I have this nagging belief that advertisers know well that nobody in this generation wants to be advertised to, and that ads generally don't work as a direct call to action. Something that allowing podcasters to loosely do ad reads achieves is a small sense of authenticity.

This seems to fit in nicely with the assertion that they know people dislike ads; when a podcaster stiffly or sarcastically reads an ad and throws in a side comment, the ad-averse listener reads this as an irreverence to commercial advertising that both the podcaster and the advertiser are both acknowledging.

I truly think that the advertiser sneaks into the podcast listener's authenticity dome this way, and I feel like this must be a well-understood phenomenon for advertisers who buy ad reads on podcasts known for having a primarily gen z and millennial audience.

Incidentally there's a podcast episode by New Models that briefly discusses this idea, which they call the "authenticity dungeon". https://www.librarystack.org/new-models-podcast-episode-07-a...