Sound Decoded: Why Share of Voice Has a Sound Problem—and How Modern Brands Are Fixing It

Main Facts

In the modern corporate boardroom, marketing analytics are treated as hard science. Spend ten minutes with a media director, and you will receive a meticulous breakdown of share of voice (SOV), a granular tracker measuring against share of market (SOM), and four-quarter forecasting models. The math is rigorous. The reporting cadence is weekly. It is an adult, data-driven conversation built on decades of empirical research.

Yet, ask that same media director about the music embedded within those multi-million-dollar campaigns, and the analytical framework entirely dissolves. The chosen track is often described as "a really nice find from the agency." The creative brief typically demands something vague, such as "optimistic" or "modern." The creative director signs off because the track "felt right in the room," only for the next campaign to pivot completely to a different track, a different reference point, and a completely different production team.

This dichotomy exposes a quiet, expensive category error plaguing modern advertising: while brands treat share of voice as a strategic planning lever, they treat music and sonic branding as an afterthought or a finishing touch.

According to industry insights and modern marketing psychology, this disconnect actively undermines advertising efficiency. When a brand spends heavily to build excess share of voice (ESOV) but fails to maintain a consistent sonic identity, the compounding mental availability effect leaks out through the speakers. The brand pays for premium media weight, only for its audience to experience a disconnected portfolio of sounds attached to a single logo.

Chronology

The Evolution of Share of Voice

The modern framework governing marketing budgets and visibility owes its conceptual foundation to landmark research published over three decades ago.

• 1990: John Philip Jones published a seminal analysis in the Harvard Business Review, establishing foundational links between media weight and brand growth.
• Late 1990s–2010s: Les Binet and Peter Field built upon this framework through extensive analyses of the IPA Databank, proving that brands whose SOV exceeds their SOM tend to capture proportional market growth.
• Present Day: The industry widely accepts the shorthand multiplier: roughly half a point of annual market share growth per ten points of positive excess share of voice, with creative quality acting as a multiplier.

The Rise of Audio Channels

While visual identity standards (logos, palettes, typography) quickly adapted to digital and multi-channel marketing to protect brand recognition, audio lagged behind as a structured asset class. However, the channel-level argument for audio has recently reached maturity.

• Early 2020s: Platforms like Spotify, podcast networks, and social video ecosystems demonstrated massive shifts in consumer media consumption toward sound-on environments.
• 2026: Spotify published its Sound-On Era report, quantifying consumer audio habits and proving high trust metrics compared to traditional social placements. Concurrently, industry leaders began calling for a structural overhaul of how brands brief, select, and govern their audio assets.

Supporting Data

The business case for audio as a high-performing medium is no longer a matter of speculation. Hard data from major digital platforms and industry studies underscore its potency:

• 92% of US consumers stop other online activities to stream audio, according to Spotify’s 2026 Sound-On Era report.
• 87% of consumers actively silence videos on other digital platforms to listen to audio-first content instead.
• 36% higher trust levels are reported for music or podcast ads compared to standard social media advertisements.
• 4x to 8x return on investment (ROI) in incremental revenue is generated from audio within marketing mix modeling, as reported by LinkedIn’s Hilary Batsel.
• The ESOV Growth Formula: Multiplying a brand’s ESOV ($textSOV – textSOM$) by $0.05$ projects its annual percentage rate of market growth, provided that the creative elements—including sonic assets—effectively compound recognition over time.

Official Responses and Expert Insights

Industry leaders and former Chief Marketing Officers are increasingly vocal about the need to shift audio from a tactical checkbox to a foundational pillar of brand strategy.

"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 CMO at the NBA, Paramount+, and the New York Times

Experts argue that music possesses measurable properties that can be codified into a brand’s DNA—often referred to by practitioners as mDNA (music DNA). Rather than reducing music to an uninspired formula, defining tempo, key, harmonic palettes, instrumentation, and rhythmic feels allows organizations to govern sound with the same rigor applied to color palettes and typography.

Shai-Caleb Hirschson, a specialist in sonic branding, outlines four primary operational benefits of establishing an mDNA framework:

1. Killing Taste Arbitration: It shifts internal corporate arguments from subjective preferences ("I prefer this track") to objective evaluations ("This track fits the brand definition, and here is why").
2. Making the Brief Portable: Instead of relying on problematic reference tracks that encourage copyright-infringing imitations, a defined parameter set travels seamlessly across international markets.
3. Enabling Pre-Campaign Testing: Brands can score candidate tracks against defined sonic parameters and campaign objectives before capital is committed to media spend.
4. Exposing Creative Drift: Regular auditing reveals whether seasonal campaigns reinforce the brand’s identity or stray into off-brand territory, identifying where mental availability is quietly leaking.

Implications

The structural asymmetry between how organizations plan visual media and how they approach sound carries significant financial and strategic implications.

Economic Inefficiency

When a brand maintains rigorous ESOV planning alongside casual, ad-hoc music governance, it forces capital to work against itself. Media dollars buy impressions, but without a consistent sonic fingerprint, the next commercial feels like a complete stranger to the audience. The compounding memory structures built by previous campaigns are broken, forcing the brand to pay a permanent markup for consumer attention.

Operational Transformation

Fixing this gap does not require an expanded headcount or bloated bureaucratic departments; rather, it demands two critical shifts in decision architecture:

• Moving the Music Brief Upstream: Organizations must introduce the music brief before scripts are locked and rough cuts are edited. Treating music as a structural pillar rather than a finishing touch integrates it directly into the core creative narrative.
• Building an Audio Feedback Loop: Brands must systematically score post-campaign music performance against key metrics such as recall, attention, attribution, and brand-linked memory. Over time, these data points evolve from isolated notes into a proprietary corporate asset.

Ultimately, sound represents one of the most emotionally efficient assets in a marketer’s toolkit. By applying the same evidentiary standards to audio that are already standard practice for visual design and media placement, brands can stop leaking capital and start building a truly unified, recognizable market presence.