Digital audio advertising
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Digital audio was around £410m in the UK in 2025 under the IAB's digital definition, growing about 14%. AdBuyMCP compiles it to show and genre allowlists plus publisher segments and grades it 65 out of 100, content-level — you are reaching people who listen to business podcasts in London, not the specific decision makers on your account list. One detail worth knowing: dayparts are set from the brief itself. A brief carrying firmographics buys the morning and evening commutes; one without them buys daytime and evening. That is a rule in the compiler rather than a model's guess, so you can disagree with it.
Goes deeper: How audio compiles
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Podcast advertising
Advertising inside podcast episodes, either dynamically inserted at play time and targeted by listener, or read by the host and baked into the episode permanently. The two are bought, priced and measured differently.
Audience segment
A named group of people a seller will let you target, defined by some combination of demographics, behaviour, stated interest or inferred intent, and identified in a buying system by a specific identifier.
Fidelity score
A published score out of 100 answering one question: how much of an audience definition survives translation into a channel's native targeting words. It is a property of that translation rather than a forecast, and it is not a quality rating.
More on channels and formats
The seven things you can actually buy, and the words the sellers use for them.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through