Artificial intelligence will impact marketing, but it will not replace it. Instead, Audacy CMO Paul Suchman sees creative advantages for the AI community as it approaches audio campaigns. But he says Audacy sees itself as “fierce protectors” of the human connection that’s one of the key ingredients of the audio format’s success.
“Of all the media out there, audio is so distinctly human. It’s voices connecting with people, directly into their ears, into their brains, into their hearts,” Suchman says. Speaking on the ANA’s Marketing Futures podcast, he says the reason advertisers want to be on their podcasts and radio properties is because of the human connection, so it will limit how far AI can be taken. “We are absolutely integrating it but doing it in a way that we can be champions of human connection and human creativity and just humanity,” he says.
Audacy is already using AI to sort through large volumes of data to target specific cohorts of listeners at a scale not possible earlier and analyze performance. While its creative use has been limited, Suchman says it has also been helpful when a multimarket ad campaign needs to be localized with specific mentions of a geography or group of listeners.
“It’s end-of-assembly line production where AI has a great role, because it does it quickly and efficiently and without error,” he says. “But it’s being executed based on a very human and creative concept. And it’s contributing to results, because it’s delivering messages with more precision and specificity than ever before.”
Looking forward to 2025, Suchman says they have a slate of podcast content in development. While he offers no clues as to what sort of content is on the horizon, Suchman says in terms of advertising the “pendulum is swinging” and more advertisers are looking beyond just driving sales with audio ads.
“We’re seeing a swing back to brand advertising,” he says. Suchman says driving sales remains the endgame, but marketers are looking to do that through shining a light on their brand and their core value proposition, as well as the things that make them different. “Brand marketing is alive and well in 2025; that’s absolutely a trend that we are seeing,” he says.
Suchman also sees a growing role of factoring emotional branding into their campaigns, as more companies are putting more emotion, character and creativity into their creative. He says research supports a shift in that direction.
“What we are seeing in the audio space is advertising that uses emotional value that appeals to both the EQ (emotional quotient) and the IQ is having better results all across the funnel, driving awareness, interest, consideration, and importantly, driving action and results,” Suchman says. He says the “theater of the mind” component to audio advertising creates an emotional impact that is driving listeners to take action and deliver results for brands that use the medium in the right way.
“People go through the day in their rituals, and they consume audio at different moments of the day, and they’re more engaged,” Suchman says. “When the advertising is hitting those emotional chords, and it’s hitting during the right ritual — that makes the emotional impact even more powerful.”
‘New Audiences Coming Into Audio’
It is not just advertisers that are changing. So too are listeners. Suchman says listeners are also spending more time consuming audio, with a third of their media time each day spent listening to radio, podcasts, and other content.
“We have the empirical data to show that audio consumption is growing. However, advertising spend against audio is not keeping pace with that,” he says. “Audio is an under-invested media for advertisers. We see that gap closing and more dollars shifting from other media into audio in 2025.” Suchman credits more brands embracing a “total audio” media plan that includes not just podcasts but streaming as well as over-the-air radio, leveraging them as a total audio package within a media plan.
“There are new audiences coming into audio. The younger audience coming into audio is consuming podcasts, but also radio. They may not be consuming it in the way that previous generations consumed it, but they are embracing that live, local, real, raw power of radio, and just loving it,” he says. “We’re really heartened to see that the power of radio, capital ‘R’ radio, is being embraced by younger consumers.”
Suchman says podcasts are “still the darling” of audio, even as the industry develops in real time.
“We’re seeing standards and norms developing in real time as the industry matures right before our eyes,” he says. “The original way that it was being bought is advertisers were buying specific shows. That’s still happening now, but we’re also seeing shows being bought programmatically. And it has had a real impact, as you’re able to buy a wider selection of shows based on audience criteria.”
Buying Tribes, Not Shows
Suchman sees more advertisers buying across networks and services like Audacy’s Podcorn, which works with thousands of small shows, helping marketers connect with niche podcasts. The genre nature of podcast content allows listeners to gather into tribes that congregate around content, like sports, true crime, or news. Suchman says that has allowed Audacy to sell those tribes to brands, rather than specific shows.
The strategy has shown promising results. New Balance worked with Audacy to put its shoe ads into specific sports content, and it had a nearly 350% return on its advertising spend. In another execution, Mazda worked with Audacy to identify and find shoppers who are ready to buy cars. That drove them to news, talk, and sports content. The result was a more than 25% increase in foot traffic to Mazda dealers.
“We had thousands and thousands of dealer visits attributed directly back to our audio campaigns,” Suchman says. “And AI played a role in there, in helping us create that content in a way that was very specific to a dealer, to a location, to a set of auto features that we thought would resonate with a particular cohort.”
He says similar efforts have worked for brands such as Dunkin’, Mass Mutual, Nike, Pepsi, and Verizon, among others.
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