Measuring advertising often leads you astray – beware the doom loop of performance-marketing
Read the summary:
Jointly, not in silos: Performance and brand marketing should be planned and carried out jointly.
ROI growth: The combination of performance and brand marketing can increase marketing ROI by up to 90%.
Significance of the brand: A strong brand has been proven to improve marketing performance, but the share of brand marketing in marketing investments has decreased.
Fragmentation of the media environment: Diverse media investments are important to reach audiences.
High-quality ad experiences: Advertisers should prioritise environments that provide quality ad experiences and brand safety.
"Marketing is at a turning point – always, but especially now", says Paul Stringer, head of the WARC research team. He spoke at Sanoma’s Get Tomorrow Movement customer event about the relationship between performance and brand marketing.
"Performance and brand marketing must be carried out systematically hand in hand, not in silos", Stringer emphasises.
By combining performance and brand marketing methods, you can achieve the best results. Brand marketing acts as a multiplier for performance marketing.
When moving from pure performance marketing to a mix of performance and brand marketing, marketing ROI can grow by up to 90%, according to Analytics Partners.
Are you ignoring 95% of your potential customers?
The impact of a strong brand on marketing performance is undeniable. However, investment trends are moving in the opposite direction: the share of brand-building marketing has decreased by almost 10 percentage points from 2023 to 2024. In 2024, as much as 69% of marketing budgets were spent on tactical performance marketing.
Why do marketing decision-makers work against research data and invest the majority of their budget in short-term measures?
"The effects of brand advertising will only be visible in the longer term, but many companies measure results quarterly. Patience for verifying the effects of brand advertising is lacking", explains Stringer.
More sophisticated measurement methods are needed to demonstrate brand marketing performance. You should not rely on attribution modelling alone. Attribution modelling overestimates short-term direct impacts, such as search-engine advertising and direct advertising, and underestimates longer-term brand-building activities.
Stringer advises using marketing mix modelling analytics and long-term brand tracking studies to help verify the effectiveness of brand marketing over time.
"Measuring is often misleading. Beware of the vicious circle, doom loop, of performance marketing", he says.
Business realities often run counter to sound judgment. We know we should invest more in the brand, but we don't have the patience or the ability to do so."
According to Stringer, the most important thing is to take a balanced approach.
"Performance marketing is important, and it has a place in advertising", he says.
"But marketers who grow more sustainably and get the highest returns for their performance marketing activities also invest in brand advertising. Typically, the distribution between brand and performance investments should be 60/40, i.e. 60% for brand marketing and 40% for performance marketing."
After easy wins in the short term, growth can be difficult. Only 5% of consumers are ready to buy at the exact moment when they come across an ad. If a marketer does not invest in building future demand for their products and services, they are effectively ignoring 95% of their potential customers.
Are you investing too much in a single platform?
The fragmentation of the media environment is a big challenge for marketers.
"If you consistently use your distinctive brand features, you’ll achieve more impressive results", Stringer stresses.
According to him, the biggest challenge caused by media fragmentation is that campaigns are sometimes designed too much to suit media platforms, in which case they are not linked to the brand idea or lack consistency. Or consistency may also be emphasised to such extent that the suitability of the campaign for the media platform in question is neglected.
Already more than half of advertising investments go to technology giants such as Google and Meta.
"I think we need to take a step back and ask if this is a good trend. It is really important that advertisers prioritise diversity and maintain a broad level of investment across different media. First, to support a vibrant and healthy media ecosystem, and secondly, because the fragmentation of the media has scattered audiences across many different platforms. You won't reach everyone you want to reach if you invest too much in a single platform", Stringer notes.
Advertisers have been concerned by Meta’s announcement that it will stop fact-checking.
There is a risk involved in relying too much on one platform and letting it make decisions on your behalf about how you advertise and what kind of rules apply in the context of advertising. That’s why I think it’s really important for advertisers to prioritise environments that offer quality ad experiences and brand safety, so that the brand doesn’t end up in an environment that causes it long-term harm"
Are you focusing too much on individual campaigns?
Stringer recommends building platforms for marketing activities instead of campaigns.
"I encourage marketers to stop short-term campaign thinking and focus on long-term creative platforms that include both performance and brand advertising, reach audiences across a wide media spectrum, and utilise creative implementations based on a consistent brand idea."
He takes the example of the Snickers chocolate bar, which has used the slogan “You're Not You When You're Hungry” for years.
"It would have been pretty boring if Snickers had run the same campaign for years. They have used the same brand idea while producing different creative executions at different times, all related to this same idea."
What should we do better?
What message does Paul Stringer have for Finnish marketers? What should we do better?
"As far as I understand, performance and brand marketing are still quite often carried out in silos. I encourage marketers to be more curious about what the other team is doing and what metrics they are prioritising, as well as thinking about ways to bring these two worlds together. The power of advertising increases dramatically as performance and brand marketing teams think about marketing communications in a more integrated way."
According to him, in a fragmented media environment, it is important to continue supporting diverse media investments.
What message does Paul Stringer send to Finnish marketers? What should we do better?
"My understanding is that performance and brand marketing is still pretty much done in silos. I encourage marketers to be more curious about what the other team is doing and what metrics they are prioritising, and to think about ways to bring the two worlds together. The power of advertising increases dramatically when performance and brand marketing teams think about marketing communications in a more integrated way."
He says that in a fragmented media environment, it is important to continue to support diverse media investments.
Don't rely solely on global tech giants and assume that they will solve all your advertising concerns. Marketers should make more use of the local media ecosystem, which can offer interesting and novel opportunities."
Stringer also mentions the moral and ethical reasoning behind media choices.
"It's about the desire to support a vibrant and dynamic media ecosystem. You can do this by distributing your advertising budget across different media channels instead of investing everything into one or two channels."
Photo by Pasi Salminen
Read next: Brand building and brand awareness: where does a good, sustainable brand come from?
