Podcasts are forecast to command nearly $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year–but podcast advertising agency Oxford Road says that number could be nearly $1 billion higher if podcasts were better about giving brands standardized ROI measurements.
That number comes from Oxford Road’s Chief Audio Officer Summit, held in SoCal this past July. For that summit, it gathered 75 people it calls “brand decision makers” (including “six of the top 10 spenders in podcasting”) to hear from podcast creators and strategists. During the event, Oxford Road asked those decision-makers what key issues they’re facing in the podcasting world, and why they aren’t investing more money to reach podcast listeners.
The results? A full half of respondents said their brands are holding back on buying podcast ads because of “limitations in performance data.” 71% of respondents said that current measurement tools available for podcasts are less useful than tools available for other channels.
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As The Hollywood Reporter lays out, podcast advertising has undergone several morphs during the COVID listening boom. Originally, podcasts relied on affiliate marketing via promo codes, and those make it easy to see exactly how many listeners are purchasing products after the show (unless Honey is involved…). In recent years, brands have been able to track podcast ad engagement and sell-through with things like ‘pixels’ (aka little bits of transparent code) and URLs embedded in a podcast’s RSS feed.
“Now you’ve got one show on three different players that are all doing different ways of measurement, and some of those are not compatible with pixels, and so there’s a lot of chaos, and advertisers are trying to catch up with that and triangulate,” Dan Granger, Oxford Road’s CEO, told THR.
Respondents at Oxford Road’s summit cited video podcasts as being particularly difficult re: measuring success. “76% of brands would increase their podcast investment if attribution for YouTube podcasts matched that available for audio,” Oxford said in its What Brands Want 2025 report. “Nearly a quarter would grow spend by 50% or more.”
Video podcasts have one more sticking point for brands, too. Over half of respondents said they struggle to find a universally accepted definition for “podcast” now that players like YouTube and Spotify are proliferating video content alongside the standard audio-only shows.
“55% said a consistent definition of ‘podcast’ is important, given growing confusion across audio, video, influencer, and YouTube teams, and challenges with budget allocation, channel management, and attribution,” Oxford reported.
The solution here is standardization.
“I think that what’s going to be necessary is for the players to move toward each other and agree on standards and practices, so that the data that I get out of the RSS distribution, fundamentally, is the same and looks the same as what I get from Spotify and from YouTube,” Granger explained.
That being said, it is apparently still possible to track podcast ad performance based on hard sales data–and Oxford Road spent 12 months gathering that data to release its first official list of the ORBIT Top 15 Podcasts Measured by Ad Performance. ORBIT stands for the Oxford Road Benchmark Intelligence Tool, which Oxford Road says “measures actual customer acquisition costs, return on ad spend, and sales results from real campaigns.”
“Podscribe can tell you who’s advertising. Magellan can estimate spend,” Granger said in a statement. “ORBIT shows you which shows made money and which ones lost it. We factor in what advertisers paid, what they were trying to achieve, and whether the investment paid off. That’s the difference between counting impressions and measuring profit.”
Based on ORBIT’s data, Oxford Road found that Dungeons & Dragons sensation Critical Role is the #1 top-performing podcast in the world, in terms of converting listeners into customers for brand partners.
Intriguingly, shows like The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy, which have dominated podcast listening charts for years and regularly make headlines with splashy guests, are completely absent from Oxford Road’s top 15. This indicates brands “systematically overpay for household names while smaller shows deliver better returns,” Oxford Road said.
Here’s the full list:
- Critical Role
- The David Pakman Show
- The Megyn Kelly Show
- Monday Morning Podcast
- Lenny’s Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
- Unsubscribe Podcast
- Explain It To Me
- The Bulwark Podcast
- Lore
- Start Scrutiny
- Emergency Intercom
- The Salem Tovar Podcast
- Sweet N Sour Podcast
- The Toast
- Soder
Oxford Road says it plans to release a new list of peak ROI shows monthly, and also plans to release other categories of lists, including marking shows by “genre-specific performance, international markets, emerging shows, and vertical-specific results.”
Will Oxford Road’s reports and lists convince brands to spend more money on podcasts? Maybe. It’s worth noting this data is all from Oxford Road and has not been independently/externally verified, so until there’s some wider confirmation, brands may be hesitant to jump.
For now, though, it’s clear the podcast industry needs an agreed-upon way to measure how ads perform. Anyone up for relitigating the definition of “a view”?
