Audio's share of media attention has consistently outpaced its share of ad spend. That gap is one reason advertisers keep telling researchers they're not done investing: in Sound Check Europe 2026, Bauer Media Audio and Elevate Consultancy surveyed more than 1,000 senior agency and advertiser decision-makers across nine European markets, and 96% said they planned to maintain or increase their audio spending. SiriusXM Media's 2026 planning overview, drawing on 2025 US data, points to the same underlying gap in the US market.
That combination of committed spend and unrealized opportunity raises a real question: what more could brands discover by broadening the role they give audio advertising?
Mobile apps and games bring that question into focus. Unlike music streaming or digital radio, people open these environments to play, solve, browse, or engage with content. They spend meaningful time there for reasons that have nothing to do with listening. Bringing audio advertising into those moments gives brands access to different audiences, different types of interaction, and new contexts for a message.
A puzzle game, a sports title, a rewards app and an entertainment app each attract a different mix of people and create a different kind of session. Expanding digital audio advertising into these non-audio-first environments adds more than inventory. It gives media planners new ways to think about where an audience can be reached and what that audience is doing when the message arrives.
Programmatic access makes these environments straightforward to activate through familiar buying platforms and workflows. Audience segments can be layered with contextual signals like app category, environment, geography, device, or time of day, giving planners more precise ways to match message to moment.
The useful advertiser view comes from privacy-conscious segmentation and patterns in the available signals: how relevant audiences cluster across app experiences, which contexts suit the campaign, and how performance varies between them. Publisher, placement, and user experience all give substance to what "quality supply" actually means here.
For brands, this creates room to extend an existing digital audio strategy, test a different setting, or add audio advertising to a broader mobile campaign through a familiar media-buying process.
Brand awareness, consideration, and response to an offer each involve different expectations of a campaign, and digital audio gets more interesting when we let it serve those different roles instead of giving it one fixed job.
Two campaigns from our work at Odeeo show that range in practice. A Costa Coffee campaign with DAX Mobile Gaming used in-game audio advertising to support Costa Express, reporting a 15 percentage point increase in awareness. A McDonald's campaign with Admerasia, targeted at Asian American consumers and built around app activity, reported a 15% increase in orders, with outcomes independently measured by Claritas.
The two campaigns also illustrate why measurement should follow the objective, not the other way around. Costa Coffee needed a brand-lift result to understand a shift in perception. McDonald's needed independent measurement to connect exposure to a specific action. With the right setup, in-app campaigns can support evidence well beyond delivery and clicks, including brand lift, app activity, and purchase outcomes, though how much depth is available depends on the campaign, the permissions in place, and the measurement method used.
What stands out across both examples isn't just the results. It's that each had its own audience, execution, and evidence built around a distinct objective. Once a team identifies which role digital audio needs to play, it can plan the message, environment, audience layers, and measurement together, rather than bolting measurement on afterward. A brand-building idea and an offer-led execution may share a format while asking very different things of it.
The Bauer study offers one more signal worth sitting with: 73% of advertisers said stronger evidence of effectiveness would increase their investment. Paired with the broader commitment to maintain or grow spending, that finding points to real appetite for understanding digital audio's contribution more precisely: not just believing in it, but being able to prove it.
Measurement and attribution are central to that shift. The clearer a campaign is about its objective, audience, and measurement approach from the outset, the easier it becomes to interpret what happened after exposure. Awareness needs different evidence than orders do, and attribution only means something once you account for method, lookback window, and campaign context.
For those of us building in this space, sharing that evidence clearly is not optional. It's what turns a general belief in digital audio into an informed view of where it fits and what it can actually deliver.
Audio advertising earns a lasting place in the plan when advertisers can understand its role, evaluate its contribution, and decide with confidence to invest again. The next chapter of digital audio will be shaped less by inventing a new format than by activating a familiar one in environments brands have yet to explore and measuring it with the rigor advertisers already expect elsewhere.