Performance Versus Brand Arguments Miss the Bigger Attention Issue

By Ed Bristow, VP, Business Development EMEA, Adlook

The industry has spent years trying to close the gap between brand and performance. But as advertisers face growing pressure to prove that every pound of media spend is working harder, I think we’re focusing on the wrong divide. Too often, success is judged against the cheapest measurable outcome rather than whether media is genuinely influencing someone who might not otherwise have acted.

That matters because an efficient-looking campaign isn’t necessarily an effective one. Optimising towards what is easiest or cheapest to measure can obscure whether media is actually creating incremental growth. The problem isn’t that brand and performance are competing objectives. It’s that the way we measure and optimise media can make them appear so.

Attention offers a more useful way to think about this. Rather than asking whether media is delivering on brand or performance, we should ask whether we’re buying environments where people are actually likely to notice an ad and be influenced by it.

Efficiency can mask a lack of growth

Performance campaigns optimised primarily towards the cheapest measurable outcome can end up buying whatever inventory delivers that number most efficiently. Whether that is CPA, CPC or another efficiency metric, the incentive is often the same: find the lowest-cost route to the reported result. That can mean disproportionate budget is spent reaching people who were going to buy anyway. The danger is that business growth stalls because the campaign hasn’t reached anyone new, and the ROAS (return on ad spend) figures appear healthy while disguising the fact that it created very little incremental business.

Good performance works differently. Increasingly, technology can understand the real-world context surrounding an impression in real time and optimise buying decisions, taking into account signals such as time, location and the circumstances in which someone is seeing an ad. Take a fast food ad that runs at lunchtime, reaching someone just as they’re deciding where to eat. It can influence an immediate commercial decision even if no click is tracked and no last-touch model gives the ad credit. A hotel brand advertising against travel content, just as a reader is choosing where to stay in a city, does the same job. Both examples function as performance campaigns in every sense that counts, even though the second would usually be filed under branding.

Quality versus waste

What connects these two examples is attention. A reader engaged with an article they trust pays more attention to what sits around it, and that attention is what makes an ad worth noticing and worth acting on. Advertisers have intuitively understood this for decades, but this knowledge seems to get lost the moment people frame the debate as brand against performance instead of quality against waste.

Attention works as a signal rather than an outcome. It tells buyers whether the environment they’re buying has the potential to deliver a result, making it useful from initial awareness through to conversion. A high-attention placement can support recall when the objective is awareness, or action when the objective is conversion. Media quality is the real variable here, and attention gives buyers a practical way to measure it, whichever part of the funnel they’re trying to affect.

There is growing evidence for this relationship. Adelaide’s 2025 Outcomes Guide, for example, looked at 52 case studies across 18 industries and found campaigns optimised against its attention metric delivered an average 41% lift in upper-funnel outcomes, and 55% lift in lower-funnel outcomes. Research from Lumen, Havas Media Network and Brand Metrics, spanning more than 9,000 campaigns and 5.6m impressions, similarly found that attention correlates with outcomes across awareness, consideration, preference and action intent, with the greatest impact seen on preference and purchase. People need to notice an ad before they remember a brand or act on it.

Efficiency without quality damages trust

But performance buying can still default to chasing the cheapest measurable outcome. This can incentivise buyers towards cheaper, lower-quality inventory, while multiple platforms in the chain compete to claim credit for the same conversion. This damages trust with publishers and audiences alike, and leaves advertisers with little sense of where their budget went. Advertisers deserve to know where their media runs and how it’s bought. They need to understand the quality of the media generating that number, not just the ROAS figure sitting at the end of the report.

What I’ve seen is that buyers get more value from attention when they use it as a diagnostic signal for media quality, rather than simply adding another metric alongside viewability. It helps buyers understand whether the environments they’re investing in have a genuine opportunity to influence an outcome, whatever that outcome may be.

The industry will keep having the brand-versus-performance argument because it’s an easy way to categorise media. But while advertisers are under pressure to demonstrate that their investment is genuinely driving growth, it’s increasingly the wrong question to ask. An efficient-looking campaign that reaches people who were already going to buy is not necessarily effective advertising.

Attention gives us a way to look beyond that false divide and ask something more useful. Did we buy media with a genuine opportunity to influence someone? If we start there, brand and performance stop looking like competing objectives and become what they should have been all along: different outcomes of media that actually works.