One ad. Three versions. A 29-point jump in unprompted brand recall. That is the headline from Consumable and Edison Research at SSRS, presented at the IAB Podcast Upfront in New York on September 16, 2026.
The headline number
The test surveyed 2,158 US adults in August and exposed each person to one version of the same home security ad: audio only, audio plus a still image, or audio plus video. “Only the visual layer changed,” the topline summary states.
Unaided awareness climbed from 39% before exposure to 68% after, a 29-percentage-point lift. Brand favorability moved much less, from 66% to 70%.
The format question still hangs
That figure is pooled across all three formats. The published summary and deck do not show what sound alone delivered, or whether the image or video version drove the gain. If video generated most of the lift, the combined figure would still read 29 points. If audio-only matched, it would also read 29 points.
That matters because buyers are being asked to pay for visual inventory. Other datasets lean toward video on response, but this study built the controlled same-creative comparison the market has been missing and then reported it in aggregate.
Podcast listeners outperform
Monthly podcast consumers responded more warmly. In the published materials, 77% of them liked the ad versus 67% of the full sample, and 71% said it held attention versus 62%. Their favorability lift was 7 points against 4 overall.
The limitation: the comparison puts a subgroup against a total that contains it, and no sample size or significance testing is published. So the gap between podcast consumers and everyone else is likely wider than the headline comparison shows.
What marketers should do
- Run format-level brand lift tests, not combined averages.
- Compare podcast listeners against non-listeners with matched demographics.
- Use a holdout group to separate ad effect from survey priming.
Audio’s brand case is strengthening: US podcast ad revenue hit $2.9 billion in 2025, up 17.6%, and monthly podcast consumption reached a record 58% of Americans in 2026. But spend is still ahead of the evidence. Before paying for pictures alongside sound, get a format split.
The advertiser was unnamed but described as familiar. A familiar category player starting at 39% unaided awareness may behave differently from an unknown challenger. The test was a forced exposure inside a survey, not an in-market campaign.
Source: PPC Land
