Podcast & digital audio
You are not buying a person here. You are buying what they listen to.
Fixed at 65 out of 100
One band from the compiler, whatever audience detail the brief carries, because the vocabulary this channel compiles into cannot express more than this. Geography is the only thing that changes it, and it can only subtract: a city the UK table cannot map takes fifteen points off.
Content + geo projection: show/genre allowlists and publisher segments proxy the persona; IP-derived city geo. Person-level only where publisher segments are consent-chained.
Standard. Audio does not have a higher band, because the vocabulary does not support one.
Naming a city the UK geography table cannot map costs 15 points here as it does everywhere else, and the rationale on the plan names the city rather than dropping it quietly. That penalty applies on top of the bands above.
What your audience actually becomes here
Each row is a table the compiler matches your persona against, with the provider behind it and the basis the lawful-basis manifest records. The language model extracts the semantics from your brief; these deterministic tables emit the identifiers, which is why a hallucinated segment cannot reach a buy.
Examples are drawn from the sandbox-scale slices of each taxonomy the platform ships with. The full exports load into the same shapes, so catalogue size does not change the compiler behaviour or the fidelity grade. Nothing here has yet run against a full production catalogue, because nothing has run live.
From one sentence to a Audio targeting spec
The persona is matched against the audio catalogue and the top five matches are split three ways by their identifier prefix: genres become an allowlist, named shows become a private-marketplace deal specification, and publisher segments stay as segments. Dayparts are chosen from whether the persona carries firmographics, which is the closest thing to a behavioural inference the compiler makes and it is a defensible one. Geography resolves to city.
The model never emits a vendor segment id. It extracts semantics from your brief — what kind of person, what interests, what geography, what intent — and deterministic registry code matches those against catalogue keywords to produce known identifiers. That is what makes a compiled plan auditable line by line, and what stops a hallucinated segment reaching a buy.
The fastest way to see this is a real brief compiled live in the session rather than a worked example.
Talk it throughThe rails that reach this channel
5 of the 25 connectors the platform registers touch Audio. Each one is graded on our own evidence ledger, which is deliberately blunt: a mocked HTTP test proves a client was written, not that a vendor accepted the request, spent money, or returned real delivery.
StackAdaptBuying API
Client builtProgrammatic CTV, audio and DOOH through one GraphQL seat. The broadest single rail here.
- What has to happen next
- A contracted seat, then a controlled paid activation reconciled to a StackAdapt invoice.
- Getting access
- Live inventory browse is not available: the client deliberately reports that StackAdapt has no public inventory-browse API, so catalogues shown in the sandbox are sandbox catalogues.
Amazon AdsBuying API
Client builtAmazon DSP sub-seat for CTV and audio, with refresh-token rotation held under a single-writer lock.
- What has to happen next
- A live test buy and a reconciled report.
- Getting access
- Requires a DSP sub-seat obtained through an authorised reseller. Not an open developer signup.
SpotifyBuying API
Client builtSpotify Ads API for podcast and music audio.
- What has to happen next
- A successful write. A live probe on 13 August 2026 established only that the snake_case routes answer 400 or 403 — that is route existence, not an accepted request.
- Getting access
- Needs an Ads-API-enabled app, API-terms registration and per-ad-account user OAuth, which grants access to your own account rather than multi-tenant inventory. Podcast targeting remains topic and genre based in closed-test campaign APIs.
Global DAXBooking workflow
Client builtDeal paperwork for Global's digital audio supply.
- What has to happen next
- Ingest and reconcile the first authoritative sales-house delivery statement.
AcastBooking workflow
Client builtPodcast private-marketplace and named-show package paperwork.
- What has to happen next
- Ingest and reconcile the first authoritative sales-house delivery statement.
Named on this channel's compiled plans: Spotify · StackAdapt · Amazon Ads (the DAX pipe) · Global DAX · Acast. Across all 25 connectors, spend-tested stands at 0 and report-verified at 0, and a continuous-integration check keeps those two counts honest.
The whole supply matrix →What Audio will take
Formats and the limits the product enforces on this channel. Where a limit is a schema constraint, over-long copy fails at the edge rather than being silently truncated on the way to a provider.
15 and 30 second scripts
Generated with voiceover direction and SFX notes, not just copy. A script with no read direction is half a brief.
Voiceover
UK male, female and neutral voices available as a separately charged asset at £1.25 per read.
Music bed
5 to 180 seconds, generated, 50p at the floor.
Asset production is charged separately and never blended into the media fee. The creative studio, in full
What Audio can prove, and what it cannot
Audio is a strong response channel and a weak causal one at small budgets: a vanity URL or promo code gives you observed response cheaply, and a powered lift test usually needs more spend than a podcast line carries on its own. Podscribe pixel and promo-code attribution is wired and client-built; no live campaign has produced rows through it yet.
Provider delivery, observed response, modelled estimates and powered causal evidence stay visibly separate on the report rather than being averaged into one number, and the geo-lift engine returns an underpowered verdict instead of a lift figure when the spend cannot carry the test. The four verbs, in full
Your own site's analytics, read through your token, so brand response is measured on data you already own and can audit.
GA4 as an alternative brand-response source where that is what the advertiser already runs.
Podcast attribution: pixel and promo-code response against audio delivery.
Brand-lift survey panels, intended for the fourth measurement verb.
What this will not pretend past.
Every one of the seven channel pages carries one of these, in the same type. The best this channel scores is 65, graded content-level, and the paragraph beside this is what that score does not cover.
Digital audio was around £410m in the UK in 2025 under the IAB's digital definition, growing about 14% — desk research from August 2026, not a product metric. It is a real channel but a small one, and a seven-channel plan that puts a token audio line in for completeness is worse than one that leaves it out. Sixty-five out of a hundred is a content projection: you are reaching people who listen to business podcasts in London, not the specific business decision makers on your account list.
If that limit is disqualifying for your budget, we would rather you heard it in the session than after the invoice.
Talk it throughThe same audience, compiled everywhere else
One audience definition, seven translations, seven published scores. A plan that funds two or three of these with enough weight to prove something beats one that puts a token line on all seven.
CTV & streaming TV
The one channel where a job title survives the translation almost intact.
3 bandsPaid search
One search plan. Two execution rails. Neither of them writes your keywords for you.
3 bandsPaid social
Vendor-neutral until the moment of execution, then exactly as native as it needs to be.
3 bandsAddressable & linear TV
The fastest-growing channel on this list, and the one that needs the most paperwork.
fixed bandDigital out-of-home
A billboard cannot know who you are. It can know who walks past it.
fixed bandCinema
The lowest fidelity score on the site.
fixed bandSee what your audience compiles to on Audio.
Forty-five minutes. Bring a real audience and we compile it live on Audio and the other six, with the score and the lawful-basis manifest on screen.
Book a working sessionDesign-partner phase · the sandbox needs no card and no credentials · nothing here sells self-serve media
Audio questions
Can I advertise on a specific podcast?
Yes, through a private marketplace deal, and the compiler produces the named-show package as a PMP deal specification rather than as a targeting parameter. What it will not do is promise you a show it has no deal for. Named-show buying on DAX and Acast is an assisted rail on the supply page, which means the deal is negotiated rather than clicked.
Why does my audio plan buy the commute?
Because your brief carried firmographics — an SIC code or a seniority level — and business audio is consumed on the way to and from work. If the brief has no firmographic signal the plan buys daytime and evening instead. It is a rule in the compiler rather than a model's guess, so you can disagree with it and override it.