Digital advertising doesn't sit still. New platforms, new privacy rules, new AI tooling, and a new set of acronyms show up every few months, and reading alone won't keep you current. Podcasts fill the gap: you can listen on a commute or between meetings and still walk away knowing what changed.
Source: Backlinko
Podcast listening itself has become mainstream infrastructure for this kind of learning. In 2026, 55% of Americans are monthly podcast listeners, and 80% have listened to or watched a podcast at least once. Among 12-34 year-olds, that monthly number climbs to 66%. Video podcasts are also no longer a niche format: 51% of Americans have watched one, largely driven by YouTube.
Here are 11 podcasts worth adding to your feed if you work in digital advertising.
1. AdExchanger Talks
Interviews with the people actually setting direction in programmatic and media buying. Managing editor Allison Schiff and the AdExchanger team get sources to go further than they would in a written Q&A, on topics like brand safety standards and how generative AI is reshaping media quality.
2. The Big Story
AdExchanger's second show, built around a single story per episode instead of a roundup. Good for when you want depth on one development rather than a scan of the week's headlines.
3. Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi run interviews with important thinkers in advertising and marketing on Fridays, plus in-depth vendor interviews on Mondays. Admiral CEO Dan Rua sat down with Ari Paparo on this show to talk through visitor relationship management and Admiral's Series A. See the key takeaways here.
4. Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
eMarketer's analysts turn their own research into a conversation instead of a slide deck. Recent episodes have covered retail media restructuring, AVOD growth, and 2026 trend forecasting, so this is one of the more current shows on the list.
5. The MadTech Podcast
ExchangeWire's team, now running weekly episodes plus a shorter daily news wrap and a monthly listener mailbag. If AdExchanger Talks is the interview show, this is the one that tracks the day-to-day news cycle.
6. The Local Marketing Trends Podcast
Corey Elliott and Gordon Borrell dig into local media and advertising specifically, an angle most of the bigger shows skip. Useful if your publisher or client base is regional rather than national.
7. The Digiday Podcast
Digiday has split its coverage into multiple shows now: the flagship Digiday Podcast plus dedicated series on the creator economy, AI, retail media, and programmatic. Worth subscribing to the flagship and then picking up the spin-off that matches your focus.
8. AdTech Heroes
Interviews with people building and running ad tech infrastructure, not just the media and strategy side. A good complement if the rest of this list feels too agency-facing.
9. Humans of MarTech
Phil Gamache's show on the people behind the martech stack: career paths, how they evaluate tools, and what running marketing operations actually looks like day to day. Weekly episodes, active through 2026.
10. The MarTech Podcast
Benjamin Shapiro's long-running, short-form interview show — most episodes run 15 to 20 minutes and focus on how marketers use technology to drive growth, from attribution to automation to AI adoption.
11. Marketing Over Coffee
John Wall and Christopher Penn have kept this weekly conversation going since 2007, making it one of the longest-running shows in the space. Practical and grounded rather than trend-chasing, which is exactly why it's held up this long.
Build the habit, not just the playlist
Pick two or three of these, not all eleven. A show you actually finish beats a feed you never open. Pair them with reading and events: Admiral's own AdOps and AdTech training resource list rounds up courses and certifications alongside podcasts, and the 2026 industry conference calendar is worth checking before you plan travel.
If you want to hear how Admiral talks about this space directly, we've been guests on a few of these kinds of shows ourselves — see our conversation on AdTech Unscripted about visitor relationships and the key points from our CEO's Ad Ops All Stars episode.
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