SiriusXM’s Lizzie Collins reveals how “secret” auto demos at CES 2026 point to a new era for in-car sound – interactive, data-rich and participatory. But for brands to catch up, audio measurement must finally evolve.
Lizzie Collins
When people talk about CES, they usually talk about screens. Bigger ones. Foldable ones. Ones that roll up, roll down or somehow disappear into the wall. Audio rarely gets top billing.
And yet, when we caught up with Lizzie Collins at CES this year, it became clear that some of the most consequential experimentation at the show wasn’t visual at all. It was happening through sound – and often behind closed doors.
Collins, a senior leader at SiriusXM, was in Las Vegas for meetings with partners, advertisers and car manufacturers, including a series of what she openly describes as “secret” automotive demonstrations.
“They’re totally secret,” she says, laughing. “Each car manufacturer has its own proprietary roadmap. So what we’re really doing is giving them a sense of what audio could be as part of the in-car experience.”
That distinction matters. We didn’t see the demos, and she can’t talk about specifics, but the direction of travel is clear: audio is no longer something that simply fills the car. It’s becoming something you interact with. And that’s a big shift for a medium that, until relatively recently, lived inside a very simple box.
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Collins has seen CES change more than most. This was her 16th year at the show (14 of them uninterrupted) and her first visit, back in 2006, looked nothing like today.
“My very first CES was when it was really just a trade show,” she says. “We put a trailer in a beer corral with little iPads that had Pandora on them – it was the very first time people could request a song and see how personalized music worked.”
The activation was done in partnership with the John Lennon Songwriters Foundation. Will.i.am was there. Yoko Ono, too. People could come into the bus and make music.
“At the time, it felt experiential,” she says. “But CES was really about what you were going to buy. Big TVs. Big devices. Content was an afterthought.”
Now, she argues, that logic has flipped. “All the makers are included in the definition of the product. From a publishing standpoint, you see SiriusXM all over the show floor. Pandora became part of that story. And the speed of innovation in the last five years has just been insane.”
Where CES once focused on living room hardware, Collins says it now feels more intimate – and more unsettling. “It used to be about what was in your living room. Now it feels like what you wear, what’s in your brain, what’s part of you. We went from plasma TVs to robots in under 15 years.”
That acceleration matters most, she argues, in audio. “15 years ago, audio was about programming something that would keep you in one place, like the car, for hours. Now sound comes through everything. You can tell a device what you want to hear. It’s bi-directional.”
The result is that audio is no longer appointment-based. It follows you. “It used to be in-home, on-the-go, at-the-office. Now it’s everything you do. Cooking. Working out. Moving around.” And the numbers back that up.
SiriusXM today is far broader than the satellite radio brand many still associate it with. The company now spans subscription radio, ad-supported streaming and podcasting, owning SiriusXM and Pandora outright while also representing a wide network of podcast creators and shows. In total, it reaches around 170 million listeners a month across music, talk and live audio – giving it a rare, joined-up view of how people actually use sound across different moments of the day and different devices, particularly in the car.
“About 32% of time spent with entertainment is audio,” Collins says. “That’s a crazy number. And it’s grown because it’s easy and effortless to receive.”
Yet the money hasn’t followed. “Only about 4% of ad dollars go to audio. And I know exactly why.”
Audio’s underinvestment, Collins argues, isn’t about lack of effectiveness. It’s about measurement – and decades of bad habits. “Marketers will take terrestrial radio, streaming, podcasts, endorsements – all very different things – put them into one bucket and just call it ‘audio.’ Then they expect it to behave like display.”
It doesn’t. “There’s no click. So the signal never arrives in the way they expect.”
SiriusXM has spent the past two years, she says, going client by client, helping advertisers rebuild how they evaluate audio. “Every single time we get to the end of that process, they say: ‘We made a big mistake. We were measuring it wrong all along.’”
That doesn’t mean every campaign works, she’s quick to add. But it does mean audio has been systematically undervalued. “I picked the hardest medium to represent. Sometimes I’m jealous of video and display. You guys have it easy – you take credit for all our conversions.”
If measurement is one battle, the car is another frontier entirely. Historically, in-car media had to be simple for safety reasons. That constraint is loosening – even before full autonomy arrives.
“In a world where many of us might not be driving, but still in a car, what does that mean for media?” she asks. “That’s a whole other horizon.”
Even today, cars are already connected, already data-rich. “If you’ve bought a new car in the last four years, it’s basically a big phone. Mine tells me everything I’m doing wrong. Put your eyes back on the road. Stop drifting. Take a break.”
What SiriusXM is exploring – quietly, and often confidentially – is how live audio might fit into that environment. “There’s a future where you press a button and say, ‘I need to know something,’ and it maps straight into the studio. On to the production board. Into a live show.”
That matters, she believes, because younger audiences don’t want to sit back and listen. “Gen Z doesn’t want to be passive. They want to be part of a conversation.”
Live call-ins. Polls. Real-time interaction. Audio, once the most one-way of media, is becoming participatory again – this time with technology doing the heavy lifting.
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SiriusXM’s ambition isn’t just to fix measurement or modernize the dashboard. It’s to make audio creative feel alive again – for listeners, creators and brands.
“Creators don’t want scripts,” Collins says. “They want to know what a product feels like. What color it would be. What emotion it creates.”
That philosophy has already shaped how SiriusXM works with talent – from live call-in shows to hosts who insist on writing their own ads.
“One creator said to us, ‘This copy is rubbish. I can do it better.’ And he did,” she says. “That would never have happened in old-school radio.”
Audio, she argues, is finally shedding the idea that it’s just a 30-second spot between songs. “There’s so much more audio being made. And it can show up live, between songs, in podcasts, in the car. Our job is to help brands understand where they belong.”
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