Acast’s Greg Glenday Says Brands Are Missing Podcasting’s Real Audience Opportunity.

Brands are wasting podcast advertising dollars by targeting the wrong shows and misunderstanding how listeners actually engage with content, according to Acast CEO Greg Glenday, who argues podcasting’s future will be driven by audience behavior rather than traditional media assumptions.

Glenday says Acast analyzed 170,000 brand mentions across 12,000 podcasts and found food podcasts accounted for less than 1% of conversations about food delivery companies — despite receiving roughly half of food delivery podcast ad spending. He argues the mismatch reflects a broader problem in how marketers approach podcast advertising.

“Delivery is not a food passion behavior. Delivery is a time-management solution,” Glenday says in a blog post. “If someone is listening to a Michelin-starred chef talk about the art of cooking, they are not in the headspace to order Deliveroo.”

Instead, Glenday says podcast genres focused on parenting, productivity and the “chaos of modern life” may offer more natural environments for delivery advertising because they better align with audience behavior and mindset. The comments were a centerpiece of a keynote that Glenday delivered last week at The Podcast Show in London. In the address he argued podcasting is becoming increasingly influential in shaping culture, advertising and consumer behavior.

A major theme of the speech was what Glenday calls “narrative influence” — the idea that podcasting’s real strength comes from the direct relationship between creators and audiences rather than whether content is consumed as audio or video. Glenday says podcasts are often where conversations around major cultural moments begin long before brands move into mainstream advertising cycles tied to events such as the Super Bowl or the Oscars.

“What podcasters have built with their audiences is unlike anything else in media,” Glenday said. “The power comes from the story, the conversation, the relationship between a creator and their audience.”

Influencers Are Cringe 

Podcast trust and advertising performance metrics also featured heavily in the presentation. Acast’s Podcast Pulse research found 75% of weekly listeners do not consider podcasters to be influencers, yet 84% say they have been influenced by one. Glenday says 64% trust podcast hosts to provide genuine endorsements, while 73% of listeners 18-34 said they purchased a product from a brand first discovered through podcasts during the past year.

Glenday acknowledges “influencer” has become a “loaded word” in advertising, where many ads have become disconnected from genuine opinion and that has eroded trust in that entire marketing category.

“Podcasters are something different,” he argues. The result is 85% of daily podcast listeners have taken some form of brand action after consuming a podcast. Even among 18- to 34-year-olds — which he calls the most ad-skeptical generation in history — Podcast Pulse shows nearly three in four (73%) have made a purchase from a brand they first encountered through a podcast in the last 12 months.

Glenday argues podcasters operate differently from traditional influencer culture because audiences view them as trusted voices rather than celebrity endorsers. “Podcasters are that friend,” he says. “For millions of people, every single day.”

The speech also addressed the industry’s evolving relationship with video. Glenday says fears that video podcasting would undermine audio listening have faded as audiences increasingly move fluidly between watching and listening depending on circumstance. 

“Two years ago, video felt like a storm on the horizon for podcasting. Everyone was anxious. Now we're here, and the storm turned out to be a wave we can actually ride,” Glenday says. He describes podcasting as inherently “multimodal,” with consumers shifting between formats throughout the day.

To support that shift, Acast has developed what it calls “quantum ads,” technology designed to automatically serve either audio or video advertising experiences depending on how consumers access a show. He thinks the audio-video continuum has become “a permanent feature” of how people consume podcasts.

Glenday also stresses that while Acast uses artificial intelligence internally for areas such as ad matching and analytics, the company believes podcast content itself must remain human-driven.

“The content has to be made by human beings,” he says. “The relationship a listener has with a podcaster is built on the knowledge that there’s a real person on the other end of that microphone.”