Need to know: What is share of voice?

How many ads do people see every day? It’s a hard number to pinpoint, and even harder to figure how many they actually pay attention to, but one thing is for sure: brands that stand alone in the spotlight are easier to notice than those sharing the stage with dozens of their competitors.

Advertising is a competition. Brands want to reach their target audiences, obviously, and do so as cost-effectively as possible, but they also need to stand out from their peers to capture consumers’ attention, imagination—and wallet.

That’s where Share of Voice comes in. It’s a crucial metric used by brands around the world to size up their markets, competitors, and plot their next moves, yet it’s often mistrusted or outright misunderstood. Let’s clarify: what is share of voice, what isn’t it, and how can the right data make all the difference?

Share of voice isn’t really about voice

A brand’s Share of Voice (SOV) refers to its media spending and is expressed as a percentage of all media expenditures in the category, in that market, on that channel and at that particular point in time.

So it’s not really about the brand’s voice, if we take voice to mean exposures, views, likes, product conversations or more upper-funnel constructs like brand familiarity, awareness or consideration. SOV doesn’t measure the impact of a campaign (there are other tools for that), but whether the campaign has the means to be competitive in the first place. In an ideal world, one would lead to the other (more media dollars, better outcomes) but a lot can go awry along the way: bad timing, poor creatives, poor channel choices, shifty targets, unexpected market changes, the list goes on. By taking any type of outcome out of the equation, SOV can tell marketers if their resources measure up before going into battle.

It’s also important to note that a brand might choose to focus on its SOV on Instagram in February, or its SOV on TV in Phoenix in the week leading up to Memorial Day. Nationwide, 12-month, cross-channel figures can be extremely helpful come budget time, as we’ll see below, but SOV definitions can be narrow too. Every brand, big or small, gets to pick its field of play and define SOV as it sees fit.

Share of voice can boost market share

You may have heard of the SOV rule: SOV and market share (SOM) are tightly connected, and a brand that sets its SOV above its SOM (that is, the brand has extra SOV [ESOV]) is likely to grow in the long term, while a brand that sets its SOV below its SOM is more likely to decline. Some researchers even ventured to quantify the correlation: Binet and Field, for instance, studied 171 campaigns across top categories between 1980 and 2010 and established that a brand’s SOM typically gained 0.5% for every 10% in ESOV.

Many practitioners have pointed to variations by channel and industry, differences between small, medium and large brands, long-term effects, cross-channel effects, or even the impact on a brand’s price elasticity. There are many nuances but the bottom line is this: SOV is and remains an invaluable resource for marketers planning their media budgets.

We’re big fans of SOV at Nielsen, and our Ad Intel clients have long had access to timely and comprehensive advertising intelligence to analyze spending trends and decode their competitors’ media strategies. To make these powerful insights available to a wider range of businesses, we just opened an online marketplace with à la carte trend reports and detailed SOV datasets covering millions of brands across all the top industries. Let’s examine a small slice of that data to illustrate the benefits.

SOV reveals standout media strategies among furniture retailers

Retailers today rely primarily on digital channels to run their marketing campaigns—not just online retailers but everyday brick-and-mortar stores like Walmart, CVS or Gap. On average in 2024 (from Nov 2023 to Oct 2024), retailers in the U.S. spent 59% of their advertising budget on digital channels, 29% on TV, 7% on audio, and the rest was split relatively evenly between print and outdoor.

Let’s narrow it down: What can Nielsen’s Ad Intel data tell us about furniture retailers, specifically?

U.S. furniture retailers had a much more traditional media mix, spending 64% of their advertising budgets on TV and 25% on digital. Figure 1 shows that their budget allocation was almost a mirror image of the whole retail category.

Who were the dominant players? Figure 2 shows that four companies dominated the furniture category with more than half of all media spend in 2024: Wayfair, Sleep Number, Rooms to Go, and Ashley Furniture. They all had sensibly the same SOV, with IKEA and La-Z-Boy a distant fifth and sixth with SOVs of 7.8% and 4.5%, respectively.

But that doesn’t mean that they had the same media mix. While Wayfair’s budget allocations were on par with the category in 2024, figure 3 shows that Rooms to Go spent slightly more on TV and a lot more on print compared to its peers, Ashley spent comparatively more on digital, and Sleep Number on audio.

When we analyze channel-specific SOVs, we can see how much Sleep Number dominated the category in audio, and Rooms to Go in print. Meanwhile, Ashley Furniture led the way on digital channels to reach younger consumers and clearly outspent everyone else outdoors to capture impulse shoppers.

Turn the tables on your competitors

Are you ready to use SOV to assess your position in the market, optimize your media strategy, and outsmart your competitors? We’re here to help. The Nielsen Marketplace has the trend reports and granular datasets you need to get started.