Radio Pumps Up Marketing Effectiveness
September 27, 2025
Tracking the Audio Landscape
Whether broadcast, streamed, or downloaded and accessed via digital channels, audio is the most habitual, thought-provoking, and immersive medium. Broadcast radio outlets are also the largest purveyors of audio media content, providing live, original, and on-demand programming distributed through broadcast, podcasting, and streaming platforms.
Against that backdrop, it’s little wonder audio accounts for nearly a third (31 percent) of consumers’ time spent with ad-supported media, according to RAB, per Edison Research and WARC estimates. What’s more, radio earns a 69 percent share of that ad-supported listening. Radio content not only reaches massive groups of consumers, but drives them to take action. Indeed, radio is a full-funnel solution for brands, efficiently and effectively driving awareness, consideration, and sales.
According to a recent poll by Oxford Road, 64 percent of brand performance marketers responsible for audio advertising use the medium to meet lower-funnel marketing goals, while 21 and 15 percent of brands, respectively, use audio for top- and middle-funnel KPIs.
Given the pressure to drive measurable results — and the instant gratification achieved from performance-driven, digital campaigns — brands are forcing themselves to choose between branding and performance marketing. However, it’s not a zero-sum game.
“Brand is what gets you noticed and why they arrive in the first place,” Paul Suchman, CMO at Chameleon Collective, writes in a LinkedIn post published in late July. “It’s what is remembered when the buying cycle is long. It’s what earns trust before a search begins and loyalty after the sale closes.”
The magic of audio — especially radio — is that it makes it easy for brands to achieve both branding and performance goals. Radio is the medium that brands can lean into to capture consumers’ attention, boost the results of other media in the mix, and deliver tangible results.
Radio Drives the Entire Funnel
In the current climate, many advertisers are employing the quick fix, turning to performance-oriented digital tactics to achieve short-term goals. By forgoing traditional, high-reach media like radio as part of the mix to support both brand loyalty and performance, marketers are leaving money on the table. Indeed, they need to foster both short-term sales and long-term branding.
Nielsen’s Global Annual Marketing Survey reveals that 46 percent of marketers perceive radio’s ROI to be less effective compared to other media, such as search, which is viewed as most effective by 65 percent of marketers. However, per Nielsen’s “Global Compass” database — which aggregates data from roughly 25,000 campaign ROIs, across 100 categories and 50 countries annually — radio delivers the second highest ROI ($2), after social media ($2.22), but above other media, including display ($1.52), search ($1.16), and connected TV (CTV) ($1.15).
“We have consistently seen that when we activate an audio strategy within campaigns, it leads to increased store and site traffic,” says Kristy Carruba, director of audio planning and strategy at Macy’s. “The data demonstrates that audio plays an important role in driving engagement with our customers. We’ve also seen some great results when audio and video are used together. Based on our data and success with previous campaigns, we lean toward integrating more audio in our campaigns to increase customer engagement.”
Whether national or local, the impact radio brings to the bottom line for marketers is undeniable. During a recent webinar hosted by Audacy, Chris Santin, VP of sales at Choice Cabinet, said that after he ended a relationship with an agency, he brought marketing in-house and leaned into both radio and social media.
“Within two weeks, we’ve had multiple people come into our showroom who said, ‘You guys have been here for 17 years. We never knew it. We heard you on the radio,'” Santin says, adding that showroom sales are up more than 30 percent since employing the new strategy.
Results Sound Good
Every dollar invested in media requires a clear way to measure success, but not all methodology is created equal. For audio, there is a measurement tool for every KPI, with methodology varying by goals and/or platforms. From brand lift to attribution to sales-effect studies, radio consistently delivers a significant ROI for its advertising partners — whether in concert with other media or as a standalone.
For example, Audacy implemented a geofencing study for a regional restaurant chain to measure foot traffic (in-store visits) due to their radio campaign. The methodology was able to track improvements in both customer dwell time and visit frequency, resulting in a 20 to 40 percent boost in customer visits, depending on the location.
Katz Radio Group implemented a web-traffic study for an e-commerce brand during the ultracompetitive holiday season to directly attribute traffic back to the medium. Overall, the radio campaign achieved an average lift in web traffic of 27 percent, according to RAB.
iHeartMedia leveraged proprietary measurement solutions to track a pharmaceutical OTC brand campaign’s impact on sales lift, which increased sales three-fold.
“The Advertising Landscape 2025: Driving to Action,” released last July by Sounds Profitable, shows that 22 percent of the 5,000 consumers aged 18 and over surveyed said they made an immediate purchase after hearing an ad on a podcast. By contrast, 7 percent of the respondents made an immediate purchase after hearing an ad on AM/FM radio, while 5 percent bought something after seeing an ad on TikTok.
Using Nielsen’s Media Impact planning data, Cumulus Westwood One is able to show marketers that if they shift just 10 percent of their budget from TV, CTV, and digital plans to AM/FM radio — without increasing total budget — the overall buy’s reach will spike by 20 percent.
In fact, adding audio to the media mix generates double-digit gains throughout the media buy, according to multiple studies highlighted in an RAB presentation. For instance, search activity grew 29 percent, while television recall rose a whopping 83 percent.
Plan for Every Phase of the Funnel
Marketers are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to plan, analyze, and optimize their media spending. Considering the complexity of the media landscape, leaning into intelligence technology — that is not necessarily picked up by AI — to support media planning fundamentals and project outcomes is paramount.
Take Nielsen’s Commspoint, a subscription-based media planning technology that provides brands with media channel effectiveness analytics for every stage of a customer purchase journey.
Though AI planning tools may not be ingesting technology such as Commspoint, radio consistently spurs both brand engagement and sales performance across multiple categories. For instance, Nielsen Commspoint’s analysis of a pharmaceutical brand’s campaign that used linear television, OTT/CTV, and radio showed that radio provided the most comprehensive returns — driving lift in brand awareness and more points throughout the sales funnel.
In an economy wracked by uncertainty, audio is poised to be the brand’s constant companion, one that performs strongly on all the media planning fundamentals and delivers audiences at scale, with deep levels of engagement. Adding radio advertising to the media-buying mix — and showing that it can deliver results encompassing the entire sales funnel — is an effective way for marketers to prove their value to the C-suite and ease the pressure.
