If you want PR to have a seat at the table, bring the table a number it can act on. In-house communications teams have spent years making the case for that seat with activity metrics, and the case keeps falling flat for two reasons: the numbers don’t connect to results, and all the numbers are backward looking. The executives across the table want to know what happens next.
PR has always been looking for a simple way to articulate its impact. The much-debunked Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) is still used for one reason: it’s an often-impressive number that’s easy for executives to see at a glance. As I argue in my book, The Invisible Asset, AVE can be used for campaign health, and even a year-over-year temperature check, but it certainly isn’t a metric of PR value.
But there’s another metric that deserves to have its day. It’s one we already have and it’s easy to understand: share of voice. It’s the only forward-looking KPI in PR and marketing, and it’s the number that turns a communications report into a boardroom conversation; I’ve seen it happen.
Every other KPI looks backward
Clips tell you what ran last month. Impressions estimate who might have seen it.
None of those numbers tells leadership what happens next. And leadership lives in what happens next.
Share of voice does something no other PR metric can: it looks forward. Binet and Field’s research through the IPA, probably the most rigorous long-term study of marketing effectiveness ever conducted, established a consistent relationship: brands whose share of voice exceeds their share of market grow, and brands whose share of voice falls below it lose ground. The gap predicts future market share movement with enough consistency that sophisticated marketing organizations worldwide use it as a planning metric.
That makes share of voice the only forward-looking indicator in PR and marketing. It’s the closest thing our profession has to a crystal ball. When your share of voice exceeds your share of market, you’re showing the board where market share is heading. In The Invisible Asset, I describe a brand that held roughly 9 percent market share while its earned media share of voice ran at about 14 percent. The moment leadership saw those numbers side by side, the budget conversation changed from defending spend to “how do we grow this lead.”
While AI comes with a host of challenges to business and society, AI is doing PR a favor. It’s finally providing evidence of what we’ve known all along: PR influences authority and reputations. AI platforms now shape the first impression a brand makes on investors, buyers, and regulators. Leaders at all levels feel that disruption, and earns PR a seat at the table.
When leadership sees it
I watched this play out recently with a publicly traded company in a regulated industry. A new CEO arrived with a growth mandate, spending his weeks back and forth to New York talking to investors.
To support the growth conversation, we showed him how his share of voice coincided with growth and how the organization’s narratives were shaping the entire industry. The CEO suddenly had data he could take to investors. PR, which had spent years as a support mechanism for SEO, earned a respected seat at the table, and the in-house communications team gained internal authority it never had before. One metric did that.
Measure the entire conversation
If you’re building a share of voice program, the power lies in how you set it up. Every SOV program has to match your specific competitors, your space, and your narratives. No two should look identical.
In our work, we always build two views at least: share of voice across the entire topic and share of voice against named competitors. We might build share of voice for leadership or spokespersons as well. The whole-topic view is the one that matters most. It’s a truer measure of how a brand is influencing its space and where it sits in the overall conversation.
Competitor SOV is a worthwhile temperature check, but it’s volatile, subject to short-term bursts that can misrepresent the truer data. And if you only monitor penetration against competitors, you miss the white space entirely: the portion of the conversation where no brand appears at all. That unclaimed territory holds the single biggest opportunity in most categories, and teams miss it because their monitoring never captures it. That’s the area to crack.
Your newest audience is counting, too
AI has raised the stakes on share of voice. Decision-makers now outsource the first pass of their due diligence, and often the last pass, to AI tools. When an investor or buyer asks an AI platform about your category, the platform builds its answer largely from editorial coverage in authoritative publications. Paid advertising doesn’t register. Neither does social media.
That means the same earned media building your share of voice is also training the answer your next investor, customer, or regulator receives. We’re no longer in an attention economy. We’re in a trust economy, and share of voice is the most visible measurement of the trust your brand has earned.
From defending spend to forecasting growth
For PR professionals, this is the practical payoff. Walk into your next planning meeting with clips and impressions, and you’ll spend the hour defending a budget line. Bring share of voice mapped against share of market instead, and you’re presenting a growth forecast the board can act on.
When a skeptical CFO pushes back that share of voice is a media metric, my answer is short: it’s your only forward-looking metric in PR and marketing. Ignore it at your peril. Authority earns better efficiency from paid media, reduces time to purchase, and creates trust with both people and AI. Share of voice is how you see all of it coming.
