Local Advertising Is Audio’s Next Big Growth Opportunity.

Consumable believes one of podcasting’s biggest growth opportunities isn’t finding more national advertisers — it’s finally making local advertising work at scale. Chief Strategy Officer Jared Lapin says advances in audience identity and attribution are beginning to solve a longstanding challenge that has limited audio’s ability to compete for local performance marketing budgets, particularly in smaller markets where audience targeting has traditionally been difficult.

“The scale is there,” Lapin said in a recent interview. “We now have the scale that you can hone in on.” He says that includes elements such as geography, audience profile, time of day, device type and other targeting signals.

Lapin says local digital advertising has historically been one of audio’s toughest challenges. National campaigns are easier because they offer immediate scale, while local campaigns often struggle to find enough qualified audiences to target efficiently. Consumable’s network, he argues, changes that equation.

The strategy builds on Consumable’s core product, which it calls “Visual Audio.” The company delivers audio advertisements inside mobile app interstitials, combining traditional audio storytelling with the identity and measurement capabilities of digital advertising. Lapin said that gives advertisers something audio has often lacked: precise targeting, attribution and fulfillment data.

“Audio works,” Lapin said. But he argues audio has fallen behind other digital channels. “It’s isolated, and it’s kept it out of the modern media mix in the way that it really should be,” he said.

Consumable sees scale as one of its biggest advantages in addressing that. The company’s U.S. network reaches 210 million unique users and delivers roughly 30 billion monthly impressions, providing enough inventory to support campaigns ranging from national advertisers to highly localized buys.

Consumable works through channel partners that often white-label its technology, allowing broadcasters and publishers to package the company’s audience targeting under their own brands while leveraging their existing local sales organizations. “It’s not necessarily good business for us to hire a seller in every local market,” Lapin explained.

That scale also powers one of the company’s newest initiatives, Pod IQ, a platform designed to address one of podcast advertising’s biggest technical limitations.

“Podcasting is weak on digital identity,” Lapin said. Traditional podcast delivery relies largely on IP addresses and user agents, making it difficult to identify listeners, target them consistently or attribute campaign performance. Pod IQ attempts to solve that by creating what Lapin describes as a real-time digital identity for podcast listeners, allowing advertisers to target audiences, retarget previous listeners and build audience segments based on podcast consumption.

Lapin believes stronger identity will eventually help monetize far more of podcasting than today’s biggest shows.

“If the user’s listening to show 750,000 or they’re listening to show 75, if they’re the person that I want to speak to, they’re equally valuable,” he said. “I think as solutions like my Pod IQ product sort of grow in their significance, I think you’ll see more monetization at the longer end of the podcast hill.”

The same technology could also extend beyond podcasting. Lapin says Consumable is exploring ways to help radio broadcasters demonstrate the kind of attribution modern advertisers increasingly expect. The company is working on using its digital audience scale to build attribution panels that could model how broadcast AM/FM campaigns perform using digital identity signals.

“I really believe in audio. I believe in sound,” Lapin said. “I believe that the opportunity to build a bridge over that moat for broadcast radio unlocks a gold rush of money into the audio space.”

Another major focus is retail media, one of the fastest-growing segments of digital advertising. Retail media networks allow retailers to sell advertising using their own shopper data and closed-loop purchase measurement, but Lapin says audio has largely been left out because of its identity limitations To address that, Consumable has spent significant time building products for that market and expects to roll out additional retail media initiatives in the coming months.

“We’ve certainly seen that there’s a pretty ripe opportunity for smaller players, for local advertisers, for local brands to leverage audio to capture the power of sound — and to use it to drive performance,” Lapin said. “Nobody’s spending money in marketing to not sell things.”