Today’s marketers face increasing pressure to link marketing to business performance, torn between two often conflicting priorities: brand storytelling and performance marketing.
Lately, this conversation has been popping up among marketers and was the topic of at least three panels on Monday at this year’s Advertising Week conference in New York.
The brand versus performance debate goes back even before the advent of Advertising Week, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, according to Advertising Week founder and CEO Lance Pillersdorf. It’s a timely topic at this year’s event as a host of new media channels, such as streaming advertising, and economic headwinds that are straining marketing strategies and changes in technology, such as next-generation artificial intelligence, that have promised to stimulate creativity faster than ever before, according to marketers and agency managers.
“It’s something of an art versus science that’s been around for as long as it’s been creative.” [with] a media platform to put that creativity on,” Pillersdoff said from this year’s symposium near Penn Station in Manhattan. “It’s a conversation that has evolved over time with technology changes.”
In theory, there should always be a balance between brand stories and performance goals. (It helps that shoppers are aware of the brand before they buy.) But in recent years, the pendulum has swung in one direction as marketers became overly dependent on short-term, performance-driven marketing tactics.
The conundrum it created is “inconsistent messaging across touchpoints, incredibly fragmented campaigns that lack synergy, and wasted resources that duplicate efforts and create inefficiencies,” Eddie Gonzalez, chief strategy officer at marketing agency Razorfish, told Digiday in an email.
That said, there has been a marketing push of late to build brands and get the word out. Since January, agencies say they’re seeing an increase in requests for proposals that include brand-building elements. So it makes sense that panels like “Branding as a ‘Multiplier’ — Why We Need to Rethink Branding vs. Performance” and “Bridging the Gap: Performance Marketing Meets Brand Building” were featured in Monday’s Ad Week.
“Lack of investment in brand advertising accidentally pushes brands to the left,” said Ken Favaro
head of strategy at BERA Brand Management, a brand technology platform; Favaro spoke at “Branding as a ‘Multiplier’ – Why We Need to Rethink Branding vs Performance” on Monday. “So you have to invest more in performance advertising just to get the same results, which means you’re investing less in brand advertising, moving your brand even further to the left, and around and around you.”
As the 2025 planning process begins, marketers expect the conversation to continue, as they are encouraging customers to split dollars between brand and performance to work together instead of as two separate focuses, according to Cody Mohon, assistant media manager at GS&F advertising agency.
“This allows for efficiency and budget optimization that build on each other for a stronger bottom line across the board,” Mohon said.
Elsewhere from Advertising Week:
OMG’s AI Buying Agent standards project aims to ensure that advertisers’ interests are considered when platforms create automated ad-merchandise algorithms.
Appears:
8 in the morning Why it’s hard to meet customer needs – and how to succeed on the Penn 1 Social Stair
9:40 in the morning AI in Action: A New Era of Innovation-Level Advertising Success
10:10 a.m From Clicks to Conversations: How to Build Relationships and Engage Your Audience at the Insight Level
11:30 in the morning Fandoms, Tropes and Reaching Gen Z through Storytelling on the Insights Stage
12:45 p.m Owning the Game: Scoring Big in Women’s Sports at a Creative Level
3:30 p.m House of Data: Advanced Advertising in a Fragmented Media Ecosystem at the media level
https://digiday.com/?p=557368
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