Podcasting has emerged as one of the fastest-growing formats of digital media, evolving from a niche audio medium of the early 2000s into a mainstream channel of infotainment consumed by millions of listeners worldwide. This paper examines the rise of podcast marketing with particular reference to India, where platforms such as YouTube have made long-form, conversational video podcasts widely accessible. Adopting a structured narrative review methodology, the study synthesizes literature published between 2019 and 2024 across databases including Scopus, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and SSRN, organizing findings into thematic areas such as podcasts as a marketing tool, listener behavior, advertising effectiveness, and host credibility. The review reveals that trust, authenticity, and parasocial relationships between hosts and listeners are the dominant drivers of advertising outcomes, with host-read and content-congruent advertisements outperforming conventional pre-recorded formats in brand recall, favorability, and purchase intention. Supplementing the review, a qualitative examination of Indian YouTube podcasts illustrates how creators and brands leverage series formats, guest appearances, and audience engagement through comments to build loyal niche communities. The paper concludes that podcasting represents a low-cost, high-engagement marketing avenue that remains under-researched in the Indian context, and it identifies directions for future empirical work using listener data and brand-level engagement metrics.