GLOBAL — Spend ten minutes with a media director at any major enterprise, and you will receive a masterclass in modern marketing precision. They will provide a granular calculation of share of voice (SOV), track it meticulously against share of market (SOM), and offer a confident, data-backed forecast for the next four quarters. The math is rigorous, the reporting is weekly, and the conversation is grounded in hard corporate strategy.
Now, spend ten minutes asking that same professional about the music embedded within that media.
Suddenly, the rigorous framework evaporates. The track was “a really nice find from the agency.” The creative brief asked for something “optimistic and modern.” The creative director (CD) signed off because it “felt right in the room.” Come the next campaign, the brand will deploy an entirely different track, sourced from a different reference, and commissioned by an entirely separate team.
It is the exact same brand, backed by the same corporate vision, yet managed through two entirely disparate budget and disciplinary cultures. One treats share of voice as a fundamental planning lever to drive growth, while the other treats music and sonic branding as a superficial finishing touch. According to industry experts, this hidden strategic gap is quietly costing modern brands more than almost any other production decision they make.
The Main Facts: The Asymmetry of Modern Marketing
The core contradiction in modern advertising lies in how marketers value reach versus resonance.
While visual identity is fiercely guarded—utilizing strict color palettes, standardized typography, and immutable logo placements to build compounding mental availability—audio is treated as a revolving door of transient artistic choices. A typical enterprise brand output over a single fiscal year might feature acoustic folk music in one digital campaign, harsh electronic textures in a product launch, sweeping orchestral arrangements in a brand film, and generic royalty-free library cues underneath everything else.
Each individual track may make sense in isolation, but collectively, they fail to form a cohesive brand identity. Instead of building a recognizable sonic signature, they create a fractured portfolio of unrelated noises loosely anchored to a single logo.
Consequently, while expensive media buys successfully secure impressions, the vital brand fingerprint—the psychological anchor that makes a new advertisement feel familiar and trustworthy to a consumer—is entirely absent. Brands are paying top dollar for excess share of voice (ESOV) while receiving little more than a series of disconnected, fleeting touchpoints.
Chronology and Evolution: From John Philip Jones to the Sound-On Era
To understand how marketing arrived at this juncture, it is necessary to trace the evolution of media planning theory over the past three decades.
1990: The Foundation of SOV
The conceptual framework underpinning modern marketing budgets traces back to foundational work by John Philip Jones in a landmark 1990 Harvard Business Review article. Jones established the quantifiable link between advertising weight and market gains.
The IPA Databank Era
Following Jones’s work, market researchers Les Binet and Peter Field expanded upon these principles through extensive analyses of the IPA Databank. Their research codified a central tenet of modern media strategy: brands whose Share of Voice (SOV) exceeds their Share of Market (SOM)—a metric known as Excess Share of Voice (ESOV)—tend to grow. Industry shorthand dictates that roughly every ten points of positive ESOV yields about half a point of annual market share growth, with creative effectiveness acting as a powerful multiplier.
$$textProjected Annual Growth Rate = (textSOV – textSOM) times 0.05$$
This formula transformed marketing budgets from arbitrary overhead into quantifiable, defensible investments. However, this mathematical evolution created a blind spot. The actual sound a brand makes—whether in a TikTok video, a high-budget television spot, or a podcast pre-roll—was never integrated into the equation. SOV remained strictly a media question, the visual identity remained a creative question, and the music was relegated to an afterthought.
2026: The Paradigm Shift
Fast-forward to 2026, and the macro-case for audio as a medium has been definitively won. Spotify’s Sound-On Era report provides hard metrics verifying what consumer psychologists have long suspected: 92% of US consumers actively pause other online activities to stream audio, and 87% will silence videos on alternative platforms simply to focus on sound. Furthermore, consumers report being 36% more likely to trust audio advertisements (such as music or podcast placements) than standard social media ads.
Simultaneously, LinkedIn’s Hilary Batsel reported an astonishing 4x to 8x return on investment (ROI) on incremental revenue generated by audio within enterprise marketing mix models. The channel-level argument is closed. Yet, despite the medium being thoroughly measured and validated, the actual music carrying the brand message remains stubbornly tethered to raw instinct.
Supporting Data and Industry Insights
Despite the lack of structural governance in audio, industry leaders are beginning to push back against the status quo.
Tammy Henault, former Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at major entertainment and media giants including the NBA, Paramount+, and The New York Times, addressed the issue directly in recent industry roundtables. “Brands need to stop thinking about audio as a bolt-on, and start thinking of it as a foundational element to their plan,” Henault argues. If audio is foundational, the music residing within it cannot simply function as auditory wallpaper.
Key Metrics in Audio Performance
- 92% of US consumers stop other online activities to focus entirely on streaming audio content (Spotify Sound-On Era Report).
- 36% higher consumer trust in audio and podcast advertisements compared to traditional social media placements.
- 4x to 8x ROI generated by audio integration within enterprise marketing mix modeling (LinkedIn Marketing Solutions data).
Despite these staggering performance indicators, most organizations operate without a unified metric to answer a basic question: How on-brand has our music been over the past twelve months? Without an objective scoring system, brands routinely generate off-map outliers that actively leak equity and brand recall.
Official Responses and Perspectives from the Field
The traditional resistance to formalizing musical parameters usually centers on the argument that art cannot be reduced to data. Critics argue that music is inherently emotional, contextual, and mood-driven, making it impossible to grid out in the way a visual color palette might be structured.
However, brand strategists and audio specialists counter that while music is emotional, it possesses deeply measurable properties. Elements such as tempo, harmonic palettes, instrumentation, rhythmic feel, production registers, and genre adjacencies can be evaluated through established frameworks in music psychology.
Shai-Caleb Hirschson, a prominent voice in sonic branding, advocates for the adoption of an mDNA (musical DNA)—a defined, operational set of parameters written in attributes rather than subjective reference tracks. According to practitioners, implementing an mDNA yields four immediate structural benefits:
- Elimination of Taste Arbitration: It replaces subjective arguments about what "feels right in the room" with objective evaluations of whether a track aligns with the brand’s defined parameters.
- Global Portability of Briefs: Instead of relying on copyrighted reference tracks that encourage derivative or illegal imitation, an mDNA parameter set can travel intact across global markets, ensuring localized originality without brand drift.
- Pre-Spend Testing: Brands can evaluate and score candidate tracks against campaign objectives and brand identity before committing major capital to production and licensing.
- Visibility Over Brand Drift: A scoring framework makes it immediately clear when a campaign sits on the edge of the brand’s identity or drifts entirely off-map, highlighting where equity is quietly leaking.
Implications for Modern Marketers
The persistent asymmetry between how brands plan their visual and media strategies versus how they plan their sound is no longer economically or operationally defensible.
A brand utilizing rigorous ESOV planning while practicing casual music governance is asking its financial capital to achieve outcomes that its operational systems are not built to deliver. Conversely, defining a brand’s sound does not stifle creativity; rather, it liberates it. Composers, music supervisors, and creative directors frequently welcome a clearly defined sonic boundary, as it eliminates the exhausting cycle of reinventing the wheel and debating subjective tastes on every new project.
The Two Strategic Shifts Required
To close the audio gap, enterprise marketing teams must execute two fundamental implementation shifts:
- Shift the Music Brief Upstream: Rather than treating music as a post-production puzzle piece selected after the rough edit is locked, brands must integrate the sonic brief early in the campaign development phase. This transforms music from a superficial finishing touch into a structural narrative pillar.
- Build an Institutional Feedback Loop: Following every campaign cycle, brands should score the performance of deployed audio against key behavioral outcomes—such as ad recall, brand-linked memory, and attention metrics. Over time, these data points evolve from isolated campaign stats into a proprietary enterprise asset.
Ultimately, music remains the most emotionally efficient asset in a marketer’s toolkit. Yet, it remains simultaneously the most underbriefed, underaudited, and underleveraged component of modern brand equity. Closing this strategic gap does not require the creation of a new corporate department. It simply demands that enterprises apply the exact same rigorous standards to sound that they already demand of every other dollar spent in their media plans.
