Our Best Podcast Pick, PodFraud, and Is It The End of Ads?

Podcasts walked the red carpet, won the awards, and settled into your living room. So, where does the industry head next? Find out on a new Media Roundtable: Industry Edition.

Stew Redwine (Executive Creative Director, Oxford Road) breaks down the biggest stories with fellow audiophiles:

• Bart Roselli (EVP Media, Oxford Road)

• Courtney O’Connor (Director, Podcast Media, Oxford Road)

• Giles Martin (EVP Strategy, Oxford Road)

The team is talking: The End of Ads, PodFraud, the Living Room Podcast, and more. Let’s dig in.

“ Is it the end of ads? No, but I do think that it’s potentially an end of an era.” – Courtney O’Connor (Director, Podcast Media, Oxford Road)

The End of Ads? – It sounds like a sensationalist take: could podcast ads see the same collapse as ‘90s banner ads? No, but at a minimum, guarding against increasing ad load is smart business (Podcasting was dragged for its ads during the Golden Globes). No one wants podcasts to become burdened with ads like radio. Marketers, check the ad load of your shows, and reward the networks who are keeping the percentage low.

PodFraud – We have two cases of advertising rule-breaking this week, but remember, fraud is an arrow. It points to value. Take the pay-to-play scandal in India, where people pay $15-30k to be a guest on a show: the value of the show has to be many times higher to justify the risk. On another note, if there’s a business for someone to strip out the ads and resell the shows, that’s a problem, but this points to the bigger issue of rising podloads. Again, the industry needs to manage ads or risk audiences opting out. In the meantime, marketers must work to make their ads compelling enough that no one would skip them. (Stumped? We can help.)

The Living Room Podcast – YouTube says couch podcast viewing hit 700M hours in October 2025. Giles’ rough math says that’s ~4% of CTV viewing, a staggering number. There’s one thing we don’t know: exactly how attentive is the watcher? Couch podcasts could be a source of active engagement, or background noise that might not even have someone in the room listening to it.. Our POV: if you can measure well, kick the tires on a campaign. Then you’ll know if the results justify the CPMs.

Want more insights from the forces shaping the industry? Tune in to the full episode by clicking the link below.