Sports betting advertising may be a hot category, but for podcasters fantasy sports is also delivering real dollars. Heading into the fall return of football, Magellan AI saw fantasy sports brands more than double their ad spending on podcasts between July and August. The category delivered $2.7 million in ad spending last month, a 116% increase from a month earlier.
“Last year we saw activity in July and August. This year we saw more activity,” said Magellan AI CEO Cameron Hendrix, who pointed out during a webinar Tuesday that even more ad dollars are likely to be placed during September considering a year ago fantasy sports brands spent roughly twice as much in September as they did in August.
“It makes sense that fantasy sports advertisers are ramping up for football season. But not only are they ramping up, they are actually increasing the dollars that they are putting to work in the podcast space,” Hendrix said.
Magellan AI also detected a big jump in shoe industry spending during August as kids headed back to school. Overall, Magellan AI says shoe industry spending increased 49% from July to August when an estimated $1.4 million was spent on podcast ads.
Hendrix said it was driven by two brands – Brooks and New Balance – which were on its monthly movers and shakers list of advertisers making the biggest increases in their spending. Magellan AI says Brooks invested an estimated $388,000 on podcast ads last month, up 648% from $52,000 in July. And New Balance spent an estimated $175,000 or a 1,532% increase from its $11,000 in July.
Hendrix says New Balance relied on host-read ads while Brooks used produced spots. Magellan AI also shows that while New Balance primarily ran ads on Health & Fitness and Sports podcasts in 2021, this year its ads have primarily run on Sports and Football podcasts.
New Balance also started its podcast advertising earlier this year, with its campaign launching in August compared to September last year.“We like to see brands not just spending again in the space, they’re actually coming back earlier and launching campaigns earlier,” Hendrix said.
Magellan AI says the top 20 brands invested a combined $32.369 million on podcast ads last month. That was a seven percent increase from what the top 20 spent during July. The top two advertisers were the same in both months with the list led by the online mental health brand BetterHelp and retail giant Amazon.
Magellan 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 in select media kits and estimated based on popularity.