
A study from Les Binet and Peter Field found that for every 10-point increase in excess share of voice, brands see around a 0.5% annual market share growth on average. But does this marketing principle still hold true in today's fragmented media...
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Dan Cleveland
So the data you get in, it's not like all the dots are straight on a line. We're either changing the slope or we're getting a shift in the curve in the relationship. So that fuzzy math is that it's not something where you're gonna put like an R value on it to understand the exact tightness of that fit relationship.
Elena Jasper
Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the chief product architect of misfits and machines. Hello.
Angela Voss
Good to be with you.
Elena Jasper
And we're joined by a special guest, Dan Cleveland, our vice president of strategy at Marketing Architects.
Dan Cleveland
Hey there.
Angela Voss
Hey, Dan. Thanks for joining us.
Dan Cleveland
Thrilled to be here.
Elena Jasper
We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. Today, we are talking about excess share of voice or eesav. We'll cover the history of share of voice, why and when excess share of voice leads to market share, how to measure it, how to grow it, and much more. And Dan has joined us because he is our expert on Xs share of voice and how we calculate it for our clients. Now, we usually jump right into research or an article when we open these episodes and I have one ready. But before I get to it, I thought first we might define some terms. So let's start with the basics. What is share voice and why has it been such a foundational metric in marketing? And Rob, I believe you prepared a little Rob's history lesson for this one.
Rob DeMars
It's time for Rob's history lesson. I sure did. Oh, yes. Share a voice. Sov as some like to call it. But I like to call it the OG metric of competitive swagger. So back in the day when media was dominated by tv, radio and print, that was when they would take pieces of parchment, Elena, and put it together into these pages and they'd make this thing called a magazine. You wouldn't, you wouldn't, you wouldn't scroll it. You'd actually kind of turn the page.
Elena Jasper
So, yeah, today I wouldn't know what to do. I'd just start. I just start scrolling start.
Rob DeMars
I got too silly. Okay, so back then, share voice became the go to way to measure how loud your brand was shouting compared to everyone else in the room. At its core, it simply meant of all the advertising in your category, how Much of it was yours. If your brand accounted for 25% of the ad spend in your category, you had 25% share of voice. And it mattered a lot because back then attention was limited and channels were few. So being louder than your competition often meant being more memorable. Share A Voice became a kind of scoreboard, a way to track visibility, presence and competitive pressure. It was clean, it was simple, and it gave marketers a way to justify spend in language the C suite could understand. We need to be heard if we want to be chosen. Now, sure, the landscape's a lot messier today. We've got fragmented media influencers, emerging social media platforms and a million micro moments. But the idea behind Share Voice, that your brand needs to be seen and heard in proportion to the space you want to be in, is timeless. So SLV may be old school, but it's still got plenty of game. Elena.
Elena Jasper
Thanks, Rob. And we are going to talk about that fragmentation because that's a big topic that comes up when you bring up share of voice today. We are going to talk about that later, but for now I want to also define excess share of voice. So, Ang, what is that excess share of voice theory and then how does it link share of voice to share of market?
Angela Voss
Yeah, great. So excess share of voice, one of the most foundational concepts in marketing effectiveness, was championed by Lesbinette and Peter Field. And at its core, ESOV is the difference between your share of voice, which is the percentage of total category ad spend that your brand represents, and your share of market, which would of course be your portion of category sales. And the power of this metric really lies in its predictability. Bennett and Field's research from the IPA databank found that for every 10 point increase in excess share of voice, brands typically see around a.05% annual market share growth on average. I'm going to get darts at me. We've had darts via LinkedIn. I can feel them hitting me. And we'll talk a little bit about the predictiveness in a second and the effect compounds, especially for brand building campaigns. The principles clear, spend more than your fair share and generally you're likely to grow, spend less and generally you risk that decline. So it's one of the most practical, just enduring rules in marketing. So one of the best tools for setting budget levels in line with growth ambitions for a brand.
Elena Jasper
Yeah, when you first hear it, think about it, you're like, this is a gold mine for marketers. But it's definitely not without some controversy. But now that we're all on the same page I did want to tee us up with a bit of an article and I chose one that questions the theory because like I said and like Ange mentioned, this is not something that's totally accepted and supported in the marketing community. So this article, it's by Bhavan Pavari for the IPA and it's titled ESOV An Excessive Focus on the Wrong Thing. And in the article he asks can we still rely on media spend alone to drive growth in a world where attention is fragmented, impressions are cheap but often meaningless, and creative is either ignored or talked about? 20 years ago putting 10 points of media weight above your market share was a safe bet to grow, but today you might be shouting into the void. Bhavin makes the case that fame and creative cut through, not just budget are what truly earn attention and by extension market share. In fact, he flips the script entirely, suggesting we think of creative as a true driver of excess share of voice and media as its amplifier, not the other way around as we've traditionally understood it. So I've heard similar objections to access share voice, mostly tying it to digital spend and how we can't count on digital attention. So it kind of sullies the original calculation. So Angie, how strong is the evidence that ESOV leads to growth? And are there any notable exceptions?
Angela Voss
Yeah, so that evidence that excess share of voice drives market share growth does remain strong even in the post Covid media landscape. But to your point and to Bhavan's point, it's not just as simple as spend more, grow more. Studies by Field and others continue to show that positive ESOB correlates with growth, especially when supported by strong creative and high attention media environments. That said, Bhavan's critique is sort of timely. In the fragmented digital world, not all impressions are created equal and that digital spend can artificially inflate share voice metrics without delivering meaningful attention. So the most current thinking reframes ESOB as potential to be seen not a guarantee of impact. Today it's the combination of creative quality, fame effects, media attention that determines how much real value you can get from that spend. Creative awarded campaigns, for example, can deliver two times or more growth per point of ESOV compared to average. So yes, ESOV still works, but only when paired with the right message, the right media context. When it fails, it's usually due to low attention placement, weak creative, or it could be too because you're operating in a declining category. So I think the takeaway is budget alone doesn't grow brands, attention ultimately does. ESOV is still a powerful planning tool, but in today's world, it's sort of a starting point versus just an endpoint.
Elena Jasper
And Angie mentioned this, but when Dan and I were prepping for this podcast, and Dan, I'm sure you'll speak to this more in a little bit, we were saying, yeah, like sometimes it doesn't work out for you, but that's probably a sign of something if the formula isn't going your way. So, Dan, thank you again for joining us. You're the person that gets to figure this all out for us and our clients and gets to deal with all the complexity. You measure it, you track it. For the brands we work with, it's a great metric that we can use to justify TV spend or prove out how TV is working. So walk us through the tough math. How is XS share of voice calculated?
Dan Cleveland
Well, thanks. So access share of voice is really looking at a number of different dimensions that are relevant to marketers and to your business. So we look at engagement, brand awareness, and also share of market. So when we start looking at the share of voice exercise, obviously the foundation of it is the actual share of voice data. So we use partners like Vivix to aggregate that information for the competitive set as well as our client to get that information about the category. So we understand the category size, the trajectory of the category from a spend standpoint. And then as you were mentioning, Ange, looking at the actual share of voice percentage of that particular brand against the total. So that particular calculation then is really that line that Andrew's mentioning is that's the bar essentially that you're currently at. And then know what we see is that when we start looking at spend variances, whether above or below that line, we are looking for changes or understanding the effect or the change that it has on things like engagement, which we use Google Trends to understand or proxy that just real quick on that. Essentially we're creating queries that represent what a brand's engagement would look like through Google. We do that for the full competitive set. So we have something we call share of search, which is that combination of that brand compared to its competitive set from a engagement metric standpoint. So there's some nuances there and there's a lot of Boolean and adders delete kind of comments to clean up those queries. In short, that gives us a foundational element to understand, even near term or almost real time with Google trend data, how their brand is actually performing. The second one I mentioned was brand awareness. So all of our clients get a brand study, a couple times a year. And that gives us a chance to see from an aided and non aided awareness standpoint what changes are occurring. That often is at least a secondary metric for brands to understand to what degree they're gaining ground against a competitive set and just growing. And then the third category that we look at is market share and that is the toughest of them. Obviously that data is most protected or is least publicly available. So we have a number of different options for us. In some cases we can go to our clients and they actually have industry studies or they have a pulse on that on their own when they share that. Obviously that would be the gold standard. If we can get that. For categories where we don't have that kind of information, we are using things like credit card data or other means of measuring the overall category spending levels and that then becomes what we're looking at as the foundation for the market share changes. And Lenny, just go back to your first question. One thing that we have found a couple times, which is actually it's been very interesting, is that ESOB can actually work with your marketing effectiveness measurements. So we have seen situations where brands have had inconsistent or degrading marketing effectiveness outcomes because their mix was wrong, because their creative wasn't compelling, because they were in the wrong places. Sometimes that's why they come to us is because they're having trouble and what they're doing isn't working or it's broke. And esob gives us a chance to look behind the curtain a little bit and see exactly what are some of the foundational problems they may be struggling with.
Elena Jasper
So esop, it should work for your brand and if it doesn't, that might be a sign. Like if you are spending more than your category and you're not seeing the gains, that can be a sign that something's off with your mix. You maybe you're investing in the wrong channels, maybe your creative is not strong enough. So it's not necessarily the formula is broken, it's that maybe it's not perfectly balanced.
Dan Cleveland
Your brand or your strategy is broken. Yes. So it's a sign that you're sick. You know, it's a go see the doctor moment when you are seeing decreased performance from a marketing effectiveness standpoint. Standpoint.
Elena Jasper
So just to make sure I understand, like share Voice you're saying is literally like media spend. We calculate it by seeing like what are you spending on all your channels. And the share of market's a bit harder to calculate. But we're looking at credit card data. We're basically trying to see what's the overall spend in the category. And then we use metrics and we're going to talk more about share search later. But we use metrics like search awareness to kind of like prove out that these metrics are leading to improvements.
Dan Cleveland
Yes. And we see a strong relationship across all three of those. Most of our case studies, those three metrics are on the same trajectory. It's just, you know, different slopes and whatnot. And the benefit of the share of search, if I was just to go there for a reason, is that the brand study information typically is going to be done once or twice a year. For most brands, share of market data is only going to be available rarely monthly, sometimes quarterly, sometimes annually. So you have these long gaps, like when can you start to get updates and learn some cause and effect relationships. Share of search is kind of that bellwether or that scenario in the coal mine forest, because we can get updates on that essentially daily to see what's happening. And not that you're reacting to daily changes or metrics, but you're able to see over a much shorter window of time what effects may be starting to create a trend.
Elena Jasper
One thing I did want to mention is when you and I were talking about this episode, you called it fuzzy math, which I really liked. Could you talk a little bit more about why? Because we want to be honest about how difficult this can be to do. Like, why do you call it fuzzy math?
Dan Cleveland
Well, for a person that works in data and at least has an aspiration for knowing some statistics, all of these data sources are not pure. They're not locked down. You're not working with test tube clinical research. You're out in the real world and you're gathering things that are user defined. You know, almost all these things we're talking about are things that we are creating queries from other data collection resources. So the data you get in, it's not like you're going to have this trend line that is exactly, you know, all dots are straight on a line. What we're looking for is changes over time and to what degree do we see consistency in movement. And that gives us a sense for that. We're either changing the slope or we're getting a shift in the curve in the relationship. So that fuzzy math is that it's not something where you're going to put like an R value on it to understand the exact tightness of that fitter relationship, although we do use those stats to understand or at least to have a proxy for it. But that's not the standard. The standard is to understand the relative performance time. And it gives you not necessarily like a formula output of, oh, here is the dollar amount to spend in total or by channel. But it tells us that we're spending either about enough or maybe not enough. Or it gives us a sense for the direction of where our decision needs to be made.
Rob DeMars
Well, math has always been fuzzy to me, so I appreciate that.
Elena Jasper
That's why Rob's a good marketer, because marketers rarely get math that's like completely clear. Sometimes we have to make some smart assumptions. So tan, I did want to ask you what you thought about that article. You know, I tried to choose something that kind of brought a different perspective in Nexus Share of Voice. I kind of know the answer to this because you're doing these calculations. So maybe I'll ask it this way. Why is it still relevant? You know, when we've got all this fragmentation, A lot of marketing spend is digital. Like, why do you still think it's relevant for brands to try to calculate this?
Dan Cleveland
Well, brands still are faced with the problem of deciding what to spend. And if you were to say, take ESV out of the equation, you still have that now, what are you going to use to understand your spend levels? So my reaction to the article was that it's smart marketers aren't going to use this one dimension or they're not just going to use one tool. We're a many models believer agency, as I'm sure our listeners already know. But the SOV piece from my perspective, gives a unique view as to what are the likely optimized spend ranges that you should be entertaining or testing into to as you go forward. And it's again, fuzzy math. It's not going to be a single number. You're going to get punched out of this. That's going to be like the perfect right answer. It's a tool that has a unique way of comparing some of these things that are otherwise almost impossible to figure out and assume it. So I would say a common mistake for like a person who is writing that kind of article. They may think that just changing their spend levels, if they increase their spend by 5%, I should see 5% change in my, you know, outcomes or I should see a positive lift. Well, you could be increasing spend, but if you're still underspending the rate of change that's happening in your category, you may actually be planning for a decline, although you just are able to understand why that would possibly happen. So having that kind of model, what I like about it is it gives you a full broad view of the category and your brand's role within the category. And that's pretty tough to replicate with any other tool.
Elena Jasper
So share of search is kind of an interesting metric. I know you mentioned earlier that we're tracking engagements with Google, comparing it to your category, and it's another piece to the puzzle, right? If your awareness is going up, is your share of voice going up? Your share of search should be going up. That feels like something that would be easier for marketers to to calculate. How do you feel about that? Like, do you think that every marketer should be calculating share of search? Is that easier to calculate then? Like share a voice share market?
Dan Cleveland
I think the two work really well together. The two are designed to be able to show that cause and effect. So that spend level versus what you're getting from an engagement level is really that first peek into marketing effectiveness. Are you getting incremental gain from your dollars in marketplace, or do those new impressions actually generate something that you hadn't seen before? So the reason we always bring them together is because that cause and effect is really where the value comes from. That's where you're really learning that there's a prize or a benefit coming out of this, monetizing it.
Elena Jasper
Is calculating share of search simple enough to explain on a podcast or is it too complicated?
Dan Cleveland
It's the same thing as share of voice, just that it's using the engagement metrics. So it's using the Google Trends score. I would say that gets a little bit complicated because you may have to do some things to normalize data across multiple queries. But essentially you're using that 0 to 100 scale that Google Trends gives you for all of the queries within your or your browser or your query view there. And that is what we're using to sum up for total. And then look at a brand versus total as the concentration share of.
Elena Jasper
All right, well, people, you'll have to contact Dan Cleveland at Marketing Architects if you want your share of search calculated because it is not easy enough to talk through. Turns out you need to be an expert. You can't just explain it on a podcast. Well, Dan, so you're running these analyses and you're not looking at just like our clients, you're looking at all their competitors and all their media spend and how they're growing over time. And it gives a really cool picture into what's working. So based on what you've seen, and this is all recently up to date data, which media channels contribute Most to share of voice today. And where does TV fit into that equation?
Dan Cleveland
I think what we're seeing is that brands are starting to get back to realizing that top of funnel still has to be part of the equation for them to have an effective long term plan. So what we've seen is brands that have fun focused a lot on the bottom funnel or last click are the brands where we more likely see flattening of their curves and or seeing these marketing effectiveness declines or drops. What we tend to see is that when brands are really wanting to build brand awareness in that share of market, those are not necessarily efficiency measures. Those are tonnage, those are size, those are ranking kind of measures. That's where we see top of funnel channels tend to perform better.
Elena Jasper
It's the data. People can't argue with the data. So ang, we like to talk about kind of the upsides of growing share of voice because like Dan said, like TV is a great way to do it, but a lot of brands are actually more faced with the reality of trying to stop it from decreasing. So what are those risks of underspending or letting your share of voice fall below your share market?
Angela Voss
Yeah, it's a really timely question. If we had a live audience, we might be scared to see a show of hands of maybe marketers that are thinking that they might come into a conversation regarding declining marketing budget just in the face of tariffs and consumer spending and what might be coming. So to your point, we like to talk about the upsides but maybe more pressing challenges preventing it from declining. You know, when your share of voice falls below your share of market, that's negative esab, that's not a spot we want to be. You're no longer just missing a growth opportunity, you're inviting that decline. And over time brands that underspend relative to their market share tend to lose that mental availability which makes it easier for them to be forgettable, easier to be ignored by their target consumers. And at that point of purchase that's so important. And competitors with stronger or more consistent advertising start to fill that vacuum, slowly capturing that attention and that share. And there's also evidence that underspending weakens your brand's pricing power. You know, we've often shamed ourselves on the show, I think over lack of loyalty to brands that we really do love. But without that reinforcement in consumers minds, your brand becomes more interchangeable and that leads to potentially the loss of the customer altogether, but also potentially to price sensitivity and margin erosion.
Elena Jasper
So hopefully by now people are on the same page that this Matters. It's important. Dan, I know it's hard to get practical with this because it is complex, but how do you think marketers could set realistic excess share of voice goals? Are there any tools or metrics that can help them track progress? Like do they just need to work with an agency like marketing architect? Because there are there things that they could do today to kind of set them on the right path?
Dan Cleveland
Yeah. So getting access to that category spend data is probably the first big step. I mean either you have that or you don't. If you do. One of the first application steps we take is start looking at and try to create a projection for where the category is going. So that essentially gives you the new standard of what you're needing to spend against or really what your competitive set is up to. With that competitive set spend set, you're then able to start to understand what kind of cause and effects may be occurring. You know, looking back in your history, seeing when we spent above or below that, what did we see as these outcomes from a brand or a share market stand standpoint. And then the step that's probably toughest but also most exciting is monetizing it. So getting a sense for if I spend x more dollars in marketing, what is my positive return on that investment? And that is the piece that once you start to understand that relationship, all of a sudden it becomes a lot easier equation to really understand and have an argument for why you would have a change in your spends strategy. The other piece is looking at your past outcomes, what kind of marketing effectiveness insights could be generated from that. So if you're seeing a flattening curve, even though you're spending at levels that you would expect more or better, it's probably time to reassess your mix, reassess some of your other marketing components to see if there are things that you should really be shoring up if you're.
Elena Jasper
Going to make an argument for more budget, how could it hurt to bring something like this is like an additional proof point argument. Dan, when we talked about this, you get pretty excited about this stuff. I do. I think it's really interesting. And you talked a little bit about the future and some things you want to do with this data. So where do you see this going next for marketing architects, one of the.
Dan Cleveland
Things we're working on now is blending this with our advanced attribution or MMM types of projects. So one of the challenges of applying MMM is you're still looking at generally a straight line trajectory into the future as you're looking for what are those optimal spend levels and mixes what the EOS allows us to, to bring in. There is that marketing effectiveness angle that MMM typically doesn't include. That allows us to understand if we're actually able to bend the curve, the future curve, to get again a more realistic picture of what the likely monetization would look like as opposed to just straight lining it, which, you know, it could go either way in terms of over underestimating. But that marketing effectiveness angle allows us to again give our clients a much stronger tool, much stronger argument to actually change their spending strategy.
Elena Jasper
Dan, you're so smart. I sometimes I have trouble following. So you're saying that basically one of the challenges with MMM is that it's looking at what happened in the past. So when it predicts the future, it kind of says it's going to be like the past. But this could help us make more of an argument for. All right, well, if you're changing your strategy, like it can help us maybe make the case for, hey, you're adding tv. Like this is how it could change in the future.
Dan Cleveland
Exactly. And the change isn't always linear. So when you think of like a great creative outcome or when you really nail a spend level or you've got an advantage more with impressions and marketplace, it's not usually just a little straight line change in your outcomes. I mean, you're looking at something that has the chance to really take a turn upward in your favor. So that's the piece that is, I would say unique about blending these things together is that you're not just using statistics to kind of define your future opportunity, you're using actual marketing outcomes from in the market, from what you already learned to know that when we do this, we're able to see something that actually exceeds expectation as opposed to just meeting expectation.
Rob DeMars
So it's kind of like Back to the future, like Marty McFly looking at the past, realizing variables that could change and it could fundamentally change the course of your future.
Dan Cleveland
A little flux capacitor there.
Rob DeMars
Yeah, a little flux capacitor, man.
Elena Jasper
It's like a marketer's dream actually to be able to do something like that. Well, I'd say people that are listening to this, they're hopefully excited about this, like maybe wanting to look into it more. I know that in our just personal experience, more and more marketers seem interested in these metrics, like wanting to understand them, wanting to use them to make the case for investments and typically more kind of long term, sometimes channels like tv. So I wanted to end just on A note of getting even more practical because that always helps me. So Angel, I wanted to ask you first, for marketers listening to this, what do you think is kind of the first step they could take or the first few steps to applying this theory to their own like brand strategy?
Angela Voss
Yeah, Dan, I would, I would love your take on this too. You've already hit some like really practical establishing baselines. How do we get access to share voice data? What are proxies potentially for share of market if that data is a little hard to come by? But I think from a marketer's perspective, what this allows us to do is take a more active role in driving predictable growth for your brand. So real time application for us. Dan and I just having this conversation yesterday, you know, a client looking to be at a 500 million dollar run rate by Q3 of 2026, what would that mean for market share? What levels of share of voice might be necessary to get there? And are our current plan budgets enough to get us there? What direction is the category headed? Is it sufficient? What else would you add, Dan?
Dan Cleveland
Well, one of the dimensions we haven't really talked about is impressions, not just spend. So the ability to find quality impressions at a lower cost than what you normally are, that is another multiplier of the effect because used to be, in theory we use dollars because impressions are tough to get or tougher to get than just the dollars. From a tracking standpoint, pulling that lever of finding more efficient ways to actually put the impressions in front of the right people, that is a way to again further improve your outcomes relative to market share.
Angela Voss
Such a good point. The goal isn't spend as much as you can. The goal is to get as many eyeballs, relevant eyeballs on the marketing message and in turn see the sales result.
Rob DeMars
I think in a way to simplify it even further for people like me in the cheap seats, you know, how do you make sure, as you said earlier, Ange, that you truly have distinctive assets? Right? That's going to help. That's a practical thing that you can do. How do you look for media that punches above its weight class, right? Especially for the category that you're in. How do you not try to own the whole category but potentially define your own niche? How do you make yourself special? That space that, that, that white space within a larger category? And I think lastly, how do you be consistent and not chaotic? Don't just shout media, you know, and then just go dark. Like how do you keep a consistent message out there at a level that is considered an investment, but it's so that people don't forget about you.
Elena Jasper
Yeah, it's a great point.
Angela Voss
Rob.
Elena Jasper
We were working on case study the other day about pulsing media and just how detrimental it is to your brand, to your awareness. Please don't do that. People don't come on and off if you can help it. It's not good. It's funny how much, like, all the stuff we're talking about, if we wanted to really simplify it, it sounds a lot like quality reach. Like, it always seems to come back to that. I'm sorry, but it does. I know we. Sometimes it feels like it's too simple, but it seems to come back there anyways. Well, let's end with something fun and let's keep our kind of share of voice theme going here. Dan, we'll ask you first. What's a brand, a person, an idea, a word that seems to take up way too much share of voice in your life right now.
Dan Cleveland
Oh, boy. If there's a word that I hear, maybe more than I think I should to be something manifest.
Elena Jasper
Oh, wow, he's coming for these people. Oh, no.
Dan Cleveland
They overused terms. 425 maybe. I just lost a few friends there, but that's what came to mind.
Elena Jasper
Yeah, it can be. It could definitely be overused. I'd say that's fair.
Angela Voss
Just manifest your share of market. I don't understand what the problem is, Dan.
Elena Jasper
Manifest. Less people saying manifest.
Dan Cleveland
It just makes it really easy, doesn't it, Ange?
Angela Voss
Start with unwavering belief. Should I go?
Elena Jasper
Yeah.
Angela Voss
Okay. So this was so simple for me. I'm going with Stanley Thermoses. I have three daughters between the ages of 11 and 16. And so when I say a brand that's taking up too much share of voice in my life, I actually mean their lives. We don't need any more Stanley's. We have an abundance of liquid vessels, and they're huge. And we lose the lids, the straws. We just don't need anymore. Sorry, Stanley, you. You did a great job.
Elena Jasper
They're so loud, too. They're always, like, clanging around. I always worry when I hold mine, if I fall, if it's gonna go through my head or something. Like, they are pretty aggressive.
Angela Voss
I know. They're great. It's just. Oh, man. How many Stanleys could you possibly need? I'm not drinking that much water.
Rob DeMars
I've got a word that definitely has way too much share of voice in my head right now. And I don't mean this as a political statement at all. I've just. I'd rather not hear this word for a long time, and that's tariff. Oh, I just.
Angela Voss
The word. I didn't help. I said it right on this podcast.
Dan Cleveland
It's just.
Rob DeMars
Don't need it. Don't need any more conversation about tariffs right now.
Elena Jasper
Fair enough. I would agree with that. That I would say, for me, it's the weather. Like, we all live in Minnesota. I didn't go anywhere on vacation this winter. And I'm just constantly checking, like, when is spring? When is spring? It's April. We just had a snowstorm. I'm just sick of worrying about the weather. I just want it to be warm, please. Well, I think that wraps us up. Thank you so much for joining us, Dan. That was great.
Dan Cleveland
My pleasure. Thanks.
Rob DeMars
That was fun, Dan.
Angela Voss
Thanks, Dan.
Elena Jasper
That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing. Rob, you look confused. Or are you good?
Rob DeMars
I'm just.
Dan Cleveland
I'm just excited.
Elena Jasper
Are you already confused?
Rob DeMars
I just been ready to go. I mean, I completely tuned out the last 20 minutes, so. No, I'm ready. You guys are all too smart for me, so I'm just like, all right, let's do this.
Dan Cleveland
Marketing Architects.
Podcast Summary: The Louder You Are, the More You Grow: Why ESOV Still Works
Episode Details:
The episode delves into the concepts of Share of Voice (SOV) and Excess Share of Voice (ESOV), foundational metrics in modern marketing that correlate advertising spend with market share growth. Elena Jasper introduces the topic by setting the stage for a comprehensive discussion on these metrics, emphasizing their relevance in today's fragmented media landscape.
Rob DeMars provides a nostalgic history lesson on SOV, tracing its origins back to the era dominated by TV, radio, and print media. He explains:
"Share of voice became the go-to way to measure how loud your brand was shouting compared to everyone else in the room. If your brand accounted for 25% of the ad spend in your category, you had 25% share of voice." (02:06)
Rob highlights how SOV served as a scoreboard for visibility and competitive presence, enabling marketers to justify their spend in terms the C-suite could understand. Despite the evolution of media channels, he asserts that the core idea of SOV—ensuring proportional visibility—remains timeless.
Angela Voss introduces ESOV, expanding on its definition and significance:
"ESOV is the difference between your share of voice and your share of market. For every 10-point increase in ESOV, brands typically see around a 0.5% annual market share growth on average." (05:04)
She references the foundational research by Les Binet and Peter Field, emphasizing ESOV's role in predicting market share growth. Angela underscores that ESOV is a practical tool for setting budget levels aligned with growth ambitions, reinforcing the principle: "Spend more than your fair share and generally you're likely to grow; spend less and risk a decline."
Elena introduces a critical perspective by referencing an article by Bhavan Pavari titled "ESOV: An Excessive Focus on the Wrong Thing." The article questions the reliability of ESOV in today's media landscape, where attention is fragmented, digital impressions are cheap and often meaningless, and creative content may be ignored or conversely, overly saturated.
"Bhavan makes the case that fame and creative cut through, not just budget are what truly earn attention and by extension market share." (06:18)
Angela Voss responds by acknowledging the validity of these critiques but maintains that ESOV remains robust when combined with strong creative and high-attention media environments. She notes:
"ESOV still works, but only when paired with the right message, the right media context." (06:18)
Angela emphasizes that ESOV has evolved from a straightforward spend comparison to a complex interplay of creative quality, media attention, and strategic message placement.
Dan Cleveland delves into the intricate process of calculating ESOV, describing it as "fuzzy math" due to the imperfect nature of real-world data:
"It's not something where you're going to put like an R value on it to understand the exact tightness of that fit relationship... It tells us that we're spending either about enough or maybe not enough." (13:52)
He outlines the multiple dimensions involved:
Dan explains the interrelationship between these metrics, noting that ESOV serves as a diagnostic tool to reveal underlying issues in marketing effectiveness, such as poor media mix or weak creative.
Addressing concerns about media fragmentation, Dan argues that ESOV continues to provide valuable insights:
"Brands still are faced with the problem of deciding what to spend. If you were to say, take ESOV out of the equation, you still have that now, what are you going to use to understand your spend levels?" (15:45)
He asserts that while digital media complicates the landscape, ESOV remains a critical component in multi-model marketing strategies, offering a unique perspective that other tools cannot fully replicate.
Elena introduces the concept of Share of Search as an additional metric that complements ESOV. Dan elaborates:
"Share of search is designed to show that cause and effect. So that spend level versus what you're getting from an engagement level is really that first peek into marketing effectiveness." (17:45)
Share of Search leverages Google Trends data to provide real-time insights into brand engagement, enabling marketers to detect trends and adjust strategies more dynamically than traditional brand studies or market share data alone.
The discussion shifts to practical steps marketers can take to implement ESOV effectively:
Angela Voss emphasizes the importance of using ESOV to drive predictable growth:
"It's a starting point versus just an endpoint." (07:50)
Dan Cleveland outlines actionable steps:
Angela adds that marketers should aim to actively drive growth by setting realistic ESOV goals aligned with their brand ambitions and market conditions.
Angela Voss warns of the dangers associated with underspending, where a brand's SOV falls below its market share:
"You are inviting that decline. Brands that underspend relative to their market share tend to lose mental availability, making them forgettable and easily ignored." (20:28)
She highlights the long-term consequences, including weakened pricing power and increased price sensitivity among consumers, which can lead to margin erosion.
Looking ahead, Dan Cleveland shares Marketing Architects' plans to integrate ESOV with advanced attribution models and Marketing Mix Models (MMM):
"Blending this with our advanced attribution or MMM types of projects allows us to bend the curve, getting a more realistic picture of likely monetization." (24:01)
This integration aims to enhance predictive accuracy by incorporating real-time marketing effectiveness data, moving beyond historical trends to anticipate and influence future outcomes.
As the episode concludes, practical advice is offered to marketers seeking to apply ESOV principles:
Angela Voss suggests:
Rob DeMars adds:
The episode wraps up with a fun segment where each participant shares a brand, word, or idea that currently has "too much share of voice" in their lives. This light-hearted exchange underscores the episode's central theme—balancing visibility with effectiveness.
Notable Quotes:
This episode of The Marketing Architects provides a deep dive into ESOV, reaffirming its continued relevance while addressing contemporary challenges posed by media fragmentation and digital saturation. Through expert insights and practical advice, marketers are equipped with the knowledge to leverage ESOV effectively, ensuring their brands not only maintain but also grow their market presence in an increasingly complex advertising landscape.