Sound Decoded: The Multi-Million Dollar Blind Spot in How Brands Handle Music and Share of Voice

Global — Spend precisely ten minutes with any media director in a modern corporate boardroom, and you will be met with an exact calculation of share of voice (SOV), a granular tracker against share of market (SOM), and a predictive forecast spanning the next four financial quarters. The math is rigorous, the reporting cycles are weekly, and the discipline operates with institutionalized maturity.

Yet, spend that same ten minutes asking about the acoustic architecture—the music, the sound design, and the sonic identity embedded within that media—and the institutional rigor evaporates instantly.

The track was typically "a really nice find from the agency." The creative brief called for something "optimistic and modern." The creative director (CD) signed off simply because it "felt right in the room." For the subsequent campaign, the process repeats with an entirely different track, sourced from a different reference, and briefed by a completely disconnected team.

This exposes a profound disconnect within modern marketing: two parallel budgets operating under entirely different cultural disciplines. One treats share of voice as a strategic planning lever, while the other treats music and sound as an arbitrary finishing touch. According to strategic brand governance experts, this silent operational gap is quietly costing global brands more capital than almost any other single production decision they make.

Main Facts: The Asymmetry of Brand Governance

At the core of this modern marketing paradox lies an asymmetry in how visual versus aural assets are managed. While brand managers enforce strict guidelines across typography, color palettes, and logo placement to ensure compound visual recognition over time, audio remains structurally neglected.

• The SOV Benchmark: Pioneered by John Philip Jones in the Harvard Business Review in 1990 and later expanded by Les Binet and Peter Field through the IPA Databank, the relationship between Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) and market growth is mathematically documented. Generally, multiplying a brand’s ESOV ($textSOV – textSOM$) by $0.05$ yields its projected annual market share growth rate.
• The Audio Disconnect: Despite empirical proof that audio environments drive high trust and engagement, brands rarely govern their sonic footprint. Instead of maintaining a cohesive musical identity (mDNA), organizations deploy a chaotic rotation of acoustic folk, electronic textures, and disparate library cues.
• The Economic Consequence: While media spend successfully secures impressions, the lack of a consistent brand audio fingerprint means the compounding psychological effect of that media spend leaks out through the speakers. Brands effectively pay a heavy markup for share of voice, only to deliver a series of disconnected, anonymous presences to consumers.

Chronology: From Media Planning to the Rise of the "Sound-On" Era

To understand how modern marketing reached this structural impasse, one must trace the evolution of media planning alongside the shifting landscape of consumer media consumption.

1990–2010s: The Quantified Media Revolution

• 1990: John Philip Jones publishes foundational research establishing the direct correlation between excess share of voice and brand growth, giving marketers the quantitative framework necessary to defend budgets in boardrooms.
• Late 1990s–2000s: Les Binet and Peter Field begin synthesizing decades of IPA Databank data, cementing creative effectiveness and ESOV as the twin engines of profitable corporate growth. Visual identity governance becomes a standardized corporate practice, anchored by digital brand asset guidelines.
• 2010s: The proliferation of digital channels fragments media placement. While visual standards scale seamlessly across programmatic banners and social feeds, audio is increasingly treated as ad-hoc accompaniment for video content.

2020s: The Great Audio Awakening

• 2020–2024: Digital platforms shift toward sound-native environments. Brands begin recognizing the power of sonic branding, though implementation remains largely restricted to isolated sonic logos at the end of television spots rather than a systemic musical strategy.
• 2026: Spotify releases its landmark Sound-On Era report, quantifying what brand strategists had long suspected: consumer behavior has fundamentally pivoted toward audio-first consumption.
• Present Day: Industry thought leaders, including former CMO Tammy Henault and brand strategists like Shai-Caleb Hirschson, begin openly challenging the industry’s default approach to music, calling for the formal establishment of musical DNA (mDNA) as a core pillar of brand equity.

Supporting Data: Why Audio Can No Longer Be Ignored

The macro-level argument for audio investment has long since been won. The bottleneck is no longer convincing brands to spend money on audio channels, but rather convincing them to treat the content inside those channels with strategic discipline.

Data compiled in Spotify’s Sound-On Era report and subsequent industry studies underline the measurable power of sound:

• 92% of US consumers actively pause other online activities specifically to stream audio content.
• 87% of users intentionally silence videos on secondary platforms to listen to dedicated audio instead.
• 36% higher consumer trust is reported for music and podcast advertisements compared to traditional social media ads.
• 4x to 8x return on investment (ROI) on incremental revenue is generated by audio within marketing mix modeling, according to LinkedIn data reported by Hilary Batsel.

Despite these staggering performance metrics, music selection remains overwhelmingly subjective. Brands measure visual consistency down to the precise hexadecimal color code, yet leave their most emotionally resonant asset—music—entirely to the whims of individual agency taste.

Official Perspectives and Industry Responses

Industry leaders across marketing, media, and creative direction are increasingly vocal about the necessity of bridging this governance gap.

"Brands need to stop thinking about audio as a bolt-on, and start thinking about it as a foundational element to their plan."
— Tammy Henault, Former Chief Marketing Officer at the NBA, Paramount+, and the New York Times

According to strategic practitioners, organizing a brand’s audio identity requires moving beyond vague, descriptive briefs ("uplifting, modern, energetic") and establishing measurable acoustic parameters—a concept known in specialized circles as mDNA (Musical DNA).

Proponents of systematic audio governance argue that implementing an mDNA framework unlocks four crucial operational advantages:

1. Eliminating Taste Arbitration: Endless boardroom debates over whether a track "feels right" are replaced by objective evaluations against defined brand parameters.
2. Making Briefs Portable: Global marketing teams can translate exact parameter sets across dozens of international markets without relying on illegal or off-brand reference tracks.
3. Pre-Spend Testing: Music can finally be scored against brand objectives and emotional valence models before media dollars are committed.
4. Exposing Brand Drift: Organizations gain the ability to audit their annual audio output, tracking precisely when campaigns align with or stray from the brand’s core sonic identity.

Implications: The Strategic Road Ahead for Brand Leaders

The ramifications of ignoring sonic governance extend directly to the bottom line. When a brand invests heavily in securing a dominant share of voice, but pairs that media weight with a rotating, randomized cast of musical styles, it sabotages its own mental availability.

To resolve this inefficiency, forward-thinking brand teams are beginning to execute two critical operational shifts:

1. Moving the Music Brief Upstream

In traditional workflows, music is briefed after the script is locked and a rough cut has been assembled. By that stage, the creative trajectory is fixed, reducing the music decision to a high-stakes licensing scramble. Shifting the audio brief upstream—prior to final storyboarding—transforms music from a superficial decoration into a foundational structural element of the campaign.

2. Establishing an Internal Audio Feedback Loop

Sophisticated brands are beginning to audit their audio output systematically. By scoring past campaign music against real-world performance metrics—such as brand recall, attention, and attribution—organizations can build proprietary audio benchmarks. Over a multi-year cycle, these data points evolve from experimental choices into defensible, high-value corporate assets.

Conclusion: Applying the Standard of Sound

The persistent asymmetry between how corporate entities plan their visual voice and how they manage their sonic soundscape is no longer defensible in a saturated media landscape. The technological frameworks, psychological models, and data analytics infrastructure are readily available.

What remains missing in many corporate suites is simply the administrative will to treat sound as an essential component of brand identity rather than a superficial aesthetic add-on.

For brands operating with rigorous ESOV models while maintaining casual, unstructured music governance, the system is fundamentally working against itself. Closing the sound gap does not demand the creation of costly new departments; it simply requires applying the exact same standard of measurement and discipline to sound that the modern industry already applies to every other dollar spent from the marketing budget.