Three Brands Who Got Massive Podcast Advertising ROAS with SpotsNow

Podcast advertising has always had a strange gap in it. Listeners trust hosts more than almost any other kind of media personality, but buying an ad on a podcast has usually meant tens of thousands of dollars quoted with no real proof it would work, months of back and forth with a network, and no clean way to know afterward if it actually paid off.

Rella, DIY Wrap Club, and Textla are three brands that ran into that gap and found a way around it using SpotsNow. They're not similar businesses. 

• Rella is a content management platform for creators.
• DIY Wrap Club sells DIY paint protection film and wrap installs for Tesla owners.
• Textla is an SMS marketing platform for small businesses.

But each one has a specific story about what podcast advertising looked like before SpotsNow and what changed after.

Rella: from unaffordable quotes to a show that built the brand's credibility

Natalie Barbu, CEO of Rella, wanted to run podcast ads before she ever worked with SpotsNow. What stopped her wasn't a lack of interest. It was the process.

"My biggest concern about podcast ads was that they were too expensive, and I was not sure about the ROI of them," Barbu said. "I had no idea if they would convert, and every time I was quoted from a network, it was tens of thousands of dollars."

With SpotsNow, she didn't have to negotiate with individual shows or networks. She described her brand and her audience once, and SpotsNow used that to find shows that fit.

"It was incredibly easy to set up with SpotsNow," she said. "I told them exactly what we were looking for and who we were, and they found podcasts that would be a good fit, backed by data. There was no guesswork involved."

The clearest sign it was working came from customers, not a dashboard.

"There have been multiple instances where people told me, 'Oh my gosh, I heard your sponsor on so-and-so's podcast,'" Barbu said. "Podcasts are about conversion, but they're also a brand awareness play, and they create a lot of legitimacy with your brand."

One placement stood out from the rest. Getting Rella onto HSR was the kind of partnership Barbu didn't think was possible before working with SpotsNow.

"Working with a podcast like HSR felt like an impossible thing for me, but SpotsNow made me do it," she said. "They are the show that has provided us the most legitimacy and brand awareness."

She also didn't expect how fast the whole thing would move, or how little of the coordination would land on her.

"What surprised me the most was how quickly these podcasts were able to talk about Rella," she said. "Usually, it would take months to get a partnership like this set up, but with SpotsNow it was pretty instant. I also love that their team handled everything. It's always annoying going back and forth with the podcast network or the creator, so having SpotsNow do all of that took a load off of my plate."

DIY Wrap Club: roughly 3.5x ROAS after Google stopped performing

Ji Hoon Heo is the CEO of DIY Wrap Club and previously worked with Tesbros. His business grew out of a tight online community of Tesla owners, and podcasts felt like a natural place to keep that going.

"One of the reasons we were able to grow, for the first, was the fact that we were close to community," Heo said. "And I think podcasts really connect with that community in a way we wanted to work with."

The bigger part of his story is about Google. DIY Wrap Club had relied on Google ads for years, and like a lot of performance marketers, Heo had watched that channel slowly get more expensive and less predictable.

"With SpotsNow we were advertising almost six figures," he said. "Google ads is typically what people do, but I've seen in the last two years it get less and less effective, and it's harder and harder to get to a profitable state. We got to a point where it's like, we got to try, we got to take a risk."

Part of what made that risk feel worth it was that podcast advertising is usually hard to measure, and Heo knew it going in.

"There's a lot of stuff where it's not very clear what the results are," he said, adding that he wanted to be honest that this was one of his top concerns before starting.

SpotsNow's approach to attribution is what changed his mind. "SpotsNow first told us about how they work, how the data is clean, and they know what podcasts... it's really easy to track," he said. "We can actually allocate ad spend to an area that will actually help us profitably."

Over the course of several months, DIY Wrap Club maintained roughly a 3.5x ROAS, a number Heo called "quite good," with a cost per acquisition that compared well to what the brand was getting from Google Ads. "I'm absolutely thrilled to see that as we continue," he said. "It still has an impact on our ad strategy."

Onboarding set the tone early. SpotsNow ran a real discovery process, asking Heo detailed questions about who DIY Wrap Club is and who buys from it before recommending any shows.

"They were completely data-driven, and they found a bunch of podcasts that they thought would work and make sense for us," he said. The team also proposed testing a few shows outside the obvious lane, treating early spend as something to learn from rather than a one-time bet. "We can make this a test, and then if it's good, keep adding spend," Heo said, "so we can lower spend or completely cut it if it's not working."

Once campaigns were live, Heo started using show-level performance as a research tool for the rest of his marketing.

"If a certain podcast is doing really well, I can look at that. These are the type of customers that I need. And take that data into our overall marketing strategy," he said.

He also pushed back on a common assumption about podcast ads, that they only make sense for brands without existing organic growth.

"I think that's the myth, like if you already have organic growth you shouldn't need paid," he said. "It's the opposite. We were surprised with the results. That was again an important part for us to continue working with SpotsNow. They're super data-driven, and it was really, really easy for me to make decisions."

Textla: a first podcast ad running in five minutes

Not every brand needs a long onboarding process to get value out of SpotsNow. Jake Cook, Head of Ops at Textla, an SMS marketing platform for small businesses, pointed to the opposite end of that spectrum: how little setup it took to get started.

"I love that SpotsNow is self-serve," Cook said. "I tested my first podcast ad with 5 minutes setup time."

For a small, lean team like Textla's, that speed matters as much as any performance number. It's the difference between podcast ads staying on a someday list and actually getting tested. There's no discovery call to schedule and no network to wait on, just a live campaign in less time than it takes to get coffee.

What connects all three stories

Rella, DIY Wrap Club, and Textla don't share an industry or an audience, but their experiences with SpotsNow line up in a few ways.

Speed showed up for all of them, just at different scales. 

• Rella went from partnerships that used to take months to something that felt instant.
• DIY Wrap Club moved from onboarding to a live, trackable campaign within weeks.
• Textla skipped almost all of the ramp-up and had a campaign running in five minutes.

Data replaced guesswork in choosing shows. Both Rella and DIY Wrap Club described a real discovery process where SpotsNow used audience and spend data to find shows that fit, instead of the brand negotiating placements on its own.

Attribution was the thing that made podcast ads feel safe to try. DIY Wrap Club's biggest concern going in was that podcast results are usually hard to measure. Clean tracking from SpotsNow is what let Heo treat the channel like any other performance channel: test it, watch the numbers, scale what's working, cut what isn't.

And the payoff wasn't just performance. Rella and DIY Wrap Club both hit numbers they were happy with, but they also talked about something a dashboard doesn't capture, customers recognizing them from a specific host on a specific show they already trusted.

For any brand sitting where these three were before they started, wary of the cost, the time, or the lack of clear results, the pattern here is pretty consistent. The format was never the problem. It was everything around it.

If you want to see what that process looks like for your own brand, you can check out SpotsNow.