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.
广告是一场竞争。显然，品牌希望尽可能低成本、高效率地触及目标受众，但同时也需要在同行中脱颖而出，吸引消费者的注意力、想象力和钱包。
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?
话语权份额与话语权无关
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.
同样重要的是，一个品牌可能会选择关注二月份在 Instagram 上的 SOV，或者在阵亡将士纪念日前一周在凤凰城电视上的 SOV。全国范围、12 个月、跨渠道的数据在预算时会非常有用，我们将在下文中看到，但 SOV 的定义也可能很窄。每一个品牌，无论大小，都可以选择自己的领域，并根据自己的实际情况定义 SOV。
语音份额可提升市场份额
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 揭示家具零售商的突出媒体战略
如今，零售商主要依靠数字渠道开展营销活动--不仅是在线零售商，还有沃尔玛、CVS 或 Gap 等日常实体店。2024 年（2023 年 11 月至 2024 年 10 月），美国零售商平均将 59% 的广告预算用于数字渠道，29% 用于电视，7% 用于音频，其余则相对平均地用于印刷品和户外广告。
让我们缩小范围：尼尔森的 "Ad Intel "数据对家具零售商有何具体启示？
美国家具零售商的媒体组合更为传统，其广告预算的 64% 用于电视，25% 用于数字媒体。图 1 显示，他们的预算分配几乎是整个零售类别的镜像。
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, 和 Ashley Furniture. They all had sensibly the same SOV, with IKEA 和 La-Z-Boy a distant fifth and sixth with SOVs of 7.8% and 4.5%, respectively.
但这并不意味着他们拥有相同的媒体组合。虽然 Wayfair 在 2024 年的预算分配与同类产品持平，但图 3 显示，与同类产品相比，Rooms to Go 在电视和平面媒体上的花费略高，Ashley 在数字媒体上的花费相对较多，而 Sleep Number 则在音频媒体上花费较多。
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.
扭转竞争对手的局面
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 尼尔森市场 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.
