The situation
Many brands and organisations organise their marketing efforts the buckets of ‘brand’ and ‘performance’. The how, why and what of this stokes copious amounts of industry discussion, research, theories and indeed confusion within many companies.
Why is this topic interesting? Because there is a massive opportunity for many (maybe most) brands to improve marketing effectiveness by optimising their approach to this, rethinking it ..or perhaps even completely eradicating it as a choice dichotomy / concept altogether
Historically Performance Marketing was more closely associated with ‘direct response’ i.e. a consumer signals interest in your product or category and you ‘respond’ with an ad (e.g. advertising against relevant Search keywords, affiliates ads in articles where consumers are researching a product etc)
This was quite a nice and tidy (albeit still imperfect) way of splitting advertising that generates demand vs advertising that converts demand. And the original brand vs performance conversations and theories and make a reasonable amount of sense in this context.
What has changed?
Big tech platforms such as Google and Meta have increasingly leaned into acquisition based advertising offerings that focus on delivering appealing and addictive Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) outcomes.
Automation has increasingly become the recommended approach by such companies, typically coming with a reduction in narrow targeting and intentional format based approaches in favour of scaled audiences, fluid formats and targeting algorithms that require a diverse range of creative assets as input (..but not much else).
Massive advances in mobile video via technologies like 5G mean that video inventory scale has exploded on social, web and app leading to such environments becoming increasingly feasible for performance marketing, simply due to scale and consumption.
The result of this is that the degree of differentiation between awareness driving digital marketing and digital performance marketing has reduced significantly in recent years. The difference between a Brand and Performance ad has become less distinct, particularly on platforms like YouTube, Social and Meta. Even if there is a clear to difference to the marketer, quite often the customer experience is near indistinguishable.
If you were to compare a ‘brand’ digital media plan and a ‘performance’ digital media plan, you would likely to find a reasonable degree of crossover in terms of platform choices, formats and even creative.
Why is this a problem?
Lack of differentiation can lead to a kind of ‘stealth overlap’ that does not necessarily show up in actual reported frequency or audience reporting, but still does exist in terms of advertising served. This is particularly likely to happen if there is a seperation of teams and/or communication between brand and performance operations.
The net result of this can be over-serving certain audiences, creative burnout that is hard to detect and ultimately inefficiency in total media spend.
The increasing reliance and ubiquitousness of the CPA metric often leads to brands confusing efficiency with effectiveness and therefore stunting actual business growth. This is because CPA metrics are typically measured using platform reported numbers via the likes of Google, Meta, Tik Tok et al.
The problem with these numbers is that they do not account for the impact of other channels, brand or baseline consumer behaviour.
In other words, you don’t know how many of these sales happened because if the Ad seen in that platform, or whether the sale was going to happen anyway. Not to mention inconsistency in attribution windows by platform, and an over reliance on last click based measurement techniques.
So bottom line, yes it is fast, easy to understand, easy to use and easy to report to management (see previous ‘addictiveness’ comment). However, used in isolation of other measurement techniques it is inaccurate, and in fact worse than merely inaccurate, can be misleading to the point that it may guide your business in the wrong direction.
The Opportunity
If all of this sounds familiar, fear not as you are not alone. In fact, it is near impossible to avoid such pitfalls given the current digital marketing landscape.
The good news is that by identifying and understanding these challenges, there is massive opportunity to optimise your overall approach and get ahead of competition.
So, what do we need to do?
i) Align Business Objectives
A simple and useful question is often: why are you splitting brand and performance budgets. The distinction of marketing efforts could be due to differing objectives, organisational structure, different budget setting methods or budget setting time frames.
The answer or answers to this question are useful in determining how best to achieve integration and drive synergies.
In other words, what are the desired outcomes of the marketing efforts, when are these outcomes forecasted, how often does the forecast change, when do you expect the results to be achieved, how often is the progress reviewed and optimised and to whom is all of this communicated.
Mapping all of this out side by side is the best place to start.
ii) Unified Measurement Framework
There is huge amounts of discourse on what the right ratio of brand and performance spend is, but not enough on which channels and platforms should be defined as brand vs performance. Doing this is a good place to start, as it will alert you to identify crossover channels where greater attention on integration needs to be paid.
In addition to channels, you will also want to do the classic exercise of mapping out the consumer journey stages vs key messages, creative, tactics and stating which team is responsible if there are more than one involved.
It also critical to ensure the business & marketing objectives defined in part one are aligned to media KPIs. This should ideally include multiple measurement techniques, but that is a bigger topic for another day. I like Meta’s Measurement 360 approach to this.
A final but important point, brand activity can drive performance and performance activity can drive brand results. Therefore, measuring not just the primary purpose of a brand or performance marketing effort but also the secondary halo impact can unlock massive otherwise missed opportunities.
iii) Zero Silos
If there are multiple teams and stakeholders involved across brand and performance marketing (as is usually the case) it is prudent to aim for ‘Zero Silos’.
More specifically, this means shared knowledge of: overall approach, creative that is being used in advertising, tactics that are working well/poorly and checkpoints where both sets of results are reviewed together.
This can unlock many otherwise missed opportunities (see above ‘measure everything’ point)
iv) Flex
Finally, based on all of the above mentioned opportunities, it really pays to build in a degree of flexibility into your approach across brand and performance.
This could mean leveraging a piece of creative in Brand Marketing that has been flagged as driving great acquisition and amplifying it further.
It could be something more straightforward like being able to calculate Performance marketing reach in traditionally awareness driving video channels in order to hit weekly media sufficiency targets more efficiently.
OR if you happen to prefer formulas:
Aligned Objectives & Measurement + Zero Silos + Flexibility = Halo & Synergies
Final thought: this is an area that is ever evolving and rapidly. It’s likely the optimal approach will change as the industry does and of course this always looks different by category and brand. Even 3 years ago, this post would look very different. There will unlikely ever be an ‘exact recipe’ for tackling this so staying on top of changes and constantly experimenting is the best way to constantly ensure maximum effectiveness.