Sound Decoded: Why Brand Share of Voice Has a Hidden Sound Problem

NEW YORK — Spend ten minutes in a strategy room with a seasoned media director, and you will be met with a masterclass in quantifiable precision. They will present a meticulous calculation of share of voice (SOV), track it rigorously against share of market (SOM), and forecast performance across the upcoming four quarters with algorithmic exactness. The math is ironclad. The reporting is weekly. It is, by all definitions, a mature corporate conversation.

Ask that same director about the music playing inside that media, however, and the structural rigor instantly evaporates. The sonic background of a multi-million-dollar campaign is rarely treated as a strategic asset; instead, it is shrugged off as “a really nice find from the agency.” The creative brief typically demands something vague, such as “optimistic and modern,” and the creative director signs off simply because the track “felt right in the room.” By the time the next campaign rolls around, a completely different track from an entirely different reference point, commissioned by a separate team, will take its place.

It is the exact same brand, backed by two distinct budgets, operating under two entirely different discipline cultures. One treats share of voice as a high-stakes planning lever, while the other treats music and sound as a superficial finishing touch. According to industry analysts, this quiet disconnect is costing global brands more than almost any other ad-hoc production decision they make.

Main Facts: The Asymmetry of Modern Marketing

At the core of this issue lies a glaring operational contradiction in contemporary advertising. While visual identity is heavily guarded, codified, and measured for consistency, a brand’s sonic footprint remains largely unmanaged, highly fragmented, and subject to personal taste.

The industry understands how to measure visual presence down to the pixel, ensuring that every asset—from a TikTok short to a billboard—features the exact same logo, color palette, and typography. Yet, the same brand might use acoustic folk in one commercial, heavy electronic textures in another, sweeping orchestral arrangements in a product launch, and generic stock music libraries underneath everything else.

While each individual track may feel appropriate in isolation, they fail to cohere into a unified auditory identity. Instead of building a recognizable brand asset, the company produces a rotating portfolio of unrelated sounds attached to a single logo. Consequently, while expensive media buys secure maximum visibility, the brand fingerprint that connects one ad to the next leaks out through the speakers, leaving consumers unable to form a distinct auditory memory of the company.

Chronology: From Media Metrics to the Modern Audio Awakening

To understand how modern marketing arrived at this crossroads, it is necessary to examine how media planning evolved over the past four decades.

• 1990 — The Foundation of SOV: The bedrock of modern marketing frameworks was established when John Philip Jones published seminal work in the Harvard Business Review, later expanded by Les Binet and Peter Field through their comprehensive analyses of the IPA Databank. Their research proved a fundamental law of advertising: brands whose share of voice exceeds their share of market tend to grow proportionally to that gap (roughly a 0.5% annual market share increase for every 10 points of positive excess share of voice).
• The 1990s to 2010s — The Quantified Visual Era: Armed with the ESOV multiplier, marketers successfully defended large budgets in boardrooms. Visual branding evolved into a strict science. Pantone colors, minimum clear-space rules for logos, and strict typography guidelines became standard operating procedure. Sound, however, was left behind as an untamable creative art.
• 2020 to 2025 — The Rise of the Sonic Logo: As media consumption fragmented across digital platforms, brands began experimenting with brief sonic signatures—audio logos designed to tag the end of commercials. While this was a step forward, it treated sound as a punctuation mark rather than a foundational language.
• 2026 — The Sound-On Era: The release of major industry studies, such as Spotify’s Sound-On Era report, upended traditional visual-first assumptions. Data began proving that consumers were not just passively hearing ads; they were actively engaging with, trusting, and rewarding audio formats at unprecedented rates.

Supporting Data: The Hard Economics of Hearing

For years, creative agencies argued that music could not be measured because emotion is subjective. However, recent data from major audio platforms and professional networks suggest that ignoring the economic power of sound is no longer financially viable.

• 92% of US consumers actively pause other online activities specifically to stream audio, according to Spotify’s 2026 data.
• 87% of consumers deliberately silence videos on other social platforms to listen to dedicated audio content instead.
• 36% higher is the consumer trust factor for music and podcast ads compared to traditional social media interruptions.
• 4x to 8x ROI is generated on incremental revenue from audio within comprehensive marketing mix modeling, as reported by LinkedIn’s Hilary Batsel.

Former Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Tammy Henault—who has held leadership roles at the NBA, Paramount+, and the New York Times—summarized the shift in the Spotify report: "Brands need to stop thinking about audio as a bolt-on, and start thinking about it as a foundational element to their plan."

If audio is truly foundational, industry experts argue, then the music carrying that audio can no longer be treated as mere background wallpaper.

Official Responses and Industry Perspectives

Marketers, musicologists, and sonic branding experts are increasingly speaking out against the industry’s ad-hoc approach to audio.

Shai-Caleb Hirschson, a leading voice in sonic branding and strategy, points out that the resistance to standardizing music is rooted in a false dichotomy. "You can’t grid color the way you can grid layout, but that hasn’t stopped brands from defining color palettes and measuring how consistently they show up," Hirschson notes.

Rather than reducing music to a rigid, sterile formula, industry advocates are proposing the implementation of a Music DNA (mDNA). This framework involves establishing measurable properties—such as tempo, harmonic palettes, instrumentation, rhythmic feels, and emotional valence—tied directly to a brand’s core identity.

According to executive producers and brand strategists who have trialed mDNA approaches, defining these boundaries yields immediate operational benefits:

1. Eliminating Taste Arbitration: It replaces subjective arguments like "I prefer this track" with objective evaluations such as "this track fits our defined sonic parameters, and here is why."
2. Portable Briefs: Instead of relying on illegal or creatively limiting reference tracks, brands can hand global markets a clear parameter set that ensures local relevance without sacrificing global consistency.
3. Pre-Campaign Testing: It allows brands to test candidate tracks against consumer response data before committing substantial media budgets.
4. Auditing Brand Drift: It enables organizations to measure whether their sonic output over a twelve-month period remained true to identity or wandered off-brand.

Implications: Closing the Gap Between Media Spend and Brand Identity

The implications of this structural oversight are profound. When a company invests heavily in achieving a high excess share of voice (ESOV) but fails to govern its sonic identity, it effectively pays a premium to look and sound like a stranger to its own audience every time a new campaign drops.

Closing this gap does not require bloated corporate committees or expensive new departments. Instead, it demands two critical operational shifts:

1. Moving the Music Brief Upstream: In most organizations, music is chosen as an afterthought once the rough edit of a video is completely locked. Pulling the music brief forward—integrating it before storyboards are finalized—transforms sound from a decorative afterthought into a structural pillar of the narrative.
2. Establishing Audio Feedback Loops: Brands must begin tracking the performance of their sonic assets over time, measuring recall, attention, and brand-linked memory. Over several years, these data points evolve from isolated campaign experiments into proprietary, high-value corporate assets.

Ultimately, music remains the most emotionally efficient asset in a marketer’s toolkit. Yet, it is simultaneously the most underbriefed, underaudited, and underleveraged element in the corporate budget. Applying the same rigorous standards of measurement and governance to sound that the industry already applies to media spend and visual identity is no longer just a creative preference—it is a financial imperative for sustainable brand growth.