Approximately four in ten British adults are unwilling to click on paid ads in search results or on social media. For advertisers investing a large share of their budgets in these channels, such resistance raises the question of how much ad performance depends on what audiences knew about a brand before seeing it on screen. New research from Radiocentre, the UK industry body for commercial radio, examines this relationship, as well as the financial outcome of distributing money differently between digital channels and audio.
The findings of Sound Profits were presented on 30 September at the Tuning In conference in London. Analysis conducted by WPP Media showed that reallocating 15% of the budget for generic paid search, or Generic PPC, into audio could generate approximately £1 million in additional profit. A similar result was modelled when reallocating 20% of the budget for paid social media advertising. The brands included in the analysis had an average annual media budget of £12.7 million.
Overall spending in the modelled scenarios remained unchanged, as did investment in other channels. The allocation changed within the portion of the budget intended for paid search or social media, from which money was redirected into audio. The calculations are based on annual response curves from the Profit Ability 2 dataset, which covers £1.8 billion in media investment, 141 brands and 14 sectors.
Smaller reallocations also produced a positive result in the model. When audio received 10% of the generic paid search budget, profit return on investment increased by 8%, while a 20% share resulted in a 16% increase. For paid social media, the corresponding increases were 11% and 21%. These percentages refer to the analysed combination of the original channel and audio. The calculation includes short-term effects up to 13 weeks and long-term effects from week 14 up to two years.
To explain the relationship between the channels, Radiocentre surveyed 6,000 adults in the United Kingdom with research agency Differentology. Paid links in search results are something 36% of respondents are unwilling to click on, while the figure for social media ads is 38%. Reasons for caution include unfamiliarity with the brand and a lack of trust.
Half of the respondents said they would be more likely to click on a social media ad or a paid search link if they had previously heard that brand advertised on the radio or in podcasts. Radiocentre describes this relationship as a priming effect: audio can build familiarity and trust that make it easier for consumers to decide to click when they later encounter a digital ad. The survey therefore offers a possible answer to why investment in one medium can help another perform better.
The choice of search and social media budgets as the starting point for the analysis is also linked to their size. Together, they accounted for 70% of UK advertising spending in 2025, according to data from WARC and the Advertising Association cited in the report, with search excluding retail search.
Donna Burns, head of insight at Radiocentre, emphasised that the aim was to establish where additional audio investment could deliver the greatest impact. “The findings from Sound Profits show that better results don’t necessarily require bigger budgets,” she said.
