Podcasting’s growth story is facing a CMO reality check.
Cluttered, repetitive ad breaks and a lack of consistent measurement standards are factors giving some marketers pause about continuing to pour budgets into podcasts. That’s according to a new report from the podcasting ad agency Oxford Road, which was shared exclusively with CMO Insider.
More than half (57%) of the marketers Oxford Road polled said measurement gaps were holding back their podcasting investments. For brands with annual media budgets of $100 million or more, 90% said measurement was a top concern.
“The exposure side, the attribution side — they’re both a bit of a mess, frankly,” said Oxford Road EVP Giles Martin, referring to how marketers assess podcast audiences and measure the success of their campaigns.
The podcast market operates across multiple platforms, from RSS feeds to Spotify, Apple, and increasingly YouTube. Each has its own audience metric: downloads, streams, or views, which are calculated differently.
Attribution is just as fragmented, with marketers relying on an imperfect mix of promo codes, pixels, geo-testing, and media mix modeling to gauge what worked.
“It makes it harder for advertisers to buy, it makes it harder for sellers to sell, and it can make it harder for creators to get the money they deserve,” Martin said.
That could go some of the way toward explaining why 40% of marketers in the report said other channels deliver a better return on investment than podcast ads.
More ads, more problems
Growth in the podcast advertising market appears to be slowing.
While 40% of the marketers surveyed by Oxford Road anticipated increasing their podcast and audio budgets in 2027, this was down from the 59% of brands that said they increased those budgets this year. That tracks with other industry spending forecasts. EMARKETER expects US advertisers to spend $3.76 billion on podcasts next year, up 10.4% year over year, but a slowdown from the 16.8% annual growth it estimates for 2026.
“There’s a significant disconnect between audience attention and advertising investment,” said Patrick Dolan, head of display and audio at the media agency The7Stars.
The pitch to advertisers is that podcasts offer highly engaged audiences who are selecting the shows they want to listen to, often around specific topics that align well with brands’ business objectives. Host-read ads can offer an added degree of connection.
“A good host read sounds like advice from a friend,” said Byron Tassoni-Resch, CEO of the performance marketing agency WeDiscover.
Yet for some marketers, podcast ad breaks have evolved to become too messy. More than 40% of the marketers polled by Oxford Road cited the “advertising environment” as a reason they were putting off podcast investments. Marketers said they were concerned about growing ad loads, ad repetition, and other quality-control issues, such as inauthentic, “ho-hum” host-read ads, or even ads that cut off mid-sentence.
Oxford Road’s report was based on a July survey that polled 41 marketers, a group it said represents $400 million to $500 million of podcast ad spend, including three of the top 10 podcast spenders.
Marketers need a multi-pronged podcast strategy
Media buyers said marketers need to adopt a more sophisticated approach to extract greater value from their podcast investments. Martin of Oxford Road said brands should consider treating podcasts as a deeper, multi-format partnership, combining host reads with creator social posts, short-form video, newsletters, and, where useful, lower-cost pre-recorded podcast ads that build reach and brand recall.
The7Stars’ Dolan said that bolder approaches to podcast plans create a “true value exchange” between the podcast creator and the advertiser and foster a more authentic partnership.
“These more long-term approaches stop the short-term, high-frequency ‘standard’ read that lacks the passion we seek from our podcast creators,” Dolan said.
Media buyers made a similar case for measurement, where combining different methods is the best approach.
“Brands buy podcasts like TV, but they measure them like search,” said WeDiscover’s Tassoni-Resch. Relying on promo codes alone, for example, is an imperfect science because it only counts the people who remember them. A podcast ad might have helped drive a sale, but it often doesn’t get credit for it.
Tassoni-Resch recommends brand-lift studies to show how awareness changes after a brand is mentioned on a podcast. Marketers should also combine methods such as holdout tests and media mix modeling to demonstrate how podcasts are additive to search and social ad spending, he said.
“When CMOs can see this value, they invest more to improve the message and scale the channel,” Tassoni-Resch said. “Good measurement turns a one-off podcast test into a long-term partnership.”
The podcast industry is pushing for unified standards to address fragmented metrics across audio and video platforms. Last year, Oxford Road convened the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting, a group of industry executives across podcast platforms and media owners, advertisers, agencies, publishers, and talent and measurement firms. This year, it released the “AMP Accords,” calling for a universal definition of a podcast, standardized cross-platform impression metrics, and a consistent approach to advertising attribution.
“There’s so much ambiguity here,” Martin of Oxford Road said. “We need a little bit more clarity in terms of what it is, how you count the exposures, and then how you measure the ROI.”
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