Podcast advertising spend surged in 2021

According to data released by advertising intelligence platform MediaRadar, spending on podcast advertising was up over 20% YoY in 2021. Q4 ad spend alone was $160 million, making a total of $590 million for the year. It is estimated that more than a third of Americans now listen to podcasts regularly. Technology brands became the biggest spenders, pushing media into second place.

Familiar names among the top 10 highest spending podcast advertisers are Amazon, Capital One, Comcast and State Farm. Most podcast advertising is located midroll with durations of 30 and 60 seconds being most common. Brands seem confident in the effectiveness of podcast advertising, with 79% of advertisers from 2020 continuing to buy in 2021.

Read next: How to get the best ROI from podcast advertising

Why we care. We say yet again, channels are proliferating. This means fragmented audiences, of course, but also potentially highly engaged audiences. Podcasts create the opportunity for focused contextual advertising as well as for more general brand messaging.

Speaking of messages, consumers (and B2B buyers) are delivering a clear one. Meet us where we are.

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.