Podcasts and influence: the medium brands still underestimate

Médiamétrie's figures leave no room for doubt: 17.6 million monthly listeners in France, up 17% in one year, 132 million French podcasts listened to or downloaded in the single month of June 2026, and a weight now reaching 10% of total audio listening according to the Global Audio study. But the real specificity lies elsewhere: where social content gets scrolled, a podcast gets listened to — often in full, often weekly, often on headphones. It is one of the last formats where an audience chooses to spend forty minutes with a voice it knows.

Podcast listeners have a relationship of trust with their host that resembles a community's bond with its creator — only more intimate. When the recommendation comes from the voice you listen to every week, it carries a credibility capital no ad spot can buy. It is the same mechanism as creator influence, transposed to a long-attention medium: an embodied recommendation, in a context the audience chose.

Guest appearances, first: placing a brand's executive or expert in the podcasts its target audience listens to — the natural extension of press relations, with incomparable speaking time. Sponsorship, next, favouring host-read messages, which inherit the host's credibility. The branded podcast, finally, for companies with genuine editorial material and the necessary consistency — a format judged in years, not episodes. And in every case, amplification: a forty-minute episode is a goldmine of highlights to turn into short clips for social platforms.

Podcasts are one of the five source families consulted by answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity — through their transcripts, which are indexed and cited. An executive's appearance on an authoritative podcast no longer reaches only that day's listeners: it becomes a durable document, attributed to an identifiable expert — exactly the type of content AI favours when deciding which brands to cite. Podcasting has moved from niche medium to algorithmic visibility asset.

We designed and orchestrated the Spotify Podcast Awards for Spotify, the first French podcast awards ceremony, at the Grand Rex in Paris: 800 guests, more than 750,000 public votes and 150 million impressions. A full-scale demonstration of what podcasting can generate when treated as a cultural object in its own right — with its creators, its communities and its codes.

It depends on the objective. To establish expertise: guest appearances on established podcasts. For awareness: sponsorship with host-read messages. For a durable brand territory: the proprietary podcast, provided you have the material and the consistency. Most brands are better off starting with guesting and sponsorship before creating their own format.

Sponsorship is generally negotiated on a cost per thousand listens, with rates varying by the podcast's reach and the message format. Guest appearances belong to press relations: they aren't bought, they're pitched. As for the branded podcast, its budget is above all a production and editorial-consistency budget.

Through listens and downloads first, measured by the platforms and certified in France by Médiamétrie and the ACPM. Then through indirect indicators: dedicated promo codes, branded search traffic after broadcast, clip pick-up on social networks. And now through presence in AI answers, which cite podcasts via their transcripts.

They are the reference format of podcast sponsorship: the message inherits the tone, humour and credibility of the voice the audience chose to listen to. Its condition of effectiveness is coherence — a product the host can recommend without betraying themselves. Hence the importance of podcast casting, as rigorous as creator casting.

Only if three conditions are met: genuine editorial material that goes beyond product talk, the capacity to publish regularly for at least a year, and an angle the audience finds interesting for its own sake. A successful branded podcast is a medium before being an advertising vehicle — otherwise, better to invest in other people's podcasts.

Last updated: September 2026