The holiday season can be challenging and heading into it the online mental health service provider Better Help, which has been podcasting’s biggest advertiser for the past 15 months, again bumped up its spending. Magellan AI says Better Help spent an estimated $8.6 million on podcasts during November, a 14% increase from a month earlier. Better Help’s ads ran across 828 podcasts according to Magellan, compared to ads detected on 784 shows during October.
With a 43% increase in its month-to-month spending, SimpliSafe moved up to second place with $3.9 million in estimated spending and ads on 187 shows – with Sports its most-used genre. It was the second month of double-digit increases for SimpliSafe which rose from No. 10 in September to No. 3 in October.
The holiday gift season brought a 77% jump for Amazon which rose to the third-biggest podcast advertiser in November, up from tenth place a month earlier. Magellan estimates it spent $3.2 million spread across 926 shows. Society & Culture was Amazon’s most-used genre.
Mobile carrier T-Mobile jumped into the top 15 last month to fourth place, spending an estimated $2.9 million. ExpressVPN rounded out the top five, as it pulled back eight percent and fell from the No. 2 spender in October to No. 5 in November.
Magellan says NBCUniversal was once again the brand that turned up on the biggest number of podcasts last month. Its estimated $2.1 million in ad spending was spread across 1,012 different shows – compared to 965 different podcasts used a month earlier. Comedy series are where most of NBCUniversal’s ad dollars went.
Overall, Magellan estimates the top 15 podcast advertisers spent a combined $40.59 million in November. That compares to $35.2 million spent by the top 15 in the medium during October, or a 15% increase month-to-month as 10 of the 15 advertisers bumped up their spending.
Magellan’s list of movers and shakers – the brands that increased their podcast spending the most during the month – was led in November by the Pentagon Federal Credit Union. The list also includes four brands – Etsy, CoolSculpting, Glassdoor, and the University of Maryland – that went from spending nothing to investing six digits in podcasting.
Etsy’s debut comes as Magellan says the gift industry overall spent more than $3 million during November. That was the most ever spent by the category.
The online gift retailer StoryWorth was also a mover and shaker as its spending more than tripled month-to-month to $693,000. It was also six-times more than what it spent last November. Magellan says that its direct response ads were most commonly detected in a mid-roll position and a high majority of the ads were host read on shows such as Disgraceland and Pantsuit Politics.
There was also a big bump up from the digital frame retailer Aura Frames. Its monthly allocation jumped to $377,000 last month. “November 2021 was Aura’s highest spend yet, reaching three-times what they spent in November 2020,” says Magellan in a blog post.
Magellan analyzes podcast advertising data from the top 3,000 podcasts in the U.S., as ranked by Apple Podcasts. Magellan’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.