Paul Riismandel
In 2023, when YouTube established its beachhead as the most-used podcast platform, the Signal Hill Insights team measured brand lift for exactly zero video podcasts that year. Just a year later, in 2024, video was included in 24% of our podcast studies.
Responding to the clear needs of the marketplace, in April 2025 we formally announced our Video Podcast Brand Lift solution.
Today, results from video podcasts comprise just over half the performance data in our new Benchmark Report 2026: How Podcasts Impact Brand Perceptions.
That’s a huge jump – from 0% to 54% in only three years – reflecting the growth in the video podcast audience and advertisers’ increased interest in tapping the opportunity.
Like so many podcasters, buyers and advertisers I talk to, I’m sure you’re eager to learn how video stacks up to audio. We’ll get to that – sharing the first large-scale comparison between the two formats – but first I want to reveal a little more about our new report.
The Challenge with Conventional Podcast Benchmarks
Benchmarks are an important tool for advertisers to put their campaign performance into perspective. They provide a partial answer to the eternal question we field, “sure we like to see lift, but is it good?” Presumably, scores falling at or above benchmark means “good.” But, this is not Lake Wobegone, and not every campaign can be above average.
I say conventional benchmarks provide a “partial answer” because underneath what seems like a straightforward comparison lies complexity. Podcast ads don’t exist in a vacuum, and all sorts of real-world factors intrude and influence how consumers respond to a campaign. Results can and do vary based upon factors like consumer category, content genre, audience profile, and even seasonality. This means we can’t always chalk up an ad’s comparative performance to how well the host reads it.
The challenge with conventional brand lift benchmarks is that they’re often based upon big overall averages that, by necessity, don’t address these potentially influential factors – what we can call independent variables. That’s why the Signal Hill Insights team sat down to try and address this problem.
A Fresh Approach to Podcast Brand Lift Benchmarks
Our new benchmarking initiative represents a fresh approach to establishing reference points for the performance of podcast advertising. We aggregated brand lift metrics from 38,704 podcast listeners and viewers surveyed in 2024 and 2025 so that we can go beyond averages. We’re digging into how ads perform with different audience segments and content categories. We’re also looking at metrics by industry vertical, ad length and integration type, as well as audio vs. video.
One big question is, do these factors influence the impact of podcast ads? And if so, how?
Here’s a place where the overall average is actually very useful, because it gives us a benchmark to compare our other benchmarks to. That is, when we have a benchmark for how ads perform with women or on Comedy podcasts we can compare to the overall average to get a sense for any other influence demographics and content genre might have.
Our 2026 Benchmark Report represents just the tip of the iceberg in this initiative. Instead of compiling an encyclopedia of charts and tables for metrics across dozens of different variables, we curated a set of benchmarks that we think are useful, and that also illustrate the potential in this approach. Keeping things streamlined, it only focuses on standard pre-, mid- and post-roll ads.
Beginning this fall, we will follow up with additional reports in this series, digging into additional demographic, content, industry and ad type categories.
Now let’s get into some data.
How Standard Podcast Ad Drive Brand Lift
This first report covers lift metrics for standard pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads, which make up results for 64% of our total sample. Overall, these everyday podcast ads are quite effective in driving lifts across the funnel, though things are more pronounced in the mid-funnel.
Starting towards the top, on average we see a modest bump of 2.6 points in brand familiarity. The means somewhat more consumers who heard or saw a podcast ad said they were familiar with the brand compared to those who weren’t exposed to the ad.
To be frank, familiarity can be a challenging metric, especially since there are a lot of well-known national brands in our dataset – brands that are so ubiquitous that most anyone would indicate some familiarity. Generally speaking, new and emerging brands tend to be more likely to drive bigger lifts here.
Shifting to brand rating, we see the lift get into double-digits, 11.4 points. That’s more consumers exposed to the ad rating a brand as “very good” or “excellent.”
Consideration also generally sees an increase of an average of 8.8 points. But where we see the largest gain is in Purchase Intent, where the average is 11.6 points of lift.
The takeaway is that standard podcast ads are able to reinforce brand and product qualities that increase an audience’s favorability, moving them closer to purchase.
What’s the Performance Difference Between Audio and Video Podcast Ads?
Now, let’s turn our attention to audio vs. video podcast ads. At the very top of the funnel they perform identically for familiarity.
As we move down the funnel, video ads outperform audio by small margins: 1.1 points more lift in brand rating, 1.5 more in consideration and 2 points more in purchase intent.
When evaluating these findings it’s important to keep two things in mind. First, these results don’t necessarily come from head-to-head comparisons from the same campaign. In some studies we do have audio and video creatives for the same brand, while others measure only audio or only video.
Second, we really do have to underline that these performance differences are indeed small. If I were delivering you a brand lift report today that showed a 2 point delta in purchase intent between two creatives or podcasts I probably would not advise you to drop the lower one based on such a difference.
The most reasonable conclusion is that, on average, right now there is no notable difference in brand lift performance between standard podcast ads on audio or video.
But, Wait… There’s More
In the full benchmark report we also compare ad reception between men and women. Then we dig into some fascinating findings for CPG brands and Education and Self-Improvement podcasts.
As I noted at the top, we’re only just getting started, and will have more metrics to share in the fall. That’s where you come in.
What benchmarks would be most valuable to see? Is there a specific metric, key audience segment, content category or industry vertical you’d like to better understand? Drop us a line or fill out this form and we’ll consider your suggestions for future reports.
Paul Riismandel
