Question 1

What is share of voice and how do you measure it?

Accepted Answer

**Share of voice (SOV)** is your brand's proportion of the total presence in a market — measured across advertising, organic search, social conversation or media coverage, depending on the version used.

**The classic advertising definition.** Your advertising spend as a proportion of total category spend. If the category spends £100m and you spend £10m, your SOV is 10%.

**Why it matters — the ESOV relationship.** The concept's importance comes from a body of work, notably by **Peter Field and Les Binet** drawing on IPA data and earlier Nielsen research, finding a relationship between **share of voice** and **share of market (SOM)**.

The finding: brands whose SOV **exceeds** their SOM tend to **grow**; those whose SOV is below their SOM tend to **decline**. The gap is called **Excess Share of Voice (ESOV)**, and the reported relationship is roughly that each 10 points of ESOV corresponds to around 0.5 percentage points of annual market share growth — with the exact coefficient varying by category.

**Why this is useful.** It reframes advertising budget from a cost to be minimised into a **competitive position** to be held. It also explains something otherwise puzzling: a brand can maintain the same spend, lose share of voice because competitors increased theirs, and decline without doing anything differently.

**Other ways SOV is measured:**

**Search SOV** — your share of impressions or clicks for a set of relevant keywords, available directly in ad platforms as impression share.

**Social SOV** — your share of brand mentions in a category, from social listening tools.

**Media SOV** — share of press coverage.

**The caveats:**

**Category definition determines the answer.** Draw the boundary differently and SOV changes entirely, which makes it easy to manipulate.

**Spend is a poor proxy for attention.** Two campaigns of equal cost can differ enormously in effectiveness, and creative quality is not captured.

**Data on competitor spend** is estimated, not observed.

**Mentions are not equal** — negative coverage counts the same as positive in raw share.

Question 2

What is tone of voice, and does it actually matter?

Accepted Answer

How a brand sounds in its writing — vocabulary, rhythm, formality, humour, what it says and what it refuses to say. It matters considerably more than its reputation as a soft branding exercise

Question 3

What is podcast advertising, and how is it bought?

Accepted Answer

Advertising inside audio programming, and its distinctive property is that a large share of it is read by the host — which is why it performs differently from almost every other advertising format.

Question 4

What is brand lift measurement?

Accepted Answer

Measuring whether advertising changed what people think — awareness, recall, consideration, favourability — rather than what they immediately bought. It exists because a great deal of advertising

Question 5

What is search intent and why does it matter more than keyword volume?

Accepted Answer

Search intent is what someone is actually trying to accomplish when they type a query. It matters more than search volume because a page that ranks for a high-volume keyword while misreading the

Question 6

How does influencer marketing actually work?

Accepted Answer

A brand pays someone with an audience to feature its product — and the mechanics of pricing, contracting and disclosure are considerably more structured than the casual appearance suggests. The

Question 7

What is marketing mix modelling and why is it coming back?

Accepted Answer

Marketing mix modelling (MMM) is a statistical technique estimating how different marketing activities contribute to sales, using aggregate historical data rather than tracking individuals. How it

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