This gap didn't appear out of nowhere. For decades, marketing learned to measure and optimize the visual: logos, colors, shots, layouts. Sound was treated as an afterthought — something you "pick" at the end of production, once the budget is already spent. You can hear the result in every commercial break: most ads in any given category sound interchangeable.
A race where everyone watches and nobody listens
Try a simple test. Turn on a commercial break and close your eyes. How many brands can you recognize by sound alone? If it's two or three, that's a lot. The rest blur into a single stream: similar stock-library music, a similar voiceover, the same "warm tone" in the finale. Swap out the product packshot and nobody would notice the difference.
That's not a coincidence — it's a systemic gap. According to an Ipsos analysis, fewer than 10% of video ads use audio assets. We're talking about sounds that belong to the brand, not the category: a signature you'll hear nowhere else, a musical motif that returns in every campaign.
Why does this happen? Because in most organizations, sound has no owner. The brand book describes the logo down to the millimeter: clear space, variants, forbidden modifications. About how the brand sounds, it usually says nothing at all. And since nobody owns it, everybody picks it their own way — the spot's director, the video editor cutting social clips, the vendor supplying the call-center system.
The result is a paradox. Brands wage their war for attention on the one battlefield where everyone is fighting — the visual. Every pixel there is already claimed. Meanwhile, the channel that builds brand memory exceptionally well stands nearly empty. In visuals, you compete with the entire market. In sound, with almost no one.
3.44 times more effective. Findings from 2,015 ads
Ipsos captured the scale of this gap in its report "The Power of You." Researchers analyzed 2,015 video ads across 10 product categories, testing which creative elements do the most to build brand attention — that is, make the viewer connect the message with a specific sender rather than with "some ad."
The result upends the hierarchy we've grown used to. Brand audio assets turned out to be 3.44 times more effective at building brand attention. Visual assets scored 1.15. That's not a cosmetic difference. It's a channel three times more powerful than the one where most of the budget goes.
Audio assets build brand attention 3.44 times more effectively. Visual assets — 1.15 times. And fewer than 10% of ads use audio.
For comparison: characters — brand heroes and mascots — scored 6.01 in the same study. The takeaway goes beyond sound itself: recognizable, ownable assets win, not generic creative. The catch is that a character has to appear in the frame, and that requires a screen. Sound works even when nobody's watching.
Ipsos ran one more calculation. It compared the top-performing third of ads with the rest of the sample and checked what set them apart.
In the most effective third of ads, branded audio cues appeared 8.53 times more often than in the rest.
The best ads don't sound random. They sound like themselves — and that's exactly how you can tell them apart.
Sound enters the mind through a different door
Where does this advantage come from? Visuals demand attention. For an image to work, the viewer has to look at the screen. And increasingly, they don't: they're scrolling their phone, stepping into the kitchen, "watching" a show while ironing. In practice, today's video ad is often a radio ad — it reaches the ears, not the eyes.
Sound doesn't have that problem. You hear it even when you look away. You can't close your ears the way you close your eyes. That's why a sonic brand signature keeps working through the very seconds when the visual loses out to the second screen.
The second half of the answer lives in memory. A melody gets stored together with emotion and context, then comes back on its own — effortlessly, often uninvited. Everyone knows the feeling of a song that follows you around all day. An image has to be recalled. Well-designed sound recalls itself.
On top of that, sound doesn't need your full attention to leave a trace. A signature at the end of a spot, a notification chime, a theme in a podcast — all of it builds brand association even when the listener's mind is elsewhere. The mechanisms behind this deserve their own article, and they'll get one. For now, one point is enough: sound and image reach memory by different routes, and the audio route is still nearly free of competition.
Then there's the media environment. Brand contacts where the screen plays no role — or only a supporting one — keep multiplying: podcasts, music streaming, the car radio, smart speakers at home, headphones on the commute. In these channels, a brand without its own sound is simply absent. It can buy airtime, but it won't leave a trace that connects the message to it specifically.
The math that changes the budget conversation
Now for the financial side. Big-budget visuals get produced from scratch for every campaign: a new shoot, new set design, new post-production. Once the campaign ends, most of that work goes into the archive. The next campaign starts from zero all over again.
A brand's sound system works the other way around. You design it once, and it keeps working across every asset for years: in ads, in digital channels, in the app, on the customer hotline, in podcasts, at events. Every airing doesn't wear the asset down — it strengthens it, cementing the association between the sound and the brand.
Now put that next to the Ipsos data. A channel 3.44 times more effective than the visual one, cheaper to produce than big-budget footage, and used by fewer than 10% of ads. Asymmetries this stark are rare in marketing. Usually, whatever works is already crowded and expensive. Here it's the opposite: effective and empty.
One caveat. This isn't about "nice music for the spot." A stock-library track won't build brand memory, because tomorrow your competitor can license the same one. It's about an asset the brand owns the way it owns its logo: a sonic signature, a consistent musical language, a sound you can recognize without looking at the screen.
Step one: listen to your own brand
Before you design anything, take inventory. An audit of your sonic touchpoints takes less time than the average status meeting, and it answers a question most teams have never asked themselves: what does our brand actually sound like?
- Video and radio ads from the past 2–3 years — does anything tie them together beyond the logo in the final frame?
- Digital channels: social media, YouTube, podcasts — who picks the music there, and by what logic?
- Product and service: the app, notifications, the hotline — what does the brand sound like once the customer has already bought?
For each touchpoint, ask three questions. Could this sound be mistaken for a competitor's? Does it repeat consistently enough for anyone to have a chance of remembering it? And did someone in the organization make that choice deliberately — or did it "just kind of happen"? The answers usually sting, but they organize the conversation about sound better than any trend deck.
In most companies, this audit ends with the same conclusion. Every touchpoint sounds different, because the sound was chosen by many people with no shared strategy. That's not an accusation — it's simply where the market is today. And it's exactly why the advantage is still on the table. Your competitors almost certainly sound just as accidental as you do. Whoever starts sounding deliberate first will be the first to build sonic memory in the category — and collect the payoff of every airing that follows.
And what does the alternative look like? A coherent brand sound system that works at every touchpoint — from advertising through the app to the hotline. You can see — and hear — examples of such implementations in our case studies.
Sources
- Ipsos (Sheridan), "The Power of You," 2020 — analysis of 2,015 video ads across 10 product categories: effectiveness of audio assets (3.44x) and visual assets (1.15x) in building brand attention, character performance (6.01x), presence of branded audio cues in the most effective third of ads (8.53x more often), share of ads using audio (below 10%).
Want to know whether your brand sounds like anything at all? We'll run a free mini-audit of its sonic touchpoints and show you where your customers' memory is leaking away — book a free 20-minute consultation.