Viewpoints
Mark Ritson
Mark Ritson has stated the importance of SOV as part of effective marketing campaigns. His own work spans many industries, notably supermarkets, airlines, and luxury goods.
He has suggested SoS as a replacement to the SOV metric given the importance of digital channels, and this has been critically refuted and supported across the industry. This suggestion is more about the relevancy and practicalities of marketing, an alternative rather than replacement.
Mark Ritson is an independent award winning brand consultant and marketing professor, also known for being blunt and outspoken in the marketing industry. He runs mini MBAs in marketing.
Binet & Field
Les Binet and Peter Field have made major contributions to the research and understanding of SOV. After studying the time lag for impact between SOV and share of market they saw consistently across categories “around 40% of the impact was felt in the short term (the first month) and around 60% of the uplift was delivered over the long term (the following two years)”.
They showed not just the relationship between SOV and share of market per se, but the more dynamic causality of SOV as a driver of share of market, and the value of the excess SOV (eSOV) as a brand.
Their view of issues with survey data lead them to suggest SoS can be a solution to better understanding what customers do online, where SOV affects SoS which in turn can be an indicator of share of market. Both SOV and SoS then being key marketing metrics.
On Social Media sometimes brands that are most talked about are the ones they are least likely to buy. “There’s very little correlation between how much people talk about brands on social media and how those brands do in the real world” (Binet).
Les Binet is an award winning expert in modelling and measuring the effects of advertising in econometrics, and has worked for many blue chip clients. Peter Field is a marketing consultant and expert in advertising effectiveness.
Richard Game
Richard Game is a proponent of the benefits from short term performance analysis of SOV, with insights into SEO improvement. Whilst important, long term analysis can be more difficult and his work focuses on shorter term value through SoS to provide snapshots and trends of search performance to inform SEO improvement. He has cited both Google and Microsoft paid SOV metrics as validation of short term performance management in digital marketing.
Where Google and Amazon make reliable channels to source data and produce effective SOV or SoS calculations, SEO issues can be exposed in both organic and paid search.
His career in consulting and award winning in digital marketing spans many sectors including publishing, pet food and yogurt. He is an expert in global digital strategy.
Karen Nelson-Field
Karen Nelson-Field in her 2020 The Attention Economy and How Media Works: Simple Truths for Marketers, acknowledges the complexity of non linear digital funnel communications.
Seemingly building on Davenport and Beck’s 2002 The Attention Economy, Understanding the New Currency of Business, Nelson-Field advocates understanding the reality of human attention processing in advertising within modern and rapidly changing media. Voice and visibility are not sufficient and consideration of the quality of customer communication, according to their true attention, and this affects SOV measurement.
Karen is an award winning researcher and marketing professor, and helps blue chip companies understand customer behaviour and qualitative and improve the shortcomings of digital media.