAB Europe. That campaign ran on video, and programmatic audio could follow the same path.
Not every buyer is there yet. In “Audio in the Programmatic Mix,” Thomas Varielhes of Google’s programmatic buying platform, Display & Video 360, and Victor Vastel of independent French media agency Agence79 made the case for adding audio to programmatic plans. Our takeaway: interest isn’t what’s holding audio back. The hurdle is making it as easy to buy as every other channel.
Curation clears that hurdle. When audio runs through the same platforms and deals as the rest of the plan, teams can buy it as precisely as anything else they run, with no separate workflow to manage.
Meet listeners on screens, in cars, and inside culture
Buying audio smarter is only half the opportunity. The other half is knowing where to find listeners. For years, audio meant one thing: sound in someone’s ears. Today it reaches listeners on screens, in cars, and inside the communities they care about.
Video podcasts
Podcasts are no longer audio only, so a single buy can reach people whether they’re listening or watching. Any creator on Acast, which hosts more than 140,000 podcasts, can now publish video to Apple Podcasts. Shows in the beta saw an estimated 25% lift in weekly Apple views and listens within four months, and State Farm and T-Mobile were the first brands to reach both listeners and viewers there in one campaign. Cedric Begoc and Camille Biehler of Acast walked through the results in “Hybrid Format, Multiscreen Strategy.”
The car
The car is still missing from too many media plans. For French listeners over 35, the smartphone is now the top way to listen in the car, according to data from French audience measurement firm Médiamétrie presented at Audio Days Paris. That puts drivers within reach of digital audio, and NumberEight’s Affinity Audiences can tell when someone is on the road from signals on the phone itself, with no cookies or personal data required. Clément Berthet of French radio group NRJ and Chris Watts of NumberEight made the case in “In-Car Audio Strategy.”
Culture
Culture is where young listeners decide what catches on, and SoundCloud, where artists like Billie Eilish built their first followings, is often where it starts. In France, Gen Z makes up 60% of SoundCloud’s streaming audio listeners, and they spend nearly twice as much of their listening time on new music as the wider industry. Patricia Claper of SoundCloud and Francois Donval of French media group Lagardère shared those numbers in “A Unique Audio Experience,” along with sponsored programs like The Booth, a freestyle performance series that has drawn more than 2.9 million streams since 2025.
For brands, that’s a chance to reach trendsetters early, and it’s simple to do. In July, AdsWizz renewed its exclusive sales representation of SoundCloud across fourteen European markets, including France, so brands can buy it directly through AdsWizz.
Use data to prove audio pays off
Precise targeting only matters if you can prove it works, and Pennylane’s campaign with French broadcaster RMC-BFM did exactly that. Ads that use data-driven targeting to reach small business owners, artisans, and shopkeepers converted at 1.9 times the rate of ads that simply ran on business news programming.
Pennylane, a French accounting platform, ran digital audio alongside radio to reach both professionals and the general public. To see what worked, RMC-BFM used AdsWizz’s AudioPixel, which anonymously detects when someone hears an ad and tracks what they do next, from website visits to purchases and app downloads. As Evrard Boppe of RMC-BFM Ads pointed out in “Pennylane Adopts AudioPixel,” digital audio had long been hard to measure. AudioPixel closed that gap.
Measurement like this is now possible across the market. In “Digital Audio in France,” Olivier Rozental of SRI showed that audio can now be measured on web traffic, store visits, and awareness, the same results advertisers track for every other channel. Yet audio still gets just 7% of display ad investment in France, compared with 63% for video.
That gap is the opportunity, and it’s what should get a CFO’s attention. When an audio campaign can be measured against the same goals as the rest of the plan, audio stops being just a brand awareness extra and starts earning budget based on results.
How to get ahead in French audio
France has already made its case for audio. Listeners moved first, and the money is starting to follow. Now the tools to buy, reach, and measure audio have caught up, and the brands that act on them first will set the pace for everyone else. Here’s where to start:
- Bring audio into the same platforms and deals as the rest of your plan. Curation is the easiest way in.
- Plan for where people actually listen. Video podcasts, the car, and music culture, each reach listeners at a different point in their day.
- Plan for measurement from the start. Decide what success looks like before the campaign runs, so audio earns its budget on results.
No single company built this moment, which is why AdsWizz brought publishers, agencies, and technology partners into one room. Thank you to our speakers and partners at SRI, Amnet France, Acast, Google, Agence79, NRJ, NumberEight, RMC-BFM Ads, SoundCloud, and Lagardère for making Audio Days Paris a success.
Ready to put audio to work in your next campaign? Contact the AdsWizz team to talk through your audio plan.
by Paul Brown, Vice President, European Business & Operations
