Brand as ‘Multiplier’ – Why We Need to Rethink Brand vs Performance

This session presents the latest thinking on high-impact advertising, at a time when budgets are under considerable pressure. It is based on data from a first-of-its-kind coalition of effectiveness experts, and will provide some initial findings from a full study to be published in early 2025.

Our recommendations will include the need to reinstate brand-led thinking into advertising and to recognize that brand and performance advertising work much harder when they are truly integrated than they do as siloed activities.

Brand and performance have become the two main ways to think about advertising. There is logic behind this approach, but the division of these responsibilities into separate functions and workstreams has led to suboptimal results for advertisers. That, in no small part, is because investment has become skewed towards performance advertising.

The best returns – in terms of building equity for tomorrow and driving sales today – are delivered when brand and performance advertising are rigorously interconnected. Within that, brand advertising should take the role of the dominant partner in this relationship.

One implication of this insight is that organizations which see brand building and performance advertising as independent pursuits risk missing out on the power of using them in combination. The key driver of success here is not finding the right “balance” of spend between brand and performance. Instead, it rests on the degree of integration between these activities.