December Top 15: Rocket Mortgage takes #1, Omaha Steaks scales up for holidays

More than 4,000 brands have advertised on podcasts. Get a heads-up when new brands test podcasts as a marketing channel for the first time: learn more.

3 min readFeb 13, 2019

Rocket Mortgage

For the first time ZipRecruiter has been bummed from the top advertising spot. Historically ZipRecruiter has been number 1 (even in our Top 200 index before we started analyzing the Top 2,000), but Rocket Mortgage moved into the top spot in December 2018. Rocket Mortgage ads were seen in several different categories. The top categories included News & Politics, Sports & Recreational, Society & Culture and Business.

Out of the 213 ad spots we picked up, there were about as many mid-roll and pre-roll ads across 59 different podcasts. The average mid-roll ad was 72 seconds while the pre-roll ads averaged 30 seconds in length. Ads seen across the shows were mostly host read scripted ads. The Rick & Bubba Show ran two pre-recorded ads with a message from the CEO Quicken Loans. Ad were promoting their new Rate Shield Approval Program and asking viewers to visit their website, but vanity URLs were not used in any ads.

Omaha Steaks

Omaha Steaks was new to the Top 15 in December. In previous months, they had been no where near the Top 15. In November we picked up 33 ads, this doubled in December where we picked up 72 ads out of the episodes we sampled from the Top 2,000. We saw more mid-roll and versus pre-roll ad and majority being on News & Politics and Sports & Recreation categories.

All of the December ads were holiday focused, alerting listeners about a 74% off promotion for their Family Steaks Family Gift Package. These ads were host read and included a unique code for listeners to use at check out.

December 2018 Rankings

Magellan identified 11,897 pre- or mid-roll ads placed on the Top 2,000 podcasts in December 2018. Out of 1852 brands or products advertised during the month, the Top 15 are listed below. Click to play a sample mid-roll or pre-roll ad for each advertiser:

The Top 15:

Methodology

Every week, Magellan samples episodes from 2,000 shows that rank in the Top Podcasts view available through Apple Podcasts in the US. This sample includes episodes from shows that published new episodes in December 2018.

The brands listed above were ranked by the number of individual pre- and mid-roll ads that appeared in our sample. Podcasts advertising on other podcasts, foundations, and those advertising on only one show were excluded from the sample.

Note: this methodology previously inaccurately stated that we had sampled “up to two episodes” from shows that published new episodes during the month. This analysis includes ads on more than two episodes, if more than two were published for each show on the top 2,000 every week. We limited our sample to up to two episodes starting in March 2019.

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