Advertising is a competitive arena, and it’s vital to ensure that rival brands don’t "out-shout" a brand’s advertising message: if everyone else is advertising, will your brand be noticed?. Historically agencies have measured a campaign’s relative performance by calculating its "share of voice" - that is, what proportion of advertising in the sector was accounted for by their campaign.

More recently however, thinking has moved on to see share of mind as far more important - in other words, we may be the biggest advertiser in the sector, but are we actually the most salient in the minds of the consumer? Clearly, creativity has a huge role to play here.

There is a widely held belief in media circles that, to achieve a high share of mind, it is more valuable to dominate one or two key media rather than spread messages more thinly over several.

Commercial Radio is well-suited to creating this dominance, for some very basic reasons:

• people listen for long periods (over two hours a day)
• the ads are on a lot (see "the frequency medium")
• radio is intrusive (works in real time)
• low ad avoidance on radio (people don’t zap stations)
• production costs are low (allowing wide copy variation)

It is easy to see how brands in this environment can secure a dominant share of mind amongst the listeners.

The use of Sonic Brand Triggers multiplies the effectiveness of this approach - even if people are listening in a very passive mode, SBTs allow a branded impact to "go in under the radar".

Good examples of brands which have used radio to secure a disproportionately high share of mind - the Carphone Warehouse, Diet Coke, Coldseal, PC World (see the Radio Advertising Case Study Database for details).

"Radio is a branding medium, it allows you to come to life in the minds of the public even if they are not ready to venture into mobile communications. We started with radio and we remain with radio, it is our "banker" medium; in all honesty the way radio has helped us build our business has been a revelation"  Charles Dunstone, Founder, The Carphone Warehouse