As Big Brands Flood The Space, Smarter Strategies Are Critical
A recent Digiday piece confirmed something many in podcast advertising already know: the space is more crowded than ever. Networks like Acast reported 41 percent sales growth in Q3 2025, driven almost entirely by major advertisers. CEO Greg Glenday specifically called out "the Capital Ones and the Coca Colas" as the new players entering what was once startup territory.
This is undeniably good news for the podcast industry overall. It validates the channel. It brings production budgets, technology investments, and mainstream attention. It also signals a shift in how brands of different sizes now have to think about the medium. But it creates a clear question for emerging and mid scale advertisers: is there still room to compete?
The short answer is yes. The more accurate answer is that the market has changed, and brands must interpret that change correctly.
The Awareness vs. Performance Divide
Digiday’s article includes a telling case study. Asset, a startup in the personal care space, spent roughly sixty thousand dollars on two large podcast campaigns. Their ads ran on shows with significant reach and loyal audiences. But here’s the catch. Those same episodes also featured ads from Wayfair, Hungryroot, and BetterHelp.
These are not direct competitors, but they are playing a completely different game. Big advertisers often chase awareness, frequency, and brand presence. They can afford to show up dozens of times across premium inventory without obsessing over immediate conversion metrics. Growth stage brands with modest monthly budgets often find it challenging to compete on those terms.
When a startup buys into an episode already packed with heavy spenders, the risk is not simply getting lost. The risk is adopting the media strategy of a brand with entirely different objectives. That misalignment is where budgets burn fastest.
When Asset tested smaller shows the ads generated higher traffic and conversion rates proving that show size doesn't always correlate with campaign effectiveness.
The Rise of Scale Matched Buying
Asset is not alone. Smaller scale advertisers consistently see stronger performance when they start by buying into shows that match their own scale. It is not always about audience size. Rather, it is about the competitive environment inside the episode. When a brand stands out, the host can deliver a read with more intention, the message lands more cleanly, and listeners are not sorting through a pile of promo codes. As the messaging, funnel, and attribution get dialed-in, they can be applied to bigger swings.
Leveraging the power of smaller and mid-size podcasts at the start is often what separates long-term campaigns from short-lived, expensive experiments.
The Data That Changes The Game
Digiday also highlighted new research from Triton Digital that gives further context to how emerging and mid scale advertisers might think about targeting. Their Q3 2025 Podcast Ranker revealed specific correlations between podcast listening patterns and purchasing behavior.
Roughly 87% of true crime listeners over-index with big box retail shoppers. 51% of tech content listeners over index with department store shoppers. Broad reach genres like comedy, news, and sports capture diverse shopping behaviors.
This matters because it gives brands with more modest monthly spend something they have historically lacked. It provides defensible audience data that identifies where high value listeners already spend their time. Rather than guessing where a potential customer might be, brands now have clearer signals that reveal unexpected but highly motivated audiences.
In other words, the data is catching up to the intuition many performance marketers already had. The audiences that convert best are often found in places brands are not initially looking.
What Winning Looks Like in 2026
Greg Glenday of Acast also acknowledged a common strategy flaw “Everybody is interested in podcasting, but nobody has gone all the way in because it is hard to buy and measure the ads.” That difficulty is precisely why there’s room to compete. The complexity of the medium creates gaps, and those gaps consistently favor brands that understand the difference between attention and visibility.
Emerging and mid-scale advertisers see stronger results when they focus on the competitive environment inside each episode rather than the overall size of the show. Audience behavior data is pushing brands into genres they once overlooked. Host relationships remain a powerful differentiator, particularly in the mid tier where reads feel more considered and less transactional. And brands that understand podcast advertising as a testing system rather than a single exposure are the ones generating repeatable performance.
None of this is prescriptive. It is simply the way the market is now behaving as the category grows more crowded at the top and more valuable in the middle.
The ADOPTER Media View
"The big brand influx is actually a positive result for podcasting, even if in execution these big brands are making way for predatory sales practices. When Capital One and Coca Cola spend in a new channel, they are marking a shift in the “Technology Adoption Lifecycle” from “Early Adopters” to “Early Majority.” Though big brands entering podcast advertising are eating up a larger and larger share of listening ears on podcasts, they have not closed the door for startups. They spend on the top fifty shows, you can spend well across thousands of mid tier podcasts with engaged audiences and less ad clutter. The brands succeeding now are the ones willing to fish in less crowded waters and let data, not ego, drive their show selection." Adam McNeil, SVP of Client Services at ADOPTER Media
Opportunities Are Abundant In All The Right Places
Podcast advertising is maturing. Major brands are here, and they are spending aggressively. But the channel is far from saturated, and the dynamics that made podcast advertising valuable for emerging and mid scale advertisers remain intact. Host advocacy and personal endorsements still drive response. Audience loyalty still outperforms other channels. Measurement is stronger, it just takes data to dial it in.
The biggest change in recent years is that there is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach to sponsoring podcasts. The brands trying to mimic a spray and pray strategy will overspend and underperform. The brands reading the market for what it is, rather than what it used to be, are the ones gaining ground.
The opportunity is here. It is simply evolving, and the brands willing to evolve with it will be the ones that win.
Sherry Del Rizzo
Sherry leads ADOPTER Media’s inbound content marketing, SEO strategy, brand authority, and knowledge base development. Translation: she makes sure the agency’s expertise shows up in the right places from search rankings to industry conversations. For her, marketing isn’t just about promotion, it's about translating ideas into content people actually want to engage with.
