By James Parker, Head of APAC at LoopMe
There’s an undeniable body of evidence that supports brand advertising’s long-term commercial value.
The IPA Effectiveness Databank, consisting of more than 1,600 case studies since 1980, shows that long-term brand investment delivers around double the profit of short-term activation.
Meanwhile, notable work by Binet and Field demonstrates that campaigns reaching the whole market produce three times as many large business effects as those chasing existing customers.
Kantar BrandZ has also tracked the world’s strongest brands for two decades and found they consistently outperform the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index.
Despite this, many marketers continue to find it difficult to secure brand-building budgets. So what needs to change?
Performance wins in the short term
The commercial value of building a brand is one of the most thoroughly researched ideas in marketing. And yet, when budgets tighten, brand activity is usually the first thing cut. Boards and finance teams turn to performance channels almost by reflex. This is not because they’ve ignored the research, but because performance marketing produces real-time data in formats that senior leaders understand.
Kantar’s 2024 research found that some 47% of Australian marketers prioritise performance channels because it’s easier to communicate their returns to the C-suite. A further 42% said performance simply drives stronger short-term results, and 38% pointed to direct pressure from leadership to hit targets. Marketers are choosing performance because they can prove what it did, and show results quickly.
Until recently, it’s been much harder for marketers to produce equivalent datasets for brand advertising. Traditional brand lift studies provide data weeks after a campaign ends and often don’t connect directly to the commercial decisions being made. By the time the findings reach the desks of senior leaders, budgets have already been allocated.
Brand measurement has changed
The technology to measure brand outcomes in real time, at the level of individual media activity, now exists and is being used in market. Rather than waiting for a post-campaign survey, marketers can see brand awareness, consideration and purchase intent metrics change while a campaign is live.
They can identify which audiences are responding and which creative is working. They can see where budget is best allocated. The measurements look like performance data, and can enter the financial discussion on equal terms.
A recent UK campaign run by Dentsu X for Califia Farms shows what this looks like in practice. Califia, a plant-based beverage brand, set brand awareness and consumer preference as its primary goals.
The campaign delivered a 28% brand lift, with 325,000 users recording measurable positive ad recall. A parallel study by Circana, an independent research firm, measured a 7.5% sales lift, exceeding the category benchmark by five times. The brand objectives and the commercial results were measured together, in numbers a finance team could read without translation or reference to old textbooks.
Let brand and performance data sit side-by-side
Bringing this discipline into planning and reporting should be a priority for marketers. By following a few key principles, this goal is achievable. Firstly, they must set brand outcome targets before a campaign starts – not afterwards.
If awareness or purchase intent is the goal, they should define the number they’re aiming for and the target audience, just as a performance campaign defines a target cost per acquisition. This gives the board something concrete to assess against.
Secondly, they should report brand outcomes in the same cadence as performance metrics. And just as performance campaigns, brands should expect constant optimisation of the branding goals, applying the same disciplines and rigour as you would with any campaign.
Finally, it’s vital to connect brand outcomes to commercial measures wherever possible. The Califia campaign placed brand lift and sales lift side by side. When marketers can show that a movement in consideration came before an increase in revenue, the link between brand investment and business growth isn’t just theoretical; it’s an empirical fact.
Taking a more balanced view
This approach doesn’t mean abandoning performance marketing. Nor is it an attempt to prove that brand is more important than activation. The most successful organisations take a more holistic view of marketing and are oriented to the long term, rather than defaulting to performance under budget pressure.
What’s changed is that brand activity no longer has to operate with worse measurement than its performance counterpart, as the tools have caught up.
The marketers who get ahead of this shift will be the ones who stop treating brand and performance as separate areas of measurement. They must bring the same rigour and speed to brand measurement that they bring to performance, and report both in the same financial language.
When that happens, the case for brand investment is no longer dependent on a body of academic evidence the board half-remembers, and sits comfortably within live data the board can see for itself. And that is a far easier argument to win.