By Andy Platt, Managing Partner at Brave Bison
The marketing industry is not short of recurring debates, but few have the staying power of the great brand vs performance standoff.
For the last 15 of my 20 years in performance marketing, I have watched the same conversation play out, again and again. But now, the industry might actually be ready to do something about it.
The backdrop has shifted. Measurement capabilities aren’t what they used to be. Performance results are generally declining, thanks in part to macro-pressures and the reduced granularity of tracking.
But with fragmentation comes opportunity.
A marketing ecosystem with too many cooks
In theory, digital was supposed to simplify and unify marketing. In practice, it split things into even smaller silos.
These days, it’s not uncommon to see multiple agencies working within the same channel – creative on one side, performance on another, programmatic in its own bubble, and so on.
And with that comes disjointed messaging, inconsistent creative, and missed opportunities to reinforce a cohesive brand narrative. Layer onto that the historic divide between brand and performance, and you start to see how it all becomes a bit messy.
In too many cases, the brand team are often under-resourced, while the performance side is expected to show immediate results with increasingly limited visibility.
As for proper digital strategy?
That gets lost somewhere in between.
Meanwhile, pressure from the top only reinforces the obsession with short-term ROI. But while performance marketing can provide those quick wins, it doesn’t build consumer trust, long-term relevance, or meaningful preference. And without a strong brand foundation, performance can only carry you so far.
Sweeping statements and selective success stories
Of course, no marketing debate would be complete without someone brandishing a case study as proof.
When Airbnb announced it had slashed its performance spend and seen no impact on revenue, it was met with breathless enthusiasm by those eager to write off performance altogether. But the reality is more nuanced.
The fact that Airbnb could remove large chunks of its performance budget without major disruption says more about the inefficiency of its previous approach than it does about the uselessness of performance marketing as a whole.
It also raises fair questions about how the business defined performance in the first place, and whether it was ever measuring incrementality properly.
There’s a risk in turning these outlier moments into gospel. It encourages lazy thinking and entrenches unhelpful stereotypes. Those working in the weeds of marketing strategy will know the reality is far more blurred.
Planning, not picking sides
The answer isn’t to choose a side.
It’s to acknowledge that both disciplines offer value – and that the real skill lies in stitching them together with a bit of actual planning. That doesn’t mean inventing another portmanteau like “brandformance” (was it Peter Andre who first started conflating words “Insania” (classic) and “stizzy” (a mixture of still and fizzy water!).
It means combining the strategic strengths of brand with the data discipline of performance, and letting each inform the other.
What’s changed is our ability to understand audiences in far more granular ways. AI, for all its imperfections, is helping marketers move beyond crude demographic segments and towards clusters based on actual behaviour and likelihood to act.
Planning around propensity, not persona, means the messaging is more relevant and consistent from the very top of the funnel to the bottom. Not brand or performance – just marketing, executed with purpose.
At the same time, it opens the door to measurement frameworks that account for nuance. Performance marketers are experts at wringing every ounce of value from their campaigns.
That rigour can, and should, be applied to audience clusters – even if the payoff isn’t immediate. Reporting against behaviour, rather than just channel, helps connect the dots between all the S’s – storytelling, sales, sentiment and spend.
A rethink, not a revolution
None of this happens overnight. Changing structures, both agency-side and client-side, takes time, and not every business will be willing to make the leap.
But even modest shifts can start to make a difference. Getting brand and performance teams in the same room. Or agreeing on shared definitions of success.
Yet still, the good old-fashioned funnel still works. Granted, it just looks slightly different now, with more confidence in the audiences being reached, and a clearer sense of what success should actually look like.
So rather than reheating the same tired debate, maybe it’s time to move on. There’s no prize for picking a side. But there’s real value in bringing both together.
