How to advertise on Zac Amico's Morning Zoo: what it costs, who buys, and how to book

Host-read inventory on this show gets quoted per campaign through Gas Digital Network, the comedy network that also happens to be the show's home, not sold off a public rate card. Spotsnow data shows direct-response formats account for almost the entire ad mix here, which is unusual even for comedy, and Yo Kratom, the top spender, has run roughly 4 to 5 host-read spots on the feed. If you're a DTC brand that lives on coded redemptions, that mix is the whole pitch: the audience is already trained to hear an offer and act on it. Spotsnow estimates all of this from tracked advertiser activity, not audience surveys.

The feed in question is Zac Amico's Morning Zoo, a chaotic weekday run through bizarre news, strange arrests and true crime oddities.

Why Zac Amico's Morning Zoo is built for host-read direct response

Zac Amico is a New York stand-up comedian and a fixture on the Gas Digital comedy circuit, working alongside a rotating cast of comics and assorted degenerates. The show sits in comedy, with true crime, news, and society and culture riding underneath it.

Spotsnow attributes almost all ad activity on the show to direct-response formats. That matters because DR reads carry the machinery buyers need: a promo code, a vanity URL, a spoken offer you can trace back to a specific episode. Where a CPM argument usually goes, the format argument is stronger here. The show runs loose and conversational, bits bleed into tangents, and listeners are already conditioned to sit through digressions because the digression is the product. A host-read ad borrows exactly that attention. It doesn't sound like a break in the show, it sounds like another tangent, which is why coded offers survive the handoff.

On the engagement side, the show holds a 4.7 average rating on Apple Podcasts from roughly 2,100 to 2,500 ratings, with about 34,000 Instagram followers and roughly 33,000 YouTube subscribers. Influence is spread fairly evenly across the three, so a flight here gets reinforced off-feed as well as in it. Spotsnow estimates the audience at roughly 620,000 listeners, an estimate rather than an audited count, skewing heavily male, young, middle income and strongly US-based.

Who is advertising on Zac Amico's Morning Zoo

The roster splits cleanly between mainstream DR spenders buying produced spots and endemic, adult-leaning DTC brands buying the host. Spotsnow data shows roughly 70 to 81 distinct brands running on the feed in the last three months. Recognizable recent names include Progressive, Shopify, DraftKings, Carvana and Talkspace.

The anchor advertisers, broken down

Yo Kratom

Yo Kratom is an online kratom retailer, and Spotsnow ranks it the top spender on the show with estimated total spend over $100K across roughly 4 to 5 ads, every one of them host-read direct response. Nothing else on the roster is that purely endemic: an adult, male-skewing customer base buying something mainstream media won't touch, pitched by a host whose whole brand is not flinching.

Gas Digital Network

Gas Digital Network sells ad-free, uncensored podcast subscriptions, and it's both the show's home network and one of its heaviest buyers. Spotsnow estimates total spend over $100K across roughly 9 to 11 ads, mostly host-read direct response. It's the cleanest possible fit, selling more of the thing the listener is already choosing to spend an hour on.

Body Brain Coffee

Body Brain Coffee is a functional coffee DTC brand, and Spotsnow attributes estimated total spend over $30K to it across roughly 24 to 29 ads, direct response, mostly produced with some host-read. A morning show full of young men looking for energy is about as on-the-nose a placement as functional coffee gets.

The outlier: Progressive

Progressive carries the heaviest appearance volume of any brand on the show, and it does none of it host-read. Spotsnow data shows its presence is entirely produced spots, which tells you the feed also absorbs pure awareness money at scale. Worth knowing if your mandate is frequency against young men rather than coded conversions.

All spend figures are Spotsnow estimates.

Why comedy brands cluster here

The reason endemic brands outspend the Fortune 500 names on host-reads is permission. Amico's authority isn't expertise, it's candor. He narrates escaped convicts and strange deaths without softening any of it, so when he vouches for a product the listener reads it as a recommendation from someone with nothing to protect. A kratom retailer can't buy that on television, and a functional coffee brand can't manufacture it on paid social. Compare that to the produced spots running in the same breaks: those brands are renting the audience, and the host-read advertisers are borrowing the relationship. The audience mindset does the rest. People come to a morning zoo loose, early, in the car, and they're in a buying frame rather than a defensive one. That's why the DR share stays near total and why repeat buying, not first-time testing, defines the top of this roster.

How your ad could sound

This Gas Digital read is a sketch, and it earns its length. The hook is a narrator losing his mind about ad breaks, with a stat that lands hard: "By the time you die, you will have spent an entire year and a half just watching ads." The comedy matches the show's register instead of fighting it, the offer is a single clean idea, and it hands back to the host in character, so there's no dead air where the listener remembers they're being sold to.

Two things I'd change. There's no urgency anywhere in it, no deadline, no reason to act during this episode rather than three weeks from now. And the only call to action is the URL, as in "Subscribe to GasDigital.com for thousands of uncensored and ad-free shows," which lands late and carries no code. Give the same read a tracked promo code spoken twice and a reason to move this week and you keep the comedy while actually being able to measure it.

View what a great sample ad looks like here.

What makes a show like this convert

1. The format carries the offer. Spotsnow attributes almost all ads on the show to direct response, which means codes and vanity URLs are the norm here, not an experiment you have to talk a network into.
2. Host credibility transfers. Amico is a working stand-up with a 4.7 Apple rating behind him, and an unfiltered host endorsing a product reads as a judgment call rather than a placement.
3. The audience is hard to buy elsewhere. Spotsnow estimates roughly 620,000 listeners, skewing young, male and US-based, a segment most brand marketers reach expensively and imprecisely on other channels.
4. Repeat buying proves the math. Yo Kratom came back for roughly 4 to 5 host-read ads and Gas Digital for roughly 9 to 11, per Spotsnow data. Brands don't re-up on a feed where the codes stay quiet.

Zac Amico's Morning Zoo in a nutshell

The listener base is young, heavily male, mostly middle income and concentrated in the US, drawn in by dark comedy and true crime oddities. Endemic DTC brands and the show's own network buy the host-read slots and keep renewing them, while insurance, fintech and e-commerce giants fill the produced breaks. Inventory is quoted per campaign through Gas Digital Network rather than published. Treat it as a direct-response buy first, with awareness volume available if that's the brief instead.

Zac Amico's Morning Zoo isn't the only feed reaching this audience. Spotsnow shows which comedy podcasts have host-read spots open right now, and which brands already buy them.