Countless stories about the bigger role that podcasts played during the 2024 election cycle have pointed to the appearances made by President Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Much has been made about the podcasts each turned up on, such as Trump’s deep reach into the bro podcast sphere. It resulted in Trump reaching 23.5 million adults during an average week on podcasts, according to Edison Research, compared to 6.4 million for Harris. But a new study finds that a second, and previously untold, factor was at play. The audio ad buying agency Oxford Road and Veritone One’s data reveals Harris’s strategy not only failed to secure the necessary scale, but she appeared on podcasts whose audiences tend to be less responsive than industry standards.
“In 2024, we invested millions of advertising dollars in the shows chosen by the two candidates,” Oxford Road says in a just-released report. “We observed that the shows selected by Trump generally drove stronger results than the shows selected by Harris, by a factor of 2x-3x or more.”
The analysis says Trump’s higher degree of engagement is evident across all marketing metrics, from top-of-the-funnel awareness and exposure to lower funnel actions, such as visiting a candidate’s website. And it reveals that Harris underperformed the typical advertiser on the shows on which she appeared.
“The podcasts on which Harris appeared were less than half as effective for the clients that support them,” the report says. “Trump’s selection of shows, however, are 20% more effective.” It says even when it compared its clients that are heavily female-skewing, such as in the beauty and apparel categories, the shows that Harris picked were less responsive than a typical show in their podcast plan.
Harris’s team focused heavily on podcasts with a female skew, while Trump targeted young men. But Oxford says the ineffectiveness of Harris’s podcast appearances is evident in the fact that there was a smaller gender gap among voters in 2024 than four years earlier. It also says that it did little to attract younger voters even though podcast listeners tend to skew younger. “Harris’s campaign clearly failed to resonate,” the report says.
The Oxford Road analysis also suggests that marketers may want to rethink how strict their brand safety guidelines are. The study says that the podcasts Harris ran on had a Civility Score that averaged between 80 and 81, while Trump’s selection of shows had an average score around 75.
“This observation aligns with our experience that shows that may be viewed as more “risky” from a brand-safety perspective, often drive more action from their listener base,” the report says. “This is why it’s so essential to caution our clients and podcast prospects about the potential trade-offs between performance and brand safety in the podcast space.”
Marketers currently allocate about 5% of their budgets to audio and Oxford says what is happening with television should cause them to rethink that, especially since Americans spend a quarter of their media time with audio. It points to TV ratings that are continuing to collapse. Since 2017, Fox News’s Adult 25-54 primetime ratings are down 55%, and CNN and MSNBC are down 60% to 65%. Contrast that with monthly podcast listening, which Edison Research reports is up 75% during the same period with Americans 12 and older. Oxford says there are similar TV ratings declines for late-night TV shows.
Download a copy of The Untold Story of The Podcast Election report HERE.