Oh look—another think piece reminding marketers that brand and performance should get married, have metrics babies, and live happily ever after. Cute. Except we’ve been screaming this from the rooftops since before Facebook pretended it cared about small businesses.
Bob Parks of Boathouse makes a well-meaning case, full of earnest nods to media fragmentation and AI buzzwords. And sure, most of it checks out. But here's the thing: we don’t need a kumbaya campfire singalong between brand and performance. We need rehab. Because CMOs have become ROI junkies—mainlining last-click attribution like it’s digital heroin.
Let’s break this down—with actual facts, not just marketing platitudes:
📉 The Fixation on Performance is Eating Itself Alive
Bob says performance gets you quick hits but stalls over time. No duh.
Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend Survey confirmed the pendulum swung so hard toward performance that long-term brand equity fell off a cliff. The result? CPMs are up, click-throughs are down, and everyone’s blaming the algorithm while ignoring the real problem: you stopped making people care.
Les Binet and Peter Field—actual grown-ups with data—have been telling you for over a decade: 60% brand, 40% activation. But sure, keep flooding Instagram with 20% off codes and wondering why no one remembers your name.
🧠 Brand Makes Performance Work Harder
This isn’t folklore. Analytic Partners found that brand marketing not only drives incremental profit—it turbocharges your performance ROI. If people trust you, they click more. They convert faster. They churn less. You’re not buying attention—you’ve earned it.
And yet, CFOs still treat brand spend like a vacation to Burning Man: expensive, messy, and hard to justify on a spreadsheet. Newsflash: Brand is not art. It’s a long-term asset. And performance without it? That’s just digital couponing with lipstick.
📊 Silos Are the Enemy
Bob hits this one right: most orgs still track brand and performance like they’re divorced parents fighting over a custody spreadsheet. Grow up. Unified measurement frameworks are not fantasy anymore—tools like WARC, Nielsen’s ROI Analyzer, and even open-source MMM libraries are democratizing access.
If you’re still blaming measurement for your fragmented media strategy, that’s not a tech problem. That’s a leadership problem.
💡 So, What’s the Real Takeaway?
Not that brand and performance need to “coexist.” That ship has sailed. The real question is: who’s brave enough to stop chasing short-term dopamine and invest in something that won’t collapse under the weight of your next quarterly report?
This isn’t about “integration” anymore. It’s about detox. Detox from the cult of click-throughs. Detox from fractional attribution fantasies. Detox from performance-only planning that’s just dressed-up desperation.
Because let’s be honest: if your business model only works when brand gets ignored, you don’t have a business. You have a Ponzi scheme with ad dollars.
📌 Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More than You Did Yesterday.
And maybe stop treating your marketing strategy like it’s Tinder. You don’t need more swipes—you need something that’ll actually last.