All Ears: Everything We Learned at Podcast Movement Evolutions 2025

The Media Roundtable is back, assuaging your FOMO by recapping the highlights of Podcast Movement Evolutions 2025. This week’s episode is sponsored by The Daily Wire.

Dan Granger (CEO, Oxford Road) hosts a full panel of Audio All-Stars:
⭐ Bart Roselli (SVP, Media, Oxford Road)

⭐ Conor Doyle (President, Oxford Road)

⭐ Miranda Romano (SVP, Media, Oxford Road)

⭐ Stew Redwine (VP Creative Services, Oxford Road)

The team is talking: 80 Steps for Ads, Audience over Algorithms, The Big Podcasting Tent, and more. Let’s dig in.

“Now we can go out to the marketplace and try to get a lot of competing factions to start rowing in the same direction for everybody’s mutual benefit.”

• Dan Granger (CEO, Oxford Road)

80 Steps  ⛰️ – According to one publisher, it takes 80 steps to get an advertiser on-air for a host-read ad. For a produced ad? Only 20. But while the market trend has been moving towards efficiency, automation, and scale, some big advertisers (like SimpliSafe and Boll & Branch) miss the collaborative, direct work approach from the earlier days. Our takeaways:

1. There might be a few steps to cut from the host-read onboarding process.

2. The live-read is so valuable to the advertiser that this artisanal, handmade ad process can’t be replaced purely by raw efficiency.

Audience over Algorithms – We heard speakers give specific advice on what the algorithm intended for creators to do. Our take? Serve the audience, not the algorithm. Podcasts are unique because of the host-audience relationship–creating content that’s distinctly chosen for a community. (The same relationship that makes authentic endorsements valuable to advertisers) Algo chasing is ‘backburnering’ your current community for another potential one. To paraphrase the old adage: “Find new listeners, but keep the old. One is silver, the other’s gold.”

The Big Podcasting Tent – We’ve been laser-focused on defining what a podcast is so we can help unify the industry and move ahead. We’ve learned that questions of audio-only or video, RSS or YouTube are unnecessary. Consumers already get it. Podcasts are spoken word, episodic, and on-demand, regardless of the platform. The industry is tangled in definitions, but we don’t have to be. Instead of drawing hard lines, let’s widen the tent. When we do that, we can accurately show just how big podcasting is, how fast it’s growing, and ensure that it gets the investment it deserves. For more on what a podcast is, why defining it matters, and what you can do to help, check out this link to our whitepaper, podcast series, and petition.

For countless insights straight from Podcast Movement Evolutions 2025 for your ears, check out the full episode below.

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