The news: Brand awareness is a growing focus for podcast advertisers as overall spending on the medium jumped 28% YoY in Q1 2026 to reach an all-time high.

• 63% of US podcasting ad spend in Q1 went toward brand awareness campaigns, up from 51% in Q1 2025, per Magellan AI’s Podcast Advertising Market Trends report.
• Direct response’s share of ad spend declined to 35%, down 11 percentage points YoY.

Meanwhile, first-time spenders are ramping up investments. New podcast advertisers in 2025 spent $39,231 in their first month and $64,616 on average per month in the following six months. In 2024, those numbers were just $18,200 on average at launch and $30,445 for the next six months.

What it means: Podcast advertising is shifting from a performance-driven channel to a brand-building one. As more marketers see podcasts as a way to drive awareness and consideration instead of immediate or one-time conversions, they’re allocating larger swaths of budgets to upper-funnel campaigns.

• New entrants are testing the waters more deeply and quickly boosting their investments, suggesting they are seeing enough value to make podcasts a larger part of their media mix.
• This rise in spending could also reflect growing confidence in the tools and capabilities that support attention measurement, audience targeting, and purchase attribution.

The move toward brand awareness advertising is notable because it raises the stakes for proving podcasts’ impact on broader brand metrics as marketers look beyond traditional conversion-based KPIs.

Recommendations for marketers: Combine podcast campaigns with brand-lift, attention, and attribution measurement tools to better understand upper-funnel impact and justify larger investments.

Marketers new to the podcast channel may also want to test campaigns across multiple shows or networks to gauge audience response and find hosts and genres with the best brand fit, then grow spend based on audience alignment and measurable outcomes.