BBC Studios has named Ozen.fm its exclusive local advertising sales representative for BBC podcast inventory in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Argentina. Rodrigo Tigre, Ozen.fm’s President and Co-Founder, wants the deal to help pull brands into a regional audio market he argues sits far behind the United States, using premium shows and third-party measurement to make the case.

That distance anchors Rodrigo’s pitch. He puts digital audio at around 3% of U.S. digital ad spend, an $8 billion business, with podcasts alone drawing at least $2 billion a year. Even there, he notes, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) research finds more listening time than ad spend. Brazil, by his estimate, is almost 10 times behind. “If that’s a reality in the U.S., why are we so behind in regions like Latin America?” he asks.

The question has run through nearly a decade of Rodrigo’s work in audio, from becoming Audio.Ad’s local partner in Brazil to building Adsmovil’s audio unit across more than 14 countries and chairing the IAB Brasil Audio and Voice Committee. Audio.Ad is a digital audio advertising company specializing in connecting advertisers with audiences through online radio, music streaming services, and podcasts. Adsmovil is a Miami-headquartered digital advertising and media company specializing in reaching Hispanic audiences in the United States and Latin America.

Rodrigo co-founded Ozen.fm in 2025 inside Surfer Network, a U.S. radio streaming company that, in his account, sold mostly through programmatic channels and lacked a direct sales approach.

Direct sales is what Ozen.fm adds. The New York-based company sells streaming radio and podcast inventory to brands and agencies, drawing on small publishers such as local bloggers, regional partners including Folha de S.Paulo in Brazil and Olímpica in Colombia, and now the BBC. “We are really a multicultural, multi-language, global podcast marketplace where we have global reach and local expertise,” Rodrigo says.

Latin American Buyers Lean Heavily on Spotify

Spotify is the biggest audio brand in Latin America, Rodrigo notes, and much of the region’s buying runs through it. He sees Brazil and Mexico as the more developed audio markets, with Colombia, Argentina and Chile relying more on the platform. “They rely a lot on Spotify, which is a brand everybody loves,” he says. “But our goal is to show that this is a part of the ecosystem.”

Markets differ underneath that. In Colombia, terrestrial radio holds a large share of advertising, and Rodrigo says growing the digital side there is a challenge that publishers like the BBC help Ozen.fm address by bringing new advertisers to the table.

That makes BBC inventory a recognizable alternative for buyers who have mostly bought one platform. The harder question is why a publisher of the BBC’s size needs an intermediary at all.

A Local Seller Lets the BBC Bundle Its Reach

The BBC does not sell podcast advertising in the UK, only abroad, Rodrigo points out, and it produces a large volume of Portuguese and Spanish content. BBC Studios’ portfolio runs to more than 500 current and archive titles, according to the company, with Portuguese-language shows such as “Que História!” and “BBC Investiga.” 

“What they don’t have is local sales, and it’s very expensive to have local sales worldwide,” Rodrigo says.

Scale is the other half of the case. A BBC sales team can only pitch BBC inventory, he explains. “When Ozen approaches a client, we of course have an exclusive offer for BBC, but we can bundle it up with other shows that have about the same categories,” he says. In Brazil, that bundle can serve global advertisers such as Shell and Coca-Cola running nationwide campaigns, and regional resellers selling into specific areas such as the South, Rio de Janeiro, or the Northeast.

The deal grew out of roughly a year of talks that began at The Podcast Show London. The BBC already worked with Zeno Media, a Surfer Network subsidiary, and Ozen.fm started by buying some BBC inventory for Brazilian demand before signing an exclusive direct-sales agreement that carries commitments. The agreement lets Ozen.fm offer category exclusivity on some shows, inside the BBC’s own rules. “BBC has a lot of rules on how we sell them,” Rodrigo says, noting that news content cannot be sponsored.

Small Podcasts Sell When Bundled by Niche

The same bundling logic works at the other end of Ozen.fm’s network. In Brazil, Rodrigo counts about 20 agribusiness podcasts with monthly audiences he estimates at 3,000 to 10,000 each. None is large on its own. “If you look into a very specific niche and you bundle up 20 of them, it makes a value offer to advertisers,” he says, particularly for brands chasing that category.

Ozen.fm also runs a Brazilian true crime network of about 15 independent shows. Beyond the standard 30-second spot, the company is starting to test host-read ads across that network. “We can have the host of the show reading the copy, and of course it gives more engagement,” he says, adding that the format takes more work.

Bundles solve for reach. Rodrigo argues that what grows audio budgets is proof that the spend worked.

Third-Party Measurement Carries the Sales Pitch

Campaigns can target by show, by category, or through a data layer that reaches demographics such as women over 35. Once a brief is approved, Rodrigo explains, Ozen.fm encourages clients to use two forms of measurement. The first is post-listening attribution through a conversion pixel on the client’s site or a mobile measurement partner such as AppsFlyer, showing who visited, downloaded, or purchased after a spot. “We have the same signals that we have on traditional digital display and video,” he says.

The second is brand lift, run through a partner with about 90 study templates and category benchmarks. Both feed optimization during longer campaigns. If true crime outperforms, more of those shows go into the delivery. In one campaign Rodrigo describes, fine-tuning after the first month cut cost per acquisition to about half the prior month’s level. Footfall measurement, linking spots to store visits, is in development.

Rodrigo stresses that this measurement sits outside Ozen.fm, which he contrasts with some big tech companies that grade their own campaigns. “All these measurements are made by third parties, so it’s not Ozen that has the brand lift or the attribution,” he says. Clients get access to the tools directly, and Podscribe users can pull data through an API into their own systems. “This is where we truly believe audio will grow, because this is what has been leading the growth in the U.S.,” he says.

Podcasting Can Avoid Programmatic’s Early Mess

That emphasis on transparency draws on Rodrigo’s years in display advertising, which predate programmatic. In the early programmatic market, he recalls, there were around 20 different SSPs connected to the same portal inventory. “It was kind of a mess,” he says. The market later corrected with Prebid and ads.txt. “Our concern now is not to replicate that,” he adds.

Ozen.fm’s response is to be selective about partners, favoring direct first-connection partnerships and Surfer Network’s own SSP. Audio also differs technically from display, Rodrigo explains, because most podcast delivery is server-to-server through third-party players, which raises fraud risk. The company uses HUMAN Security and Podscribe to attest that traffic comes from real people.

Data is the next layer. Rodrigo points to emerging audio-specific DMPs, ID graphs and links to client first-party data. Next year, Ozen.fm aims to build data clean rooms that use client data transparently and within regulations.

Brands That Test Audio Early Will Stand Out

Rodrigo calls podcasting and audio in Latin America and parts of Europe “the last blue ocean in media,” because few brands are there yet and the share of spend remains low. Brands that occupy the space now will stand out without spending heavily, he argues, while the U.S. grows more crowded. His recommendation is to allocate 3% to 5% of a media budget to audio, a level he says studies tie to broader reach and better conversions. He also cites studies showing that combining connected TV with podcasts can double returns compared with CTV alone.

The test he proposes keeps one specific platform in the plan. “You want to use Spotify. Put some money in Spotify, put some money on the rest of audio, compare it,” he says. He applies a commercial test to the BBC partnership as well. “At the end, it’s how much business we could bring to the table,” Rodrigo says, adding that Ozen.fm is meeting its goals so far and is in talks with other publishing groups.

That brings the argument back to measurement, which Rodrigo sees as the source of the shift in advertiser behavior. “We know it performs. We always knew it performs. Now we can show it performs,” Rodrigo says.

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