By Rodrigo Tigre
I’ve been working with digital audio in Brazil for nearly ten years. During that time, I’ve helped build market guides, delivered training courses for media professionals, taken part in panels, written articles, and worked to show Brazil’s communications industry that there is a real—and still underexplored—opportunity here. The argument has evolved. The data has grown. And the market has been changing—slowly, but changing.
Today, the argument is no longer a thesis; it’s evidence. What’s still missing is for the media market to be ready to act on it—with due respect to the pun.
Brazil is the second-largest podcast market in the world. Ninety-two percent of the population consumes some form of audio—radio, music streaming, or podcasts. Traditional radio alone reaches 79% of the country’s main metropolitan regions, with nearly four hours of daily listening, according to Inside Audio 2025 data from Kantar IBOPE Media. And yet, advertising investment in audio remains far from reflecting the reality of consumption.
The figure that stands out most to me—and should stand out to any media director in Brazil—comes from CENP Meios: digital audio accounted for just 0.3% of total advertising investment in Brazil in 2025. For comparison, in the United States, the same channel already represents around 3% of digital budgets—a figure the U.S. market itself still considers low. This means that, for Brazil simply to reach the U.S. level, investment in digital audio would need to be ten times higher than it is today.
Four years of uninterrupted growth—and the market still looks the other way
Between 2022 and 2025, digital audio consumption grew consistently in Brazil across all formats: podcasts, music streaming, and digital radio all recorded increases in audience and engagement. Listener behavior has changed: people no longer listen only when they are idle. They listen while driving, exercising, working, and doing household tasks. Audio has captured the so-called “unreachable moments” for other media.
Fifty percent of radio listeners in Brazil have listened to or downloaded podcasts in the past three months. Sixty percent listen to music streaming regularly. These figures represent a significant and engaged portion of the adult population—and signal an ongoing cultural shift, not a passing trend.
What’s most revealing, however, is not the volume of consumption, but listener behavior toward advertising. According to the same Kantar IBOPE Media study, 56% of listeners pay attention to audio ads, 56% say they like the ad format, and 43% have already purchased or researched a product after hearing an ad. In any other channel, these numbers would headline agency presentations. In audio, they remain almost invisible.
What’s holding the market back
The main barrier is not a lack of information about the market. Over the past decade, guides, courses, white papers, and research about Brazil’s audio ecosystem have been produced in Portuguese. IAB Brazil has published relevant materials. I myself, through Audio.ad, have produced guides and delivered training courses for years. The knowledge is available.
The issue, in my view, is that the market has historically lacked the infrastructure to turn that knowledge into consistent, end-to-end media operations—with technology, measurement, targeting, and integration into the tools the market already uses daily.
For digital audio to reach its full potential in Brazil, the market needs solutions that offer scale, interoperability, and purchasing flexibility comparable to major digital platforms.
Advertising inventory within closed platforms serves a significant portion of the audience, but the channel’s consolidation depends on broader access across different audio consumption environments, with technological standardization, integration into major media tools, and buying models aligned with established agency and advertiser workflows.
For media planners looking to scale audio campaigns in Brazil, the challenge is not choosing a specific platform—it’s having an ecosystem that enables broad reach, consistent targeting, and integrated measurement.
What has actually changed: measurement and ad delivery technology
What has truly transformed the digital audio landscape in recent years is not consumption growth—that was already happening—but advances in ad delivery technology and, above all, the ability to measure results with the same rigor expected from other digital channels.
Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) has changed the logic of podcast buying. Previously, an ad recorded within an episode was permanently tied to that episode. With DAI, ads are dynamically inserted at the moment the episode is played—whether it was published today or three years ago. This means a campaign running today can be delivered across an entire podcast back catalog, multiplying reach without increasing production costs, with targeting by location, audience profile, context, and device.
Measurement has evolved just as significantly. IAB-certified platforms now allow advertisers to track listener behavior after ad exposure using the same pixel-based logic applied by Google and Meta: conversion attribution, incrementality testing with control groups, and real ROAS per campaign. For branding strategies, cookie-free brand studies deliver results within 24 hours, with global benchmarks from more than 60,000 campaigns. Audio has moved from a trust-based channel to a data-driven one.
The window that is open now
Whenever a media channel crosses the line from “promising” to “established,” there is a window of time in which early-moving brands capture disproportionate advantage. The channel still has less competition, the cost of attention is lower, and the audience is genuinely engaged—because there is not yet ad saturation.
Digital audio in Brazil is exactly in that window right now. Consumption is already there. The audience is real, engaged, and measurable. The buying and measurement technology is available. Studies show that allocating between 3% and 5% of media budgets to digital audio can generate measurable impact across the entire consumer journey—and that audio amplifies results across the rest of the media mix. With Brazil sitting ten times below the U.S. benchmark, the growth potential is clear.
Brazil’s digital audio market is ready. The question for media planners is simple: when will you decide to be ready as well?
Rodrigo Tigre is CEO and co-founder of Ozen.fm and author of Podcast S/A — A Revolution in Loud and Clear Sound.
