Share of Voice

My biggest admonition is when advertisers and a supposedly Mr.-Know-It-All Account Director from creative agencies start whinging on ‘share of voice’ (SOV). In layman’s term, SOV is a measure of a brand’s media spends in relation to the category’s media spend. This is usually based on industry estimates; hence figures will be much higher than actual spends. The more they spend relative to other brands in the category, the larger the “SOV”. It is otherwise known as Share of Spends (SOS) or Share of Investment (SOI)

Experience in the industry dictates that SOV is usually reserved to measure a brand’s unadjusted TV GRPs vs. competition based on the likely TV buying target (generally broader than actual buying target).SOV helps to identify how “loud” your TV weights were in market vs. competition. Technically, SOV and SOI/SOS are measuring two different things and people in the industry somehow generally always think they are the same thing. It definitely is not!

Now, that being explained let me tell you why I’m so peeved when it comes to such discussion. First off, if you are not spending on TV, you don’t have SOV – only SOS/SOI. Second, they posed silly statements such as: “The challenge is to maintain brand awareness and share of voice as close as to last year’s under this year 20% budget cut due to economic circumstance”

I wanna slap them purple. Seriously, if you really have to cut your budget, there’s nothing we can do if competition decides to triple their spending. If you want the highest share, then make sure you spend way more to be #1 in the category. Don’t cut your budget. There are no other ways around it. And no, spends does not necessarily equate to brand awareness, unless there are some form of tracking to deem so. You can spend millions in all the right channels, but if your creative sucks, that impacts on awareness level too.

5 reasons as to why one should not be looking at SOV/SOI/SOS as a form of measurement to awareness or business:

1. Competitors’ spending cannot be predicted accurately
2. It doesn’t take into account discounts and special rates accorded to advertisers since industry estimates are all based on rate-card costs
3. Conveniently ignore effectiveness of a brand’s advertising
4. Can only assume that competitors have got it right
5. Spending levels not the only factor that correspond to awareness, trial rate or sales

So, don’t go blaming the media agency why your “SOV” is low as compared to competitors if you have to cut your budgets. There’s nothing we can do to prevent competition from spending more if they want to. And please, if you are not using TV, it is SOS/SOI, not SOV.