NEW YORK — In modern corporate boardrooms, the dialogue surrounding media strategy is defined by rigid, unyielding precision. Spend ten minutes with a media director, and you will be presented with a meticulous calculation of share of voice (SOV), a granular tracker mapping performance against share of market (SOM), and an exact algorithmic forecast for the next four quarters. The math is absolute; the reporting cadence is weekly; it is, by all definitions, an adult conversation.
Yet, step across the hall to discuss the audio assets embedded within that very same media, and the analytical rigor evaporates entirely. The soundtrack for a multi-million-dollar campaign is routinely reduced to "a really nice find from the agency." The creative brief typically calls for something "optimistic and modern," and the creative director signs off simply because a track "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 new team.
This dichotomy exposes a glaring operational blind spot in modern marketing. Brands are running dual operating systems under a single banner. One discipline treats share of voice as a scientific planning lever, while the other treats music and sound as an arbitrary finishing touch. According to industry experts, this invisible disconnect quietly costs brands more in wasted equity and leaked momentum than almost any other production decision they make.
Main Facts: The Structural Disconnect in Brand Audio
The core issue lies in a fundamental category error: while media spend is tracked to the decimal point to secure excess share of voice (ESOV), the actual voice—the sonic identity of the brand as it echoes across TikTok, television spots, and podcast pre-rolls—is left entirely to subjective chance.
For decades, marketers have relied on the foundational frameworks established by John Philip Jones in his seminal 1990 Harvard Business Review study, later expanded by Les Binet and Peter Field through their analyses of the IPA Databank. The core takeaway is universally recognized: brands whose share of voice exceeds their market share tend to grow, with annual market share increasing roughly proportionally to the gap between the two. Industry shorthand dictates that multiplying a brand’s ESOV by 0.05 yields its projected annual growth rate.
This framework successfully transformed marketing budgets into defensible corporate investments. However, it omitted a critical variable: sound. While visual identities are zealously protected by strict brand guidelines—ensuring the same logo, color palette, and typography appear consistently to compound recognition—music is subjected to no such governance.
A typical enterprise brand might feature acoustic folk in one campaign, electronic textures in another, and sweeping orchestral arrangements in a product launch film, supplemented by generic library cues from various production houses. While each track may function well in isolated silos, collectively they fail to form a cohesive sonic identity. Instead, they create a fractured portfolio of unrelated sounds attached to a single logo. The media spend buys valuable impressions, but the brand fingerprint required to make those impressions compound into long-term mental availability leaks out through the speakers.
Chronology: The Evolution of Audio From "Bolt-On" to Strategic Imperative
To understand how the industry arrived at this crossroads, it is helpful to trace the modern shift in consumer media consumption and how brand governance has historically lagged behind.
- 1990: John Philip Jones publishes his landmark HBR research, linking Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) directly to market growth and establishing the mathematical framework for media budgeting.
- Early 2000s – 2010s: The expansion of digital platforms cements the importance of visual Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs). Brands invest heavily in color governance and logo consistency, while audio largely remains an afterthought managed by individual ad agencies on a project-by-project basis.
- 2020 – 2024: The proliferation of audio-first environments—such as podcasts, short-form video, and streaming platforms—forces marketers to rethink channel investments. However, the evaluation of what brands sound like continues to rely on subjective taste arbitration rather than data-driven frameworks.
- 2026: Industry reports, most notably Spotify’s Sound-On Era, aggregate definitive data proving that audio is no longer a peripheral channel but a primary driver of consumer trust and attention. Concurrently, brand strategists begin advocating for the implementation of "mDNA" (musical DNA)—bringing the same governance to sound that has long been applied to sight.
Supporting Data: The Case for Audio Investment
While brand governance around music has lagged, the macro case for audio as a high-performing medium has already been decisively won. Consumer behavior and platform data demonstrate that sound is one of the most potent drivers of engagement available to modern marketers.
Data from Spotify’s 2026 Sound-On Era report underscores the shifting landscape of consumer attention:
- 92% of US consumers actively pause other online activities specifically to stream audio content.
- 87% of users deliberately silence videos on alternative platforms to listen to dedicated audio.
- Consumers are 36% more likely to place trust in music or podcast advertisements compared to standard social media ads.
Furthermore, economic modeling reveals substantial returns on investment. Data reported by LinkedIn’s Hilary Batsel indicates a 4 to 8 times return on investment (ROI) on incremental revenue derived from audio within marketing mix modeling (MMM).
Despite this overwhelming evidence that the medium captures attention and builds trust, the specific creative content carried by that medium remains unmanaged. The industry has measured the vehicle, but continues to gamble on the driver.
Official Perspectives: Industry Leaders Speak Out on the "mDNA" Shift
As the economic stakes rise, prominent marketing executives are calling for a wholesale structural revision in how brand audio is conceptualized and managed.
Tammy Henault, former Chief Marketing Officer at the NBA, Paramount+, and The New York Times, highlights the urgency of this transition:
"Brands need to stop thinking about audio as a bolt-on, and start thinking about it as a foundational element to their plan."
Henault’s perspective reflects a growing consensus that music cannot continue to function as mere background wallpaper. Shai-Caleb Hirschson, a branding and sonic strategist, advocates for the adoption of a formal musical DNA (mDNA) framework to eliminate subjective inefficiencies. According to proponents of this approach, treating sound with mathematical and operational rigor unlocks four vital organizational advantages:
- Eliminating Taste Arbitration: The most financially draining meetings in brand marketing are often those where teams debate whether a track "feels right." Introducing a concrete parameter set shifts the dialogue from subjective personal preference to objective brand alignment.
- Making the Creative Brief Portable: Reference tracks often encourage derivative, legally risky imitation. A formalized parameter set, however, can travel seamlessly across international markets, ensuring global consistency without creative repetition.
- Pre-Campaign Testing: Just as taglines and visual assets undergo rigorous pre-testing, structured audio parameters allow candidate tracks to be evaluated against specific brand objectives before media dollars are deployed.
- Exposing Brand Drift: Without a scoring system, brands cannot accurately measure whether their audio identity has drifted over a 12-month period. A structured framework highlights outliers and identifies where equity leakage is occurring.
Implications: What This Means for Future Brand Strategy
The asymmetry between how corporations plan their visual identity and how they approach their sonic footprint is no longer defensible in a hyper-fragmented media ecosystem. The frameworks, data analytics, and measurement infrastructures required to audit sound already exist. What remains missing in many corporate structures is the institutional will to treat sound as an intrinsic component of the brand voice rather than disposable decoration.
When a brand invests heavily in rigorous ESOV planning while practicing casual music governance, it fundamentally asks its financial capital to achieve outcomes that its operational systems are not built to deliver.
For creative directors, music supervisors, and composers, this shift toward structured sonic governance is met not with resistance, but with relief. Establishing clear boundaries eliminates the exhausting cycle of reinventing a brand’s sonic identity for every isolated campaign.
Ultimately, music remains one of the most emotionally efficient assets in a brand’s portfolio. However, it has historically been the most underbriefed, underaudited, and underleveraged. Closing these gaps does not require the creation of entirely new corporate departments; rather, it demands that brand leaders apply the exact same standards of accountability to sound that they already enforce across every other line item on the marketing balance sheet.
