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Throughout history, emerging trends in mass media have shaped election outcomes.
The rise of TV in 1960 influenced perceptions of who won the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon. In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign first channeled the emerging power of social media to crowdsource funding and engage a younger, more diverse population of voters, leading to more digital sophistication and micro-targeted campaigns in elections overall. Today, podcasts and podcast hosts are flexing their influence and reach through long-form audio formats galvanizing millions of listeners and personalizing candidates’ platforms.
Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman called it the “podcast election.” Candidates prioritizing sit-downs with popular shows like The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy over interviews with media stalwarts like CNN, Fox News and NBC signals something much bigger. In an era of divided opinions and increasing media fragmentation, podcasts offered this year’s candidates something no other mass media could: Engage mass audiences and drive conversations that influenced significant segments of the population.
Brand leaders—take note. Here’s how the growing influence of podcast creators is hyper-charging the mass media landscape.
Relevance and mass reach
Since Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, monthly podcast listeners have more than doubled. Now 135 million people listen to a podcast monthly. The scale has brought big-name interviews—and more advertising spend—into this space. This growth has been accelerated by how podcast creators build communities and trust with their listeners in a way no other media or influencer platform can.
This election season proves it. Candidates appeared on dozens of audio platforms, with Donald Trump and JD Vance doing more than 20 podcast interviews since June, including sit-downs with Logan Paul, Dan Bongino, Theo Von and Lex Fridman. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz did more than 10 interviews in a month, including conversations with Alex Cooper, Charlamagne tha God, Glennon Doyle and Ezra Klein. What’s attractive to candidates and audiences is the ability to engage in longer conversations shaped around each host’s audience, style, and listener culture, allowing them to delve deeper into the substantive topics audiences care about.
What it means for brands: The media landscape is changing, and audio creators offer brands a powerful platform and broad spectrum of opportunities to reach, engage, and influence audiences at scale through mass reach, audience addressability, and tailored conversations.
Influence on popular culture
What separates podcasts and podcast creators from other types of influencers is the ‘authenticity exchange’ of the medium and the depth of engagement.
While many podcasters are now celebrities in their own right, to listeners they are trusted sources of information. This is largely due to people tuning in for hours (not minutes) fully engaged in their favorite shows, forging deeper connections between hosts and their audiences.
Candidates relied on the trust and intimacy of podcasts to help them reach and resonate with critical segments of the voting population, and to engage them around topics they care about. Whether it’s tapping into conversations around modern masculinity, women’s health, economic concerns, personal stories, or even some much-needed comedic release, these interviews move the conversation off the debate stage, beyond staged rallies, and away from the pundits and the barrage of political ads, in a format that even “60 Minutes” can’t replicate. Few can deny that Joe Rogan’s platform with men had a significant impact on galvanizing voters in 2024.
Furthermore, pick-up by other mass media outlets elevates these conversations in other media channels and the national domain, playing an important role in influencing the broader cultural conversation. It’s a level of influence that can’t be matched by an ad or even a sponsored social post.
What it means for brands: Don’t discount the power of audio influencers when it comes to building upper funnel brand reputation and loyalty, all the way to ROAS, competitive CPMs and down funnel purchase decisions.
Meaningful connections
Podcasts have long been heralded for the benefits to audio advertisers. High levels of ad engagement and brand recall, the ability to authentically endorse and promote products, and host style and familiarity have attracted both brand and direct response marketers into the space.
What’s also attractive is how younger generations known for avoiding traditional mass media are engaging with podcasts across audio, video, and social formats, extending their reach beyond listeners on Spotify, Wondery, Sirius XM, and iHeartMedia to viewers on YouTube and TikTok, and even live events and recordings. A recent IAB report said Gen Z and Millennials spend 94% and 66% more time respectively with audio content than streaming TV. Younger generations also reported that audio makes them feel more connected to their community and that podcasts are often their main source of information for the things they are most passionate about.
Audio is gaining clout because it is a welcome departure from other media formats, which we’ve seen play out this election season. Interviews are more candid, relaxed, and off script, journalistic agendas are removed, and interruptions rarely happen, allowing political candidates to be more themselves, and often more at ease in the flow of conversation.
What this means for brands: Marketers must think bigger picture about their audio creator strategies, and how they derive the most value across all channels and touchpoints to capitalize on multigenerational listening and viewing behaviors.
If elections are the bellwether of mass media trends, then podcasts and audio creators emerged as clear winners this election season. So marketers, what are you doing to get ahead of the trend?
