Music as a Strategic Asset
New IPA research quantifies how sonic choices drive marketing effectiveness
Link to Massive Music
New IPA research reveals how strategic music choices can double marketing ROI. Analysis of 150 campaigns shows the four metrics that drive effectiveness.
Here’s a question worth $300 million: how much is a five-note jingle worth? That’s what Intel’s sonic signature sits on the balance sheet as. Five notes. Not particularly melodic ones either. Yet by 1994, that simple mnemonic had helped push brand awareness from 24% to over 80%. The marketing ROI? Extraordinary.
Most brands know music matters. What they haven’t known until now is precisely how much it matters, and more importantly, which specific characteristics of music actually drive effectiveness. At this year’s IPA Effectiveness Conference, Roscoe Williamson from Massive Music presented research that should fundamentally change how we think about sonic strategy. The headline finding: highly engaging music can boost marketing ROI by an average of 32%. The top performers? They’re doubling their returns.
The study analysed 150 campaigns across 96 IPA cases, testing them with 7,500 real people. Les Binet provided the academic rigour. What emerged is a framework that finally gives marketers a quantifiable way to evaluate something that’s been left to gut instinct for far too long.
A Brief History of Sonic Disasters
The story starts in 1926. Wheaties was dying. Sam Gale, the brand’s ad man, recorded a jingle with a local barbershop quartet and put it on Minneapolis radio. Of the 53,000 boxes sold nationally during the trial, 40,000 came from that one region. Wheaties lived.
Naturally, everyone copied it. By the 1950s, every brand had a jingle. Every. Single. One. The result? Sonic saturation. Audiences tuned out. The magic evaporated. Today there are just seven registered jingles in America. The format didn’t fail because it was bad it failed because everyone did it badly, all at once.
What followed was more interesting. Bill Backer’s 1971 “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” for Coca-Cola proved that advertising music could enter culture. The track became a global hit. People requested it on radio. A portion of royalties went to UNICEF. It transcended advertising entirely.
Then came the era of sonic mnemonics—Intel being the obvious example—followed by what Williamson calls Sonic Branding 2.0. Think of McDonald’s “ba da ba ba ba” played with by everyone from Minions to orchestras. Flexible sonic assets that brands could adapt without losing the core identity.
Today we’re living in sonic ecosystems. Mastercard’s contactless payment beep. TikTok’s notification sound, heard by a billion people weekly. These aren’t marketing sounds anymore they’re product sounds that feed back into marketing. The reach is enormous. The challenge? We’re potentially heading for another 1950s moment. Every brand wants a distinctive sound. But when everyone sounds distinctive, no one does.
Roscoe Williamson from Massive Music presents at the IPA Effectiveness Conference, London, October 2025
The Four Metrics That Actually Matter
Williamson’s research tested music across four dimensions: engagement, fit, surprise, and recall. Each drives different business outcomes. Get them right and the effects compound. Get them wrong and you’re just adding expensive noise.
1. Engagement
Can this music actually grab attention? Sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed how often music gets chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with whether audiences will notice it. The Philadelphia cream cheese campaign used David Gates’s “Never Let Her Go” from 1975. Nostalgic, warm, Gates’s endearing accent it pulls you in and doesn’t let go. A critic described it as like “slobbering St Bernards crawling all over you.” Weird image, but accurate. That’s engagement. The business impact? Highly engaging music can boost ROI by 32% on average, with top performers potentially doubling it.
2. Fit
This is where it gets commercially interesting. Music that fits brilliantly with the visual narrative can make consumers nearly seven times more willing to pay premium prices. Seven times. And the effect compounds with repeated viewing as audiences perceive the tight sync between sound and picture as indicative of quality itself.
Great Western Railway’s bespoke composition demonstrated this perfectly. The music was handcrafted to the visual beats, elevating the entire perception of the service. This is where bespoke still has real advantages when you can score music tightly to specific moments, you’re not just soundtracking an ad, you’re building pricing power. That’s a long-term gain that far exceeds any short-term activation metric.
What’s happening here psychologically is fascinating. When audiences perceive a tight sync between sound and image, they don’t just think “nice ad.” They infer quality at a product level. The fit between music and visual becomes a proxy for the fit between brand promise and delivery. It’s a cognitive shortcut, but a powerful one. And unlike most advertising effects that decay rapidly, this one strengthens with repetition. The more times someone sees well-fitted music, the more they become convinced of the brand’s premium credentials.
This has major implications for brand architecture decisions. If you’re a premium brand justifying higher prices, fit should probably be your primary sonic criterion, even at the expense of surprise or novelty. Conversely, if you’re a challenger brand trying to disrupt category conventions, you might deliberately sacrifice fit for surprise. The framework accommodates both strategies, provided you’re making conscious choices rather than defaulting to whatever the creative team happened to like.
3. Surprise
How unexpected and creative is the choice? Surprising music can increase brand fame up to five times. The mechanism is cognitive your brain earns mental attention trying to work out why this pairing works. Cathedral City cheese used Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” It shouldn’t work. Cheese and power ballads? But it absolutely does, precisely because of the incongruity.
The problem with surprise is that it’s the hardest to justify internally. Pre-testing often filters out surprising choices because consumers initially react with confusion rather than delight. You need brave clients. But the fame gains are substantial if you can pull it off.
4. Recall
Will people remember this music? Highly recallable music makes brands up to four times more salient at purchase. Costa’s 70’s rock band Kiss re-recording of “I Was Made for Loving You” is a masterclass here—familiar enough to trigger recognition, fresh enough to feel own-able. Re-recordings are an interesting middle ground between bespoke and licensed tracks, especially for brands working with tighter budgets.
Roscoe Williamson from Massive Music presents at the IPA Effectiveness Conference, London, October 2025
The Repetition Advantage
Once you’ve found music that scores well, Williamson’s advice is unequivocal: keep using it. The effects compound. Intel didn’t change those five notes for decades—they evolved the execution, but the core stayed constant. That discipline paid off enormously.
This cuts against every instinct in marketing departments. You hear it hundreds of times, it feels stale, you want to refresh. But consumers encounter it occasionally. It still feels fresh to them. The data on willingness to pay is particularly compelling here repeating well-fitted music over time systematically increases pricing power. That’s not a short-term activation gain. That’s structural competitive advantage.
The challenge is organisational, not creative. You need discipline to resist the refresh temptation. You need senior stakeholders who understand that what bores them internally is still working externally. This is where effectiveness data becomes crucial it gives you the evidence to push back against change-for-change’s-sake.
Where This Fits in Effectiveness Thinking
The framework maps neatly onto existing effectiveness models. Engagement and recall drive short-term activation—getting noticed, being remembered at purchase. Surprise and fit work more on long-term brand building—fame and pricing power respectively. Music is unusual in that it can serve both functions simultaneously, which makes it particularly valuable in efficiency-obsessed marketing environments.
This connects directly to the effectiveness ladder that Binet and Field have spent years documenting. Memorial music enhances salience at the base of the ladder. Surprising music amplifies fame higher up. The research essentially provides a sonic playbook for climbing that ladder more efficiently. And because music works across both short and long timeframes, it solves the perennial problem of balancing immediate sales activation against long-term brand building. You don’t have to choose.
There’s also a strategic dimension around brand maturity. Emerging brands probably need to prioritise recall and salience—be remembered, be noticed. You haven’t got time for subtle fame-building if no one knows who you are. Established brands can take bigger creative risks with surprising music because they’ve already got the salience base. They can afford the cognitive tension that comes with unexpected choices. Different stages demand different approaches, and the four-metric framework helps you make those trade-offs explicitly rather than accidentally.
The Practical Bit
Williamson recommends a simple evaluation tool: score potential music choices across all four metrics out of ten. It’s not rocket science, but it forces explicit consideration of what you’re trying to achieve. The metrics sometimes conflict—highly surprising music might score lower on fit, for instance. That’s fine. You just need to know which dimension matters most for your strategic context.
Budget constraints remain real. Bespoke composition isn’t accessible to everyone. Licensed tracks come with pre-existing associations that might help or hinder. Re-recordings offer a middle path but require careful execution. The framework doesn’t solve the budget problem, but it does help you make better choices within whatever constraints you’re working with.
The bigger challenge is often internal. Surprising music that scores brilliantly in the framework might still struggle in stakeholder reviews. Fit-focused music that compounds pricing power over time requires patience that quarterly reporting cycles don’t reward. Using the same music for years demands organisational discipline. These are people problems, not music problems.
The Saturation Risk
We should probably worry about where this goes. Every brand now wants a distinctive sound. Notification pings, voice interfaces, contactless payments, app sounds—we’re drowning in branded audio. The parallel with 1950s jingle saturation is uncomfortable. When everyone pursued the same strategy, distinction became impossible.
First-mover advantage matters here. Intel got in early. Mastercard claimed the contactless space before competitors responded. As sonic branding matures, the returns to generic approaches will diminish. You either need to be distinctively different or deeply embedded through repetition. There’s not much middle ground.
AI complicates this further. As generative AI makes music production faster and cheaper, every brand will have access to bespoke composition. But if every brand uses AI-generated music, will audiences develop some form of sonic uncanny valley response? We don’t know yet, but it’s worth watching.
Roscoe Williamson from Massive Music presents at the IPA Effectiveness Conference, London, October 2025
What This Actually Means
Marketing effectiveness has been declining for a decade. Media fragmentation isn’t reversing. Traditional levers deliver diminishing returns. In this context, sonic strategy represents one of the few areas where the data shows genuine uplift potential. Not marginal gains—substantial ones. Music that engages can double ROI. Music that fits can increase willingness to pay sevenfold. Those aren’t small numbers.
Yet most brands still treat music as decoration. Something you add at the end. A line item in the production budget. The research suggests this is leaving serious money on the table. Sonic strategy deserves the same strategic attention as media planning or creative development. The framework now exists to evaluate it properly. The pretesting tools are available. The business case is proven.
The practical implications are straightforward enough. Start evaluating music choices against the four metrics before you commit to production. Build sonic consistency into your brand guidelines with the same rigour you apply to visual identity. Resist the temptation to refresh music just because you’re personally tired of it. Consider re-recordings as a cost-effective middle ground between licensed tracks and full bespoke composition. These aren’t complicated changes, but they require treating sonic strategy as an actual discipline rather than an afterthought.
What’s missing isn’t data or methodology. It’s organisational will. Treating sound as strategic requires sonic consistency, which requires discipline. It means not refreshing music every campaign just because you’re bored of it. It means scoring music choices explicitly against business objectives rather than personal taste. It means sometimes choosing surprising music that makes stakeholders uncomfortable. These are hard things.
But the brands that get this right—that recognise sound as a fundamental driver of effectiveness rather than a creative flourish—will have substantial advantages. Intel understood this decades ago. Mastercard gets it now. The opportunity exists for others, but it won’t last forever. As more brands invest in sonic strategy, the competitive advantages diminish. The question isn’t whether sonic effectiveness matters. The data has settled that. The question is whether your organisation will act on it before your competitors do.
The study analysed 150 campaigns across 96 IPA cases with a panel of 7,500 consumers.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end of the article! This post is public so feel free to share it, and if you have not done so already sign up and become a member.