Acast introduces talent-voiced advertising to programmatic podcasting

Nathan Jolly

May 20, 2025 3:40

Podcasting company Acast will enlist its fast-growing stable of on-air talent to provide bespoke audio advertisements across its network, allowing brands to use popular podcast hosts to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Under the new program, brands can pay to have Acast podcast talents voice their 30-second scripted ads, which will be run across its network of more than 140,000 shows.

These talent-voiced ads are only available to programmatic advertisers, and can feature the likes of Maggie Dent, Toni Lodge from Toni and Ryan, Meshel Laurie, and Megan Pustetto from So Dramatic, depending on the advertiser’s wishes. Pricing follows a CPM model, with talent and production fees built into the overall cost.

“That’s really key for programmatic buyers,” Daisy Smith, Acast’s programmatic adtech solutions director, told Mumbrella. “It’s not based on [the talent’s] audience size specifically, but more based on the scale that the client’s looking for.”

Meshel Laurie

To this end, clients can target specific postcodes or demographics with talent-read advertising, separating this offering from the more traditional host-read sponsorships, which are show-specific, often prohibitively expensive for smaller businesses, and not able to be tweaked or targeted towards a preferred audience make-up.

The podcast hosts themselves can decide which campaigns they are happy to voice, meaning there won’t be a disconnect between an environmental podcast and a gas advertisement, for example. Most importantly, in a medium where AI voices are slowly creeping into advertising content, the advertising will be actually read by the host.

“We give brands the choice of having something read from script,” Smith said. “But really, we see the power when it’s sort of ad-libbed, or it’s this amazing collaboration between the talent and the brand. We try to fit somewhere in between, but it’s absolutely the true voice of the host.”

Aside from the advertising opportunities, this also provides a new income stream for Acast’s podcasts — although they are under no obligation to voice advertising for brands.

“It really opens up the scale and opportunities for our more niche and medium-sized creators,” Smith said. “The idea is that brands can now tap into these genuine brand ambassadors, but harness the scale of the Acast network — because the ad actually runs outside of that host-specific show, and across the network, giving them mass scale for activation of campaigns.”

So Dramatic host Megan Pustetto

Acast has already started running these talent-voiced ads for various brands, including Telstra, Samsung, HBF, and La Trobe University.

Smith compared this form of advertising to influencer marketing, in that the talent needs to be on board with the product they are shilling.

“When that talent is an actual brand ambassador or advocate, that’s when the magic really happens,” Smith said. A recent campaign for La Trobe University used talent who had family that attended the university, for example.

“Finding those really beautiful connections between the brand and the talent … the feedback’s been really well received in market.”

She said a recent brand activation used the postcode targeting with specific offers, adding: “That’s something that we wouldn’t be able to do by a sponsorship, which is on a national level.”

She mentioned another (unnamed) brand campaign, where postcode targeting allowed the advertiser to launch a campaign, at scale, with a known voice.

“That was an amazing solution for them because they haven’t necessarily been able to activate national campaigns with talent before. And so being able to have this geo-targeted campaign with talent was super powerful for them.”

At the end of the day, Smith said, Acast launched this offering because “we know how well talent-voiced ads perform”.

“When we access the voice of the talent, you’re essentially accessing their really highly engaged communities. We know that that leads to higher ad recall, higher recognition and higher consumer action.

“All those things make it a really powerful product in the programmatic space.”