Data
Share of voice benchmarks
Data as of
The headline number
In the median category, the leading advertiser runs roughly a third of all live ad volume, and the mention leader owns just over a third of the conversation.
Share of voice is the most cited metric in brand strategy and one of the least benchmarked. Marketers know their own share; almost nobody publishes what a category leader normally holds. Measured across 41 categories with four or more active advertisers, the answer clusters around a third: 31% of live ad volume for the median ad leader, 36% of mentions for the median conversation leader.
The rule of thumb this supports: if you hold well under a third of your category’s voice and you are not the leader, you are normal. If the leader in your category holds half or more, you are in an unusually concentrated category, and share gains will cost more than the median case suggests.
Waldo tracked ad and conversation corpus across 41 categories, measured August 11, 2026. Shares are computed within tracked brands per category.
Questions teams ask
What share of voice does a category leader normally have?
Across 41 measured categories, the median leader holds 31% of live ad volume and 36% of category conversation. Half of category leaders hold less than that; a leader above 50% marks an unusually concentrated category.
Are ad share and conversation share usually the same?
They land close at the median (31% vs 36%) but diverge sharply in individual categories, because the biggest advertiser is often not the most talked-about brand. Measuring both is the point: the gap between them is where strategy lives.
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