Our team was on the ground in London last week for The Podcast Show, the biggest international gathering for the business of podcasting. The energy was high, but so were the expectations as podcast advertising has entered a new phase. Performance and measurement are mandatory, programmatic is gaining traction, video is reshaping the format, and the infrastructure to make it all work is the conversation everyone keeps coming back to.
Here’s what was brewing.
Performance and Proving Outcomes Are the New Baseline
If there was one theme that cut through everything else at this year’s show, it was performance. Not performance as an aspiration or a talking point, but performance as an expectation. Advertisers aren’t asking whether podcast advertising can deliver outcomes anymore. They’re asking how to prove it, how to measure it, and how to compare it against the rest of their media plan.
This is a meaningful change from even a year ago, when much of the conversation still centered on brand lift and awareness. The buyers in the room this year wanted attribution, they wanted cost per result, and they wanted the same accountability they get from every other digital channel. The industry heard them. Measurement and proving outcomes came up on nearly every stage and in nearly every conversation our team had.
The challenge is that the infrastructure to fully deliver on that promise is still catching up. Today’s impression currency measures whether an ad was delivered to a device, not whether anyone actually heard it. There’s no credible audible equivalent of an “in-view impression.” And the attribution side operates in its own silo, disconnected from how the rest of digital media is bought and measured. That creates a compounding sales challenge: every conversation about adding podcast to a media plan becomes a conversation about adopting an entirely different measurement framework alongside it.
Moving past that requires identity, addressability, and a willingness to hold audio to the same standard as display and video. That transition is underway, but the gap between what advertisers expect and what the ecosystem can reliably deliver is where the urgency is coming from.
Programmatic Audio Is Gaining Real Momentum
We noticed more questions and deeper discussion around programmatic audio at this year’s show than in any previous year. That’s a signal worth paying attention to.
For most of its history, podcast advertising has been a direct-sold, relationship-driven business. Host reads, sponsorships, custom integrations. That model built the category and it still works well for the right campaigns. But the buy side is increasingly looking for infrastructure that supports programmatic execution: the ability to buy audio inventory the way they buy display and video, with targeting, frequency management, and real-time optimization.
Throughout the show, questions kept coming back to how to scale audio buying without losing the quality and context that make podcasting valuable in the first place.
That tension between scale and quality is the right one to be wrestling with. Programmatic doesn’t have to mean commoditized. The opportunity is in building the infrastructure that lets buyers access audio at scale while preserving the signal, the context, and the audience value that makes podcast advertising effective.
Video Is Reshaping What Podcasting Looks Like
One of the most prominent shifts at this year’s show was how thoroughly video has become part of the podcasting conversation. For the first time, the exhibition floor was full of vendors selling cameras and video editing software alongside the usual audio production tools. That’s a behavioral indicator worth noting. A year ago, the question was whether creators should invest in video. This year, many were shopping for equipment.
But the video conundrum goes deeper than production choices. Multimodal RSS feeds that deliver both audio and video are changing the nature of podcast content itself, blurring the lines between what’s an audio show and what’s a video show. YouTube is now one of the top platforms for podcast consumption and was highlighted throughout the event for the analytics and discovery it offers creators.
For advertisers, this creates real complexity. When the same podcast lives across an audio feed, a YouTube channel, social clips, and potentially a streaming platform, the questions about how to define an impression and how to measure across those touchpoints become urgent.
It’s no surprise that the conversation continued on LinkedIn after the show wrapped, with industry leaders openly debating the most fundamental questions: what counts as a podcast impression, how do you know an ad worked, and how do you even define a podcast when the format keeps expanding. The fact that those questions are still wide open tells you where the industry is in its evolution.
The need for identity and addressability infrastructure that can follow audiences across environments, rather than measuring them within a single channel, is only accelerating.
The Inventory Landscape Is Evolving
Our team picked up on something that wasn’t getting much attention on the main stages but was present in the conversations happening around them: the nature of podcast inventory is in transition.
Several factors are converging. The rise of video podcasting is creating new supply dynamics as content flows across more platforms. YouTube’s growing role in podcast distribution is introducing a different kind of inventory into the ecosystem. And the economic environment is prompting some publishers to think differently about how they package and price what they offer.
At the same time, Edison Research data presented at the show revealed a striking trend: audience consolidation. In 2023, you needed the top 43 shows to reach 50% of all podcast listeners in the UK. By 2025, you only needed the top 27. The biggest shows are getting bigger, which means top-tier inventory is getting scarcer and more expensive while the broader landscape is becoming more complex.
For advertisers, the traditional approach of buying specific shows at specific price points is going to get harder to scale. The opportunity lies in thinking about podcast audiences rather than podcast placements, and in building the infrastructure to reach the right listeners across a more fragmented inventory landscape.
Authenticity Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage
The keynote address surfaced a statistic that put the rest of the show in context: AI-generated podcasts now outnumber those launched by real people. The flood of automated content is creating noise at a scale the industry hasn’t dealt with before.
That makes the qualities that define great podcasting more valuable, not less. Creator trust, genuine audience relationships, habitual listening behavior, passionate communities built around specific voices and perspectives. These are the signals that separate real audience value from inflated metrics.
For the advertising side of the business, this reinforces something we’ve been focused on: the trust and influence that podcasters build with their listeners is a durable asset that extends beyond the episode itself. As AI-generated content floods the market, the ability to identify, reach, and measure audiences built around authentic creator relationships becomes the most important infrastructure in the ecosystem.
Where This All Points
Every conversation we had in London, whether about performance, programmatic, video, inventory, or measurement, pointed in the same direction: Podcasting needs infrastructure that matches the scale and sophistication of what the medium has become.
The audience is there, so is the trust and engagement. What’s catching up is the ability to make podcast audiences addressable, measurable, and activatable across the full digital ecosystem. That’s what we’ve been building, and it was encouraging to hear the rest of the industry moving in the same direction.
We’re already looking forward to the IAB Podcast Upfronts in September and the conversations that build on what we heard in London. If you’re thinking about any of these themes and want to talk about what we’re seeing, reach out.
