Four national radio industry advocates from three continents walked onto the Cannes Croisette this week with 17 years of data and a single argument: campaigns that include audio don’t just perform better, they outperform on every metric that matters to a client.
It was the first time the RAB, Commercial Radio & Audio Australia, Radiocentre UK, and Radiocentre Ireland had jointly commissioned and presented research under a unified global case for audio’s role in the media mix.
The session, titled “The Secret to Profit and Trust: Audio,” carried underlying data drawn from the Effie x System1 Databank, covering 1,262 Effie Award-winning campaigns across the US, UK, Ireland, Europe, and Australia between 2007 and 2023. The study measures performance through an index, with campaigns that ran with no audio set as the baseline at 100. A score above 100 means audio-inclusive campaigns achieved that outcome at a higher rate.
The headline numbers: ad campaigns with audio indexed 175 on profit against a no-audio baseline of 100, 181 on trust, 181 on price insensitivity, and 119 on customer acquisition. At scale, the advantage widened further. Large and extra-large spend campaigns with audio indexed 88% higher than comparable campaigns without it. Audio also indexed 16% higher on differentiation and 12% higher on brand image compared to campaigns without it.
Audio alone indexed 209 on profit. Distinctive assets alone indexed 213. Together, they indexed 264; the highest outcome in the entire dataset.
Duration matters too, but in a counterintuitive way. Short-run audio campaigns of under one year actually indexed below the no-audio baseline at 84 on share gain. Long audio of one year or more indexed 132. Long audio paired with distinctive assets reached 177.
The data also isolated audio’s catalytic role in emotional creative. Emotional campaigns that included audio indexed 203 on profit against the no-audio baseline. When emotional creative was paired with distinctive sonic brand assets and sustained over time, the compounding effect reached 2.5x at six months, 4x at one and a half years, and 6x at three-plus years versus a flat line for non-emotional campaigns held to the same duration.
Within System1’s brand asset rankings, sonic devices scored highest among all distinctive brand assets for advertising fluency at 2.3 on the Final Fluency index, ahead of fluent device characters, jingles, distinct product shapes, brand typeface, slogans, brand colors, and celebrity endorsement. Brand recall scaled directly with the number of brand codes deployed, from 15% with one code to 100% among ads using all seven
RAB President/CEO Mike Hulvey said, “These findings reinforce what our industry has long known. Audio doesn’t simply complement a media plan; it amplifies it. Whether the objective is driving profit, building trust, or acquiring new customers, audio consistently strengthens campaign performance. For local broadcasters, this is another powerful proof point that helps shift the conversation from cost to business results and demonstrates why radio deserves a larger role in today’s media mix.”
