The Sound of Decisions: Inside EightSix's OMR 2026 Masterclass

The Sound of Decisions: Why Audio Is Marketing's Most Undervalued Lever

At OMR 2026 in Hamburg, EightSix delivered a masterclass that reframed how the marketing industry thinks about sound. Titled "The Sound of Decisions," the session — led by co-founders Gordian Gleiß and Shai Caleb Hirschson alongside CTO Grace — laid out the case for audio as a strategic brand asset with hard data, not just intuition.

The room was packed. The questions were sharp. And the core message was uncomfortable: most brands have no idea what their music spend returns, whether their sonic identity actually works, or if their audio decisions are driven by anything more than the loudest voice in the room.

The Five Questions No One Could Answer

The masterclass opened with a simple exercise — five questions put to an audience of senior marketers. Do you know what your brand spends on music annually? Has your sonic logo ever been tested for attribution without visual support? Are your music decisions based on objective criteria or room consensus? Is your brand sound consistent across every market and touchpoint? Is sound named as a brand asset in your guidelines with the same rigour as your visual identity?

Almost no hands went up. That silence was the point.

86% Have Visual Guidelines. 17% Have Audio.

The data is unambiguous. According to WARC and IPSOS research, 86% of brands have formal visual branding guidelines and 92% use visual cues as their primary identity tool. Yet only 17% have audio branding guidelines, and just 8% actively use sound as a brand asset. As EightSix put it on stage: imagine your CMO said, "We've decided to ignore 80% of human perception this year."

The Chart That Changes the Game

Drawing on Rob Brittain's 2025 analysis of the International Advertising Effectiveness Database — 595 campaigns spanning 2018 to 2025 — the masterclass presented the catalytic effect of audio on business outcomes. Campaigns investing in ESOV (Excess Share of Voice) saw 15% more very large business effects than baseline. But campaigns that combined ESOV investment with audio saw a 24% uplift. Remove audio from the equation, and the number drops to just 8%.

The most striking finding: across 595 Effie Award winners, the brands at the top end of effectiveness shared one thing — 11% of their campaign budget was allocated to audio.

Four Drivers, All Measurable

The masterclass outlined four measurable drivers of audio effectiveness. ROI: campaigns using engaging music see an average 32% uplift in return on marketing investment. Price sensitivity: consumers exposed to music with strong brand fit are up to 7x more willing to pay premium prices. Differentiation: audio is 4x more effective at creating brand distinctiveness. And emotion: music-led campaigns double long-term brand effects. All sourced from the IPA Effectiveness Databank, Les Binet's research across 150 UK ads and 7,500 consumers.

Enter mDNA™

The second half of the masterclass introduced mDNA™ — EightSix's proprietary framework for defining, discovering, testing and deploying music across an entire brand. The premise: every piece of music has an emotional fingerprint. mDNA™ decodes that fingerprint and maps it to brand strategy, removing subjectivity from the equation.

As the team noted: "Every brand workshop ends the same way. Three tracks. Five opinions. And the loudest voice wins. Which is rarely the consumer." mDNA™ was built to solve exactly this problem — replacing gut feeling with a data-informed, repeatable system for sonic decision-making.

What This Means for Marketing

The OMR masterclass wasn't a pitch. It was a provocation backed by evidence. The message to every CMO, brand manager and agency strategist in the room was clear: sound is not a nice-to-have. It is a measurable, scalable, compounding brand asset. And the brands that treat it as such are already outperforming those that don't.

The full masterclass presentation is available on request via eightsix.com.