Audio advertising is growing, budgets are shifting, and AI is accelerating production - yet marketers still cannot confidently treat it as a full-funnel channel. The reason, according to ExchangeWire's senior leadership, comes down to a structural measurement gap that has persisted for years and shows no sign of closing fast enough.

The question was put directly on June 5, 2026, in a mailbag edition of the MadTech Podcast from ExchangeWire. Kamel El Hadef of Audion asked whether marketers are ready to adopt audio as a full-funnel channel, given that AI agents are enabling audio advertising to evolve rapidly and brands are increasingly using it to drive tangible outcomes alongside brand awareness. The question landed in a conversation already charged by debates about AI-generated creative and retail media infrastructure. But it struck a nerve of its own.

"Audio is an underrepresented channel," said Lindsay Rowntree, COO of ExchangeWire, on the June 5 episode. "And it's not talked about enough - and it feels like it's often talked about in the audio echo chamber and there's not enough conversation outside of that echo chamber about how great audio is and can be."

That gap between internal enthusiasm and external mainstream adoption sits at the heart of audio's challenge in 2026.

The measurement barrier

The single biggest obstacle Rowntree identifies is measurement. Audio advertising has no reliable last-click attribution mechanism. Listeners are, by definition, not in a position to click anything - they are walking, driving, or working while consuming content. That physical reality creates a tracking void that digital advertising has spent two decades optimising around.

"One of the biggest problems with audio is - and still is - measurement," Rowntree said on the June 5 episode. "And I think that is where it falls down as a full-funnel channel. Audio measurement is limited and it requires a lot of understanding. There's very little last-click attribution abilities with audio."

The practical result is that audio's value only becomes legible when measured alongside other channels. According to Rowntree, it needs to be understood within media mix modelling and multi-touch attribution frameworks rather than evaluated in isolation. As a standalone performance channel, she argues, it remains genuinely difficult to defend the spend.

This assessment tracks closely with data PPC Land has followed throughout 2025 and into 2026. Consumers dedicate 31% of their media time to audio platforms. Advertisers allocate only 9% of their budgets to audio advertising. That 22-percentage-point gap has persisted despite programmatic infrastructure improvements, measurement standardisation efforts, and successful case studies demonstrating audio's effectiveness in driving brand recall and conversion.

The walled garden problem compounds the measurement gap. Different platforms report different things - listens on one, engagement metrics on another - making cross-platform aggregation difficult. "You can't even pull that together to be able to understand what my ad on this radio channel, on this podcast actually drove," Rowntree said on the June 5 episode.

A strong channel boxed into the wrong category

Rachel Smith, CEO of ExchangeWire, raised a distinct but related argument on the same June 5 episode: audio's problem may partly be one of positioning, not just plumbing. The industry, she suggested, has pushed audio too hard toward performance credentials at the expense of the brand awareness story it can already tell convincingly.

"I think also it should kind of almost accept and embrace that it's a really strong brand awareness channel and lean into that more because it really is - it's one of the most uninterrupted..." Smith said, gesturing at the format's captive quality before Rowntree completed the thought: "It's an entertainment channel."

That captive quality is significant. Unlike display or social video, audio cannot be scrolled past or minimised. Rowntree made the point plainly: "Normally walking or driving while I'm listening to all these endless ads on the podcast I listen to - I can't skip them. And with radio I can't skip them at all. Like with everything else, I will skip it where possible. In my ear, I'm not tuning out."

That attentiveness has real value. Podcast advertising spending climbed 32% year-over-year in Q4 2025, according to Magellan AI data covering 94,422 podcast episodes. Brand awareness spending within that total rose 21% quarter-on-quarter. Direct response spending grew 13% in the same period. The channel is not stagnant. Brands are clearly finding it useful. The difficulty is demonstrating exactly how useful, at scale, in a format that satisfies modern performance marketing standards.

UK ad spend on audio grew 10% in 2025, according to figures Smith cited on the June 5 episode. That is a meaningful number in an industry where most established channels are fighting for low-single-digit growth. Yet the percentage of programmatic budgets allocated to audio has barely moved. Research tracked by PPC Land shows audio and podcast advertising representing only 9% of programmatic spend despite modest growth from 7% in 2023.

The video complexity layer

One structural change that has made audio's identity harder to define - and its measurement harder to execute - is the rise of video podcasting. Podcasts are no longer purely audio products. YouTube has become one of the largest podcast discovery platforms. Shows are filmed. Clips are shared. The same piece of content is consumed as audio in a car and as video on a connected TV screen.

Smith identified this shift directly on June 5: "I no longer see audio as just an audio channel. It's also a video channel - because what's one of the main drivers of audio? It's podcasts. What are we doing right now? Filming our podcast."

Her friend who works in post-production described podcasting as "basically the chat show reinvented," a point Smith found clarifying. The chat show format - long regarded as television's most durable form - has migrated to audio-first platforms and returned to screens through those same platforms. That dual existence complicates every layer of measurement and buying.

"If you are a podcast regular listener, then depending on where you consume your podcast, you're getting it via audio and video," Smith continued. "But that then, if you're a marketer and any media buyer will agree, becomes a challenge of - well, what am I buying?"

The practical consequence is siloed buying teams. An audio team and an AV team may both have legitimate claims on a podcast campaign. Each will report different metrics. Attribution will diverge. The data cannot easily be combined. This produces the exact outcome that frustrates brand clients and agency planners: investment decisions made on incomplete or incompatible information.

PPC Land documented this tension in detail when covering Edison Research's podcast ranking methodology changes in August 2025, when the rankings began incorporating "data from individuals whose sole podcast consumption in the past week was through video." That single methodological adjustment shifted the rankings materially - No Jumper climbed 11 positions, The Pat McAfee Show rose 26 - demonstrating just how different audio-only and video-inclusive consumption pictures can be for the same programmes.

The omnichannel argument

Both Smith and Rowntree converged on the same structural prescription: audio needs to stop seeking recognition as an isolated channel and position itself inside the omnichannel conversation.

The analogy they drew was to out-of-home advertising. OOH media owners, Smith observed, no longer want to have an out-of-home conversation in isolation. Every pitch, every panel session, every agency briefing is framed around how out-of-home fits within a broader media mix. That framing has helped OOH secure budget from teams that might otherwise ignore it.

"I want to have the conversation as it pertains to omnichannel," Rowntree said on June 5, "because that's where it should sit and should exist."

The same logic applies directly to audio. Rowntree made the appeal explicit: "Sort it out, audio industry."

This is not a trivial ask. Siloed buying structures within agencies are deeply embedded. Audio has historically been purchased through radio and digital audio desks that operate separately from programmatic display, video, and search teams. Budgets are allocated before any cross-channel conversation happens. By the time audio is considered, the performance bar it needs to clear may already be defined in terms it cannot meet.

Smith noted that this structural problem has persisted for the entire time she has been running ExchangeWire - and for decades before that. But she also argued the impetus for change is more urgent now than at any prior point. Advertising budgets are not growing at the rates they did in the early programmatic era. The growth that does exist is being directed at channels that can demonstrate measurable outcomes. Audio, caught between brand and performance, needs a clearer claim to both.

AI's expanding role

Kamel El Hadef's original question specifically flagged AI agents as the force enabling audio advertising to evolve rapidly. The ExchangeWire leadership agreed that AI is playing a significant role - though they were cautious about characterising it as transformative yet from a measurability standpoint.

Rowntree acknowledged that AI is "playing an absolutely huge role and will continue to," particularly in the production and personalisation of audio creative. The reduction in production cost and lead time that AI enables is broadly applicable to audio as it is to display and video. Dynamic ad insertion powered by AI is already mature technology in podcast advertising.

Nielsen's partnership with Edison Research in August 2025 represents one concrete example of AI and data infrastructure improving audio's planning credibility. The integration enables advertisers to plan, optimise, and compare podcast campaigns alongside television, radio, digital, and social media within a single tool - precisely the kind of cross-channel planning framework that Rowntree argued audio needs to inhabit.

Triton Digital's launch of enhanced podcast audience targeting in August 2025 introduced audience intelligence features across more than 40 demographic and purchase intent segments through collaboration with Signal Hill Insights. The Demos+ targeting system enables advertisers to purchase inventory based on listener characteristics including age, gender, income levels, and purchase intent behaviours - without compromising privacy compliance. That level of segmentation narrows the gap between audio and digital channels in terms of targeting precision.

Yet the measurement problem at the attribution layer has not been solved by these advances. Knowing who is listening does not automatically explain what that listening caused. Audio advertising enables some attribution through unique promo codes and vanity URLs, as PPC Land noted in its Q4 2025 podcast advertising analysis, but that approach relies on listener action that does not always occur and captures only a fraction of actual campaign impact.

Where the money is moving

Despite the structural limitations, the budget trajectory for audio is upward. Podcast ad spend reached $408 million in December 2025 alone, according to Magellan AI data, with Germany adding 259% more brands in Q1 2026 compared to the prior year period. The H1 2026 monthly figures for January, February, and March all tracked above their 2025 equivalents.

Audioboom reported record Q3 2025 revenue with 18% growth, driven partly by video podcast expansion. The company secured more than $79 million in advertising revenue across the full year, with video podcast viewership contributing 22 million views during recent measurement periods. That represents one-fifth of total podcast consumption across Audioboom's network - a proportion that will only grow.

The Washington Post's November 2025 partnership with Triton Digital - giving Triton control over its complete digital audio infrastructure including hosting, programmatic advertising sales, and audience measurement - reflects how seriously major publishers are treating podcast revenue as a strategic priority. The deal deploys Triton's Ad Platform for programmatic transactions, Triton Audio Marketplace for inventory distribution, Demos+ for demographic segmentation, and Podcast Metrics for IAB-certified audience measurement.

The infrastructure is maturing. Spending is growing. But Rowntree's diagnosis remains: the channel has not yet made the structural argument that unlocks the next tier of investment - the kind that treats audio not as a supplementary line item but as a primary planning vehicle.

The standard that still needs to be met

The ExchangeWire June 5 conversation points to a specific kind of gap. It is not primarily a technology gap. The tools for audio production, programmatic buying, demographic targeting, and even attribution proxy measurement are largely available. The gap is structural and organisational. It exists in buying team structures, in how media plans are written, and in what measurement outputs are considered acceptable evidence of campaign impact.

Rowntree put it directly: "I think as a brand awareness channel, I think brands are all in - but when you're trying to look at it, you can argue that everything is now performance branding or branding performance."

That collapse of the brand-performance distinction is the central tension. Modern marketing culture expects every channel to pull in both directions simultaneously. Audio, which has its clearest proven value in the upper funnel, is being asked to also prove lower-funnel credibility on measurement terms it was not originally built to meet.

Smith's response was to question whether the measurement standards being applied are the right ones. "We've been talking about the siloed approach to marketing budgets and what happens within agencies and various buying teams - for as long as I've been running ExchangeWire," she said on June 5. The implication is that the framework itself may need updating more than the channel does.

That question - of whether industry measurement standards have kept pace with how media is actually consumed - sits at the heart of the broader measurement debates PPC Land has tracked across display, retail media, and now audio.

Timeline

  • July 15, 2025 - IAB Europe publishes updated Retail Media Guide and releases research showing 53% of buyers cite lack of standards as investment barriers; PPC Land coverage
  • July 15, 2025 - IAB research projects generative AI creative will account for 40% of all advertisements by 2026; PPC Land coverage
  • July 16, 2025 - Raptive study finds suspected AI content reduces reader trust by nearly 50% and brand purchase consideration by 14%; PPC Land coverage
  • July 31, 2025 - Panel discussion documents retail media measurement complexity and standardisation challenges; PPC Land coverage
  • August 2, 2025 - Edison Research podcast rankings incorporate video consumption for the first time, shifting positions significantly; PPC Land coverage
  • August 7, 2025 - Nielsen partners with Edison Research to integrate podcast data into cross-platform media planning tools; PPC Land coverage
  • August 19-20, 2025 - Triton Digital launches enhanced podcast audience targeting across 40+ demographic and purchase intent segments; PPC Land coverage
  • October 18, 2025 - Audioboom reports record Q3 revenue with 18% growth, with video podcasting contributing 22 million views; PPC Land coverage
  • November 13, 2025 - The Washington Post partners with Triton Digital for complete digital audio infrastructure including programmatic ad sales; PPC Land coverage
  • December 21, 2025 - Analysis documents persistent 22-percentage-point gap between consumer audio engagement (31%) and advertiser investment (9%); PPC Land coverage
  • February 14, 2026 - Magellan AI reports 32% year-over-year podcast advertising growth in Q4 2025 with 1,500 new brands entering the channel; PPC Land coverage
  • May 2026 (approx.) - Podcast ad spend hits $408 million in December 2025; Germany adds 259% more podcast advertising brands in Q1 2026; PPC Land coverage
  • June 5, 2026 - ExchangeWire MadTech Podcast mailbag edition publishes, with Rachel Smith and Lindsay Rowntree responding to Audion's Kamel El Hadef on audio as a full-funnel channel

Summary

Who: ExchangeWire CEO Rachel Smith and COO Lindsay Rowntree, responding to a question from Kamel El Hadef of Audion. The episode was hosted by John Still, ExchangeWire's head of content.

What: A discussion on whether marketers are ready to adopt audio advertising as a full-funnel channel, examining measurement limitations, the structural effects of video podcasting, the omnichannel positioning argument, and AI's role in audio's evolution. Key data points include 10% UK audio ad spend growth in 2025, a 22-percentage-point gap between consumer audio engagement and advertiser investment, and 32% year-over-year podcast ad spending growth in Q4 2025.

When: Published June 5, 2026, as a mailbag edition of the MadTech Podcast.

Where: The MadTech Podcast is produced by ExchangeWire, a London-based ad tech trade publication. The audio industry context spans UK, US, and European markets.

Why: Audio advertising occupies a paradoxical position - growing in spend, growing in reach, and improving in targeting capability, yet still unable to satisfy the full-funnel measurement demands that define mainstream digital advertising investment decisions. The gap between brand awareness performance and last-click attribution capability leaves audio perpetually underfunded relative to its actual audience share.