At Cannes, a fireside conversation revealed a blind spot in many media strategies: Audio is expanding beyond traditional channels offering new unique user experiences, and the brands who act first will own the advantage.

As CPMs soar and screen-based attention fragments, savvy marketers are starting to ask a new question. What if the next breakthrough isn’t about fighting harder for eyeballs, but about claiming the ears instead?

At this year’s Saturnalia Chateau in Cannes, Andrew Essex of TCS and our own Jared Lapin, Chief Strategy Officer at Consumable, unpacked a shift that’s reshaping how brands think about audio. Audio is becoming a strategic, measurable layer that amplifies your campaigns and reaches audiences in ways that screen-first media cannot. 

The Moment of Truth: When Screens Pause, Ears Engage

At the center of the conversation was a powerful idea: Audio isn’t just a format anymore, it’s a signal. It’s data-rich, behaviorally precise, and increasingly ambient.

The highest-value advertising moments aren’t always visual. They’re often the micro-pauses when users are mentally transitioning, finishing a game level, checking weather, completing a task in an app, and Consumable is transforming how audio integrates. Jared explained the user experience: 

“You get to the end of a level and Trivia Crack has a natural pause in the game experience, and they give you an ad… we’ll deliver an audio ad. Your phone has sound on already. If it doesn’t, we’re not going to deliver an ad to you.”

This isn’t background audio competing with other stimuli. It’s foreground audio capturing undivided attention during natural content breaks. It’s a moment of pure, uninterrupted focus.

The key insight? Users aren’t frustrated by this disruption, because the moment feels organic to their app experience.

Net-New Reach, Measurable Outcomes

The scale in this opportunity is a significant breakthrough, offering new listeners beyond other major audio players. Consumable leads the digital audio space with 218 million U.S. unique users and more than 30 billion impressions each month, all addressable and transparent.

It’s net-new audio reach that expands your addressable audience across the digital ecosystem without cannibalizing your existing video or display campaigns. For advertisers focused on efficiency and impact, this is pure incremental value and new unduplicated audience – a direct path to greater market share.

As attention fragments and privacy laws reshape targeting, audio is emerging as a sweet spot for precision and brand safety. The performance data backs this up. Jared explained how promising this can be for results:

“Performance has been phenomenal. Attribution works top to bottom, which solves a lot of problems for audio marketers and enables a host of opportunities for digital marketers.”

Audio Creative Matters More Than Ever

The pitfall for many advertisers is seeing audio as an add-on, missing its potential as a strategic creative frontier. As audio evolves, creative execution becomes critical. Jared explained that new formats like the audio interstitial delivered via Visual Audio mean thinking about audio creative differently:

“Audio creative is key. Having smart audio creative, a good call to action and being responsible in the time that those app users are giving to you, to tell them about your product or service, to engage them and to ask them to respond to you.”

The opportunity lies in reaching users who are typically “ad blind” in visual formats but become highly attentive when audio shifts their mental focus during those natural gameplay pauses.

The Attention Shift That Feels Welcome 

Perhaps most importantly, this approach reclaims attention without overwhelming it. In an industry chasing increasingly immersive formats, delivering audio during pause moments feels both innovative and respectful. Users welcome the shift in focus and brands can connect on a deeper, more receptive level. Andrew captured this perfectly:  

“You hear a message that’s relevant to you [because targeting is precise]. It’s a paradigm shift. You’re relieving the eyes or letting the eyes multitask and you’re shifting the focus in the synopses of the brain to the ears.”

This is a fundamental rethinking of how attention works in a mobile-first world. 

The Strategic Advantage: First-Mover Territory

Forward-thinking brands are already seizing a strategic advantage by treating audio as a precision targeting channel, capturing share of voice in an uncontested space.

The implications for media strategy are immediate:

  1. Test and Learn: Allocate 5-10% of your digital budget to audio-first placements. Measure against your video campaigns on the same audiences.
  2. Creative Strategy: Develop audio creative that doesn’t rely on visual cues, but can be enhanced by them. Think radio-quality production with direct response calls-to-action. 
  3. Attribution Clarity: Unlike traditional audio channels, these placements offer the same measurement rigor as your digital campaigns, eliminating the attribution black holes that have haunted audio investment. 

In an ecosystem defined by screen fatigue and the rise of ad blocking, the next wave of attention and performance is undeniably auditory. The advertisers who recognize this shift will own the advantage.

Want to hear even more from their conversation? Watch the full interview here, or reach out to the Consumable team to learn more about what audio can unlock for your brand and campaigns.