Magellan AI says podcasting’s biggest advertisers held spending steady between February and March, as the online mental health brand BetterHelp and Amazon continued to lead the pack. The top 15 advertisers spent a combined $49,523,300, according to Magellan AI estimates. That was steady with what the biggest advertisers spent a month earlier. Overall, two-thirds of the top brands increased podcast ad levels.
BetterHelp led the way with $8.3 million in spending, far outpacing No. 2 Amazon, which spent $4.9 million. Discover fell out of the top 15 versus the prior month, but thanks to a 424% increase in spending, Meta moved into the top 15.
Magellan AI says Sports was the genre most used by the biggest spenders. Nine of them put most of their ad dollars into that show category. Comedy was tops for two other brands, as was Society & Culture, while Business and Health & Fitness was the go-to genre for other brands.
Magellan AI’s monthly ranking of brands that delivered the biggest increases in spending in the medium — its list of movers and shakers — was led by Meta. The parent of Facebook, Instagram and Threads spent more than $2 million on podcast ads last month, quadruple what it spent in February. Booking Holdings, the company that owns travel sites like Booking.com, Kayak and Priceline, also took advantage of the upcoming summer travel season. It spent $1.1 million on podcast ads last month, versus just $36,500 a month earlier.
The financial ad category has been soft in recent months, but Magellan AI says Fisher Investments bucked the trend. It made the monthly list of movers and shakers with a nearly $300,000 investment of its own in podcast ads. It must have gotten good returns, since Fisher spent less than $30,000 in the prior month.
Overall, Magallan AI says the movers and shakers spent an estimated $7.88 million on podcast ads during March.
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 in select media kits and estimated based on popularity.