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.
A publicidade é uma competição. As marcas querem atingir seus públicos-alvo, obviamente, e fazer isso da forma mais econômica possível, mas também precisam se destacar de seus concorrentes para capturar a atenção, a imaginação e a carteira dos consumidores.
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?
O compartilhamento de voz não é realmente sobre voz
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.
Também é importante observar que uma marca pode optar por se concentrar em seu SOV no Instagram em fevereiro, ou em seu SOV na TV em Phoenix na semana que antecede o Memorial Day. Os números nacionais, de 12 meses e entre canais podem ser extremamente úteis na hora do orçamento, como veremos a seguir, mas as definições de SOV também podem ser limitadas. Cada marca, grande ou pequena, pode escolher seu campo de atuação e definir o SOV como achar melhor.
O compartilhamento de voz pode aumentar a participação no mercado
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 revela estratégias de mídia de destaque entre os varejistas de móveis
Atualmente, os varejistas dependem principalmente dos canais digitais para realizar suas campanhas de marketing - não apenas os varejistas on-line, mas também as lojas físicas como Walmart, CVS ou Gap. Em média, em 2024 (de novembro de 2023 a outubro de 2024), os varejistas nos EUA gastaram 59% de seu orçamento de publicidade em canais digitais, 29% em TV, 7% em áudio e o restante foi dividido de forma relativamente uniforme entre mídia impressa e externa.
Vamos restringir a questão: O que os dados do Ad Intel da Nielsen podem nos dizer sobre os varejistas de móveis, especificamente?
Os varejistas de móveis dos EUA tinham um mix de mídia muito mais tradicional, gastando 64% de seus orçamentos de publicidade na TV e 25% no digital. A Figura 1 mostra que a alocação de orçamento era quase uma imagem espelhada de toda a categoria de varejo.
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, e Ashley Furniture. They all had sensibly the same SOV, with IKEA e La-Z-Boy a distant fifth and sixth with SOVs of 7.8% and 4.5%, respectively.
Mas isso não significa que eles tinham a mesma combinação de mídia. Embora as alocações orçamentárias da Wayfair estivessem no mesmo nível da categoria em 2024, a figura 3 mostra que a Rooms to Go gastou um pouco mais em TV e muito mais em mídia impressa em comparação com seus pares, a Ashley gastou comparativamente mais em digital e a Sleep Number em áudio.
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.
Vire o jogo contra seus concorrentes
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.
Nielsen’s Need to Know reviews the fundamentals of audience measurement and demystifies the media industry’s hottest topics. Read every article here.
