Podcast advertising spending surged ahead in September, as many of the big spenders in the medium bulked up their budgets. None increased more than Amazon, which Magellan AI reports added 23% more money to its budget in ads to support its Prime Big Deals Days sales event and overtook perennial top spender BetterHelp at No. 1.
Amazon spent $7.1 million on podcast ads last month, up from $5.8 million in August. And despite its slide back to second place, BetterHelp increased spending 9%. Magellan says the online mental health provider spent more than $7 million on podcast ads last month.
Even though its multiyear run at No. 1 may have been broken, there is no second-guessing in BetterHelp’s relationship with podcasting. BetterHelp Senior Director of Marketing Brittany Clevenger tells AdAge that the brand will continue to invest in podcast ads as it looks to expand overseas, explaining endorsement marketing “is the strongest in the book” for the company. “So far, host-read ads have been the No. 1 driver of performance for brands like ours, but we want audience-based buying and programmatic to be a larger part of the strategy,” Clevenger says.
Third place T-Mobile also spent 9% more month-to-month, investing $5.6 million in podcast advertising. Fourth place Shopify spent 26% more, putting $5.1 million toward podcast ads last month.
Overall, Magellan says the top 15 advertisers in podcasting spent a combined $57.72 million in September. That is more than double the $26.59 million spent by the top 15 in August — and the biggest tally for the top 15 of any month so far this year. Heading into the critical fourth quarter, it should give podcast companies plenty of optimism about how the year will end.
Magellan says only two advertisers — Oracle and Progressive — spent less in September compared to the prior month.
Across the top 15, Magellan says nine of the advertisers spent the biggest share of their dollars on Sports podcasts. Comedy was tops for three others, while one spent their biggest share of dollars on News shows, and another spent the most in the TV/Film genre.
Magellan AI’s monthly ranking of brands that delivered the biggest increases in spending in the medium — its list of movers and shakers — has a bit of everything for September. There is the blue-chip brand IBM, which boosted its podcast ad spending by more than three-and-a-half times compared to August. There are also direct-to-consumer brands like financial planning service Betterment, which spent more than a million dollars for the first time on podcast ads. There are also retailers like Starbucks — which cozied up to the medium with $217,5000 worth of pumpkin spice latte ads — and Ross Stores, which got a jump on the holiday season with $208,200 worth of ads.
The biggest increase of ads went to the direct-to-consumer DNA testing kit company 23 and Me, which spent $364,000 last month on podcast ads after spending a mere $100 the month before.
Overall, Magellan AI says the movers and shakers spent an estimated $694,200 on podcast ads in September. That comes in under the $4.1 million spent by movers and shakers during August.
Magellan AI analyzes podcast advertising data from the top 3,000 podcasts in the U.S., as ranked by Apple Podcasts. Magellan AI’s proprietary model is used to estimate advertising spend. It includes factors such as the number of ads and variation in ad load detected for a given episode, number of downloads for each episode, and estimated CPMs as reported.
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