The Hidden Marketing Multiplier: If consumers adore this content - why do so many brands under-invest, under-report and under-value it?
- Emily Waters
- Apr 23
- 6 min read
1 The investment gap nobody’s talking about
Marketers love to chase the eyeballs, yet we chronically under-fund the ears. IFPI’s global Engaging With Music 2023 study reports that people now listen to 20.7 hours of music every week (almost 25% of waking hours), up from 20.1 hours in 2022 (IFPI). By contrast, licensing or commissioning music typically soaks up well under 5% of the average campaign’s production or media budget.
The result is a yawning “attention-cost” gap: the one media stimulus your consumer is emotionally binge-consuming all day is the one you invest in least.
Why the disconnect? Because unlike viewability or click-through, music’s contribution to objectives lives below the marketing dashboard waterline - in emotion, memory and brand meaning. That creates a measurement blind-spot which finance departments duly punish at planning time. Because they aren’t measuring it, no-one is managing it.
2 Music is the emotional cheat-code
When McGill neuroscientists put volunteers in an fMRI scanner and played their favourite tracks, they saw clinically measurable dopamine spikes in the striatum - the same reward circuitry activated by sex, food or a social-media likes (ScienceDaily). Critically, dopamine is also the neurotransmitter that tags an experience as “worth storing” in long-term memory - quite a handy cheat code for anyone in branding or marketing…
But it goes further than that:
Attention magnet - Dopamine also fuels approach behaviour, so congruent music keeps people watching (or not skipping) long enough for your message to land.
Memory glue - By repeating the same melodic signature you create an always-on retrieval cue for brand choice at shelf or in-app.
Emotion multiplier - Layering music that mirrors the narrative arc increases the intensity of whatever feeling you’re trying to evoke, whether joy (e.g. Coca-Cola’s 2024 “Be Who You Are” remix) or quiet reassurance (e.g. John Lewis’s annual Christmas covers).
Binet & Field have shown repeatedly that campaigns which lead on emotion - as music-driven work does by default - are more than twice as likely to deliver very large profit growth over three years than rational, message-driven campaigns. (IPA Effectiveness Databank meta-analysis, 2021). Add to this that music operates principally on the subconscious, System1, brain and your consumers have no choice but to be emotionally cornered by brand appropriate music.
Furthermore, a University of Leicester meta-study found that brands whose music matched their personality were 96 % more likely to be recalled than those using mismatched or generic tracks. Plus memory isn’t a vanity metric: Binet & Field’s IPA Databank analyses show that brand recall is the strongest driver of long-term share growth. So if your audio cues aren’t distinctively you, you’re generously funding someone else’s salience (CMO Alliance).
3 The main reasons that marketeers under-value music:
3.1 Short-termism trumps memory building
Music’s biggest strength is long-term implicit memory: jingles, audio logos and melodic motifs prime recall weeks or years later. Yet quarterly KPIs reward trackable clicks, not future pricing power. Even Adweek has called audio “dark matter” for brand memory because it isn’t picked up by short-term metrics (Adweek). Music is most effective at medium and long term brand building.
3.2 No one “owns” sonic strategy inside the org chart
Visual identity has a brand team; media buying sits in performance; but music decisions often get pushed down to the final production mile, delegated to a junior producer or, worse still, entirely delegated to the creative agency. The WFA notes that many global advertisers still lack any formal sonic-branding or sonic strategy governance (wfanet.org).
3.3 The “Any track will do” fallacy
Streaming abundance plus cheap library subscriptions create the illusion that music is a commodity - and people do not typically assign value to things they don’t pay for. But in reality, studies keep confirming that musical fit drives higher brand-attitude, credibility and e-word of mouth (SAGE JournalsDoria). While generic stock cues may feel “safe”, they point to lazy execution and leave valuable equity on the table.
3.4 Most success stories are invisible
When a piece of music nails brand personality, the win looks “obvious” in hindsight (Intel bong, Netflix ‘ta-dum’). But because the upside becomes part of the brand’s baseline, executives forget (or are unable) to isolate the musical impact and quantify the value. This means that while quantifiable examples are few, some have spectacular results:
Brand / Year | What they did | Hard results | Why it matters |
John Lewis – “The Journey” (Christmas 2012) | Commissioned a stripped-back cover of The Power of Love to score its 90-second snow-man love story. | +44.3 % sales YoY in the five-weeks to Christmas; online revenue broke the £800m mark for the first time. Campaign Live | Shows how a single, emotionally congruent track can turbo-charge peak-season retail without price promos. |
Just Eat – “Did Somebody Say … ” feat. Snoop Dogg (2020) | Re-wrote the brand jingle with Snoop; deployed across TV, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and Twitch. | UK orders +43 % in Q3, year-to-date orders +27 %; Ad-awareness jumped from 29.4 → 37.1 on YouGov BrandIndex, overtaking Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Marketing Week | An expensive artist deal (£5.3 m) looked risky—until the numbers proved the music drove both short-term sales and lasting mental availability. |
Apple iPod nano – “1234” by Feist (2007) | Built the entire colour-splash campaign around an unknown Canadian indie track. | Perfect musical fit didn’t just sell devices—it created a cultural moment that made the iPod ads themselves appointment viewing. |
4 The lazy excuses marketeers use to undervalue music - and how to address these
“It’s intangible.”
Fix: track salience. If you link Apple Music or Spotify search volumes to media campaigns you can measure the correlation between increased music searches with campaign activity and sales.
“We’ll never get rights cleared in time.”
Fix: think ahead and pre-clear or commission modular stems you can edit (like stock footage). Better still, like some of our clients, create an approved brand music library of hundreds of tracks that span genres and emotions but that are all 75%+ also on brand.
“Any 25-second bed will do.”
Fix: A/B prove the delta once by running an identical video ad with two alternative tracks - one tightly aligned with the brand and narrative arc, one without. You will see a difference. After that, ‘audio first’ becomes a planning rule, not a cost line to haggle.
“The CMO hates that genre.”
Fix: show brand personality-fit scores next to creative, so the debate is brand-led and objective, not taste-led and subjective.
“We can’t isolate music in our marketing mix modelling.”
Fix: add a binary “brand aligned music present” flag to the model and weight GRPs by that factor. Even crude adjustments should move the ROI needle enough to justify a much more thoughtful approach and a deeper dive.
5 The bottom line
Music is not a line-item; it’s the hidden multiplier of everything on the line-item list. It captures attention, encodes memory and signals brand meaning in the brain’s native emotional language - faster than words or visuals can. Right now, the average brand is leaving double-digit growth on the table because the CFO can’t see a dopamine spike on a spreadsheet.
As a result, many brands have what we can only describe as a ‘chaotic’ approach to music selection. This is caused almost entirely by a lack of attention and commitment rather than capability.
Marketers aren’t ignoring audio because it’s ineffective; they’re ignoring it because it’s invisible on the dashboards that decide budget shifts. Yet the empirical evidence shows that optimised music is one of the cheapest, fastest ways to multiply both short-term conversions and build long-term brand equity.
If you’re ready to surface that hidden value, SoundOut can map the personality of every track against your brand’s self-defined personality, test at scale, and give you the numbers your CFO needs. Until then, the 20-point attention gap will keep widening - quietly, but expensively.
Indeed we are so confident that we can help you boost your marketing effectiveness with music we’ll happily audit your last campaign music against your brand at no cost…just drop us an email at info@soundout.com.
David Courtier-Dutton
23 April 2025
Next up, in two weeks’ time, we’ll crack open the brain scanner to show exactly how the right choice of music hijacks attention and memory…
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