Digital audio in the US is already worth Brazil’s entire digital ad market
Last month, IAB US and PwC released their Internet Advertising Revenue Report for 2025, marking the study’s 30th anniversary. The US digital advertising market grew 13.9% and closed the year at nearly US$ 300 billion. Within that total, digital audio brought in US$ 8.4 billion (+10.2%), and podcast, which keeps gaining more space in the report, reached US$ 2.9 billion with 17.6% growth. In 2015, US podcast advertising moved US$ 105 million. In ten years, it multiplied by 27.
To put it in perspective: at current exchange rates, US digital audio alone - just audio, no video, no search, nothing else, in 2025 practically generated the same amount as Brazil’s entire digital advertising market for the year. Yes, the category that doesn’t even have its own line in the reports here in the US, is worth Brazil’s entire pie.
Last week, IAB Brazil released its 2025 Digital Ad spend report: Brazilian digital advertising reached R$ 42.7 billion (USD 8.68 billion), with 12.7% growth, the second-largest jump in the historical series. The pace is similar to the American market. The mix isn’t. In the Brazilian study, audio simply isn’t a category. The slices are split between video (already approaching 50% of digital), display, search, text and social. And when we look at CENP Meios - the panel that reports spending by the country’s 330 largest agencies, digital audio shows up with a modest 0.3% of the total pie. The digital audio share in the US, also considered low, is ten times higher. Meanwhile, Inside Áudio 2025, by Kantar IBOPE Media, shows that 92% of Brazilians consume some form of audio every month.
There’s a gap that’s hard to explain: audio consumption covers nearly everyone but investment, in almost no one. But this gap isn’t fixed forever - it’s a choice. And it has three causes that are now mature enough to be overcome.
The first is structural. For years, digital audio looked too fragmented; dozens of apps, thousands of radio stations, open players. The infrastructure to scale was missing. Today, premium networks and Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) technologies sync a spot to a catalog of podcasts, streaming services and digital radio with the same precision as a display campaign. The scale exists.
The second is the measurement myth. “Audio can’t be measured.” That sentence made sense in 2010. In 2026, it simply doesn’t. Conversion pixels, incrementality testing and brand lift studies make it possible to compare audio against the same KPIs used today in video, display and social campaigns. You can know who listened, visited the site, bought, and which part of the sale only happened because of audio. The average ROAS of podcast campaigns monitored by Podscribe in its latest Q4 2025 benchmark, which includes Brazil, is 4.2x; meaning every R$ 1 invested in podcasts returns R$ 4.20. It’s not an estimate, it’s attribution.
The third is cultural heritage. Brazilian radio has more than five thousand stations, scarce metrics and difficult national coverage. Because of that, many large brands don’t even have an audio budget. Digital audio solves the problem at the source: it offers measurable national reach, contextual targeting, host-read formats with an 82% trust index (Edison Research) and integration with the programmatic mix via DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon or your DSP of choice.
The good news is that it takes very little to move the needle. Nielsen mix modeling studies show that adding between 3% and 5% of the media budget to digital audio raises sales by up to 31% and recall by 18%, while reducing cost per conversion by 12% in the total mix. That’s less than many brands spend today testing a new format on social media.
Digital audio is, probably, one of the last blue oceans available in marketing. There are 92% of internet users listening, proven ROAS, mature technological infrastructure and a market growing 12% per year, and still with very little advertising competition. The brand that enters now doesn’t fight for attention against saturated feeds; it occupies a new space, speaks directly into the consumer’s ear in moments no screen can reach.
