Brand Strategy: 381 findings, with sources

Agencies are not briefed on the actual problem. They receive a scope of work and a procurement-set fee, never a request to help grow the brand - and the client is not taking the growth question to management consultants either.

The blocker on pruning scope is measurement: neither marketing nor the agency documents what is actually in the scope of work, so the adult conversation about which deliverables deserve to exist cannot happen.

There is precedent for reinvesting efficiency instead of surrendering it: in 2004 Toyota had a consultant find efficiencies at Saatchi, then held the agency's fees flat and let it reinvest the resulting profit into building digital capability.

Marketing mix modelling has passed beyond human judgement given the number of channels; the useful AI layer is a generative front end that lets a CMO ask in plain English what to change next quarter to accelerate growth.

Andrew Ehrenberg's radical question: 'You can't launch a Me Too product - why not?' Most successful launches are unintentionally Me Too; every new accounting practice is one. Distinctive enough beats different.

Consumers didn't abandon reformulated Lucozade because of the taste - they dropped out because they HEARD it had changed. The rumor of change, not the change, caused the crash (same mechanism as New Coke: 'how dare you take my choice away').

Broad-reach advertising has a typical short-term sales elasticity of about 0.0008 - statistically zero - while search and performance elasticities run 10-20x higher.

The typical advertising elasticity of broad-reach media is ~0.0008 - statistically zero in short-term sales. You cannot see your best advertising working in weekly numbers; measure the memories of the 95% instead. Search/performance elasticities run 10-20x higher only because they harvest the in-market 5%.

Expansion rule for growing brands: go national (or into a new market) only when you can achieve overlapping mental AND physical availability there; otherwise build both in a tighter geography first.

When buyers explained six recent purchases, purpose showed up in under one percentile of their reasons.

Kantar's reversed purpose test: instead of asking whether people care about causes (they say yes), they asked buyers to explain six purchases they had just made - purpose appeared in under one percentile of verbatim reasons.

Half of marketing leaders cannot tell whether CTV works as well as Linear TV

49% of global marketing leaders say they find it challenging to assess whether new video formats like Connected TV can deliver as effectively as Linear TV.

Second for second, voluntary attention works harder than forced attention. Non-skippable ads deliver impact even at low attention levels - sound on, watched longer, and more expensive per impression - but skippable formats, once viewed for more than one to two seconds, surpass them.

Buying past thirty seconds buys length the attention curve no longer pays for

If a consumer watches about half an ad's duration most of the time, even on non-skippable formats, then the value of ads longer than 30 seconds should be questioned - you are buying length that the attention curve has already stopped rewarding.

Creativity now outranks possessions as a marker of status

Creativity is becoming a marker of personal status: 43% say how creative someone is defines a person's status, ahead of care for the planet (39%) and positive health metrics (36%). Status is migrating from what you own to what you can make.

Treatonomics: consumers trade down everywhere except the small joys

Austerity and indulgence coexist: 79% of global consumers are trading down (McKinsey), yet 38% of gen Z say they are spending more on themselves and 30% more on little treats - against 14% of gen X. VML calls it treatonomics: small affordable rewards as resilience infrastructure.

Two thirds follow creators for authenticity, and most feel a personal connection

68% of people follow creators because they seem authentic and relatable, and 60% feel a personal connection to them. The mechanism behind creator effectiveness is parasocial trust, not reach.

Škoda's Reddit-designed Octavia beat order expectations two and a half times over

Škoda let members of Reddit's Car Talk community vote on everything from the engine to the interior trim of a special-edition Octavia. Orders exceeded expectations by 255% and the campaign took a Cannes Lions Gold - co-creation as a commercial mechanism, not community theatre.

Boycotts move real numbers: Disney churn spiked four-fold in a single week

Consumer punishment is as measurable as fandom: Disney+ cancellations ran 436% above the usual churn rate in the week after Jimmy Kimmel's firing, 53% of US gen Z have taken part in brand boycotts (Statista), and Americana - the Middle East's largest fast-food franchise - saw net profits fall nearly 40% amid local boycotts.

GLP-1 use is reshaping spending in categories far from food

17% of people have taken or are taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, up from 12% a year earlier, and UBS forecasts 40 million users and $126 billion in sales by 2029. Second-order effects are already visible: US perfume sales to GLP-1 users rose 23% as suppressed appetite redirects the desire for pleasure into other categories.

Everyone thinks truth is dying - and most think they personally can spot the fakes

81% of people say the truth is an endangered concept these days and 71% believe AI is making it impossible to understand what is true - yet 68% are confident they personally can distinguish real from fake online. The confidence gap is exactly where misinformation lives.

Ads wear in, not out: longer-lived campaigns build recognition faster

Ad wear-in is measurable: the longer a brand keeps its ads alive, the faster its distinctiveness grows (r=0.52, p<0.01 across 80 UK brands and 4,000+ TV ads). The brand with a 713-day average campaign life gains +15% ad-brand recognition annually. Retiring ads early forfeits recognition they were still building.

Felix rode one consistent cat from near-death to a billion-dollar brand

Felix cat food ran one black-and-white cartoon cat consistently from 1989 to 2011 - through recessions, new channels and new markets. Sales and market share rose five-fold, price elasticity halved, the brand moved from budget to premium pricing and toppled the market leader on a fraction of its budget, ending up a global brand worth over a billion dollars.

People find things more pleasurable the more times they are repeated - unless they become aware of the repetition. Musicologist David Huron calls it disguised repetition, and it dissolves the consistency-versus-freshness trade-off: the craft is variation on a theme, not reinvention. Monet painted 250 waterlilies; Marmite has run love-it-or-hate-it for decades.

The compound creativity curve has an inconvenient shape: in the first 12 months consistency delivers limited benefit, and the advantage over inconsistent brands only opens up after year one, compounding thereafter. This is why consistency keeps being abandoned right before it pays.

42% of finance leaders cannot measure the long-term impact of brand

Brand building is marketers' number one priority for 2025, yet it does not appear in finance leaders' top five, and 42% of finance leaders say they struggle to measure the long-term impact of brand building.

Digital performance channels take 73% of global ad spend

Digital performance channels account for 73% of global ad spend, and it is performance creative that built and scaled today's most influential challenger brands such as Gymshark, Hismile, Dollar Shave Club and Wild.

A $2,000 billboard bought for the photo, not the footfall

MagicBrief bought a Sydney billboard for roughly $2,000 not for the passers-by in Surry Hills but so it could run a photo of the billboard as a Facebook ad, carrying the credibility of out-of-home with the reach and targeting of performance media.

George Howes' 15 elements of a high-performance creative team come down to a tight feedback loop between media buyers and creatives, a culture that tests instead of debating, metrics owned by the whole team, a shared and regularly updated messaging matrix, a shared understanding of what drove past wins, the ability to iterate winners by going deeper rather than sideways into replicas, following the eye of the cultural storm, clean repeatable processes, acting on competitor formats, and a culture that keeps taking bets with outsized returns.

Juniper, Eucalyptus's medical weight loss brand, started from the insight that people saw medical weight loss as cheating. It tested hundreds of Meta ads arguing 'medical weight loss is not cheating', graduated the winning language into a YouTube explainer, then a TV campaign, and finally a national white paper and PR campaign on sentiment around medical weight loss, all carrying the same message.

Self-reported attribution under-reports brand channels. During a TV campaign, Eucalyptus sees a sudden spike in customers who say they heard about the brand on Meta or Instagram even though nothing changed on those platforms: the TV ad pushed them over the edge, but they remember the channel where they had already seen the brand. Read survey data as mental availability, not as a direct cause.

Brand creative should not be judged by immediate sales alone, but it can be measured in the short term: look for short-term lift in mental availability (brand recall, consideration, salience), brand searches, direct traffic and top-of-funnel growth by referral channel, and compare awareness and consideration movement against competitors to see whether you are outpacing the market.

Splitting ~500 IPA digital-era cases into four groups (neither / activation-only / brand-only / both) shows campaigns doing BOTH brand and activation in balance are decisively the most effective - and brand building is the primary driver of long-term growth in every sector.

Strong brands are the precondition for marketing agility: short-term response campaigns are far more powerful when a strong brand stands behind them. Without brand strength there is no agility to protect.

Brands that are heavily researched online, sell online, or run on subscriptions need more brand building, with an optimal split of around 74/26 toward brand.

Brands heavily researched online, brands that sell online, and subscription brands all need MORE brand building, not less: optimal splits around 74/26 toward brand, because digital makes their activation easy and the hard job is what remains.

Brands with major product innovation should tilt budget toward brand at around 72/28, while minor, tweak-level innovation performs worse than no innovation at all.

Significant product innovation makes activation easy (great products sell themselves short-term), so innovative brands should tilt toward brand (~72/28). But minor innovation is WORSE than no innovation at all - the 'new news' model of endless tweaks and variants actively hurts effectiveness.

Financial services is the sector needing the strongest brand tilt (activation easy, brand hard) yet moving budget the opposite way fastest - "leading the way to the precipice." Retail, led by discounters like Lidl and Aldi, shows how to keep brand commitment under short-term pressure.

One broad-reach emotional brand campaign plus a 60/40 budget reallocation reversed the AA's five-year market share decline within a single year.

The AA's recovery: one broad-reach emotional brand campaign (two-thirds TV, online video amplification) plus a 60/40 reallocation reversed a five-year market share decline in a single year - brand building also makes the short-term work better, because the two work in synergy.

Creativity is a long game and needs a measurement window longer than six months

Creativity does not drive short-term response. Its impact only arises when campaigns are evaluated over more than six months, and 'topbox' effects - profound business changes - start to emerge over longer horizons still. Measure it in a quarter and you will conclude it does not work.

Category Entry Points are the cues category buyers use to access their memories when faced with a buying situation. They include internal cues such as motives and emotions, and external cues such as location and time of day. Understanding them lets you build associations between your brand and the category's core buying situations.

Each extra buying situation linked to your brand lowers defection risk

The average slope of the defection regression line is -0.2, against an average baseline defection probability of 4.4 for a customer with 0-2 CEPs. Read across the 17 categories, that suggests each additional CEP a customer links to the brand lowers their probability of defection by around 5%.

A CEP with many brands holding mental advantages is a crowded mental space and a poor place to message. Linking a brand to a CEP is never a 'one and done' task: memories decay and need consistent refreshing, and competitors messaging the same cue make that harder on top of the usual battle for attention.

The plateau was not the point of the chart when it was drawn. Roach and Kite published the whole model in 2020; it was readers telling them the flat section was the genuinely difficult part that made them go back and write about that moment specifically in 2022.

Roach's organisational objection to the funnel: when teams are named after its layers, incentivised differently and given very different tasks, he fears for how any of it works together. The model stops being a description of demand and becomes an org chart that guarantees the parts do not connect.

Roach left rational persuasion out of the modified funnel deliberately. He does not think it is always wrong, but considers it badly overemphasised, particularly in pretesting models. What he is persuaded replaces the message is category entry points - and he concedes they end up looking a lot like messages once they reach a creative brief.

The mantra behind lots of littles is borrowed and older than the problem. Big as a collection of smalls came from BBH in the 1980s, a world of TV, radio, press and posters. Roach's scale point: a big multinational with hundreds of brands could now be making several million things a year, before translation, transcreation and adaptation.

Share of model, developed by Jack Smyth at Brandtech, is a brand's visibility and perception inside the AI models - the equivalent of brand awareness and brand perception, measured against what the models say about you and how present you are in them. It is a concept, a metric and a platform at once.

The actionable part of share of model is the per-model split. Strong in ChatGPT and weak in Gemini points at making better, more tuned content for YouTube. Getting into the answers is about credibility and authority as much as training-data presence, because the models are often running a search while they answer.

AIDA was invented around 1900 by Frank Dukesmith as a SALES process model, later misadopted to explain advertising - a great model for sales, a terrible model for the different discipline of advertising.

Volvo Trucks' Epic Split reached millions who will never buy a truck - and that was the point: it biased the future buyers entering the category over following years, driving market share up long after the campaign.

The answer to 'what does brand marketing contribute commercially': brand marketing is the creation of future demand - it makes people who aren't in the market yet familiar with us and emotionally positive toward us, so when they enter the market they gravitate toward us and pay more.

Don't cram brand-building and sales activation into one execution - 'we always end up with a bunch of shit.' Separate the tasks: two executions of the same campaign, one tightly targeted and rational, one broad and emotional.

Marketing's contribution is almost always measured through its effect on sales volume, which ignores the other half of the profit equation. Profit = Sales x Price - Costs, and marketing's influence on Price remains largely unexamined and unmeasured.

Every dark quarter costs future revenue that takes years to rebuild

Nielsen's analysis finds brands risk losing 2% of future revenue for each quarter they forgo advertising, and that recovering from extended periods of marketing inactivity can take three to five years of consistent brand building.

Marketing and finance agree marketing matters and disagree completely on what to prioritise

Marketing and finance agree that marketing matters: 90% of marketing and 89% of finance decision-makers agree it drives long-term growth, and 88% and 81% that it is essential for profitability. They disagree on priority. 48% of marketers named brand building the top company priority; it did not appear in finance's top five, which led with increasing profitability at 45%.

Total ROI measures a channel's overall efficiency in converting spend into revenue. Marginal ROI reveals the value of each additional unit of spend, answering what more budget would actually deliver. Total ROI assesses performance; marginal ROI guides allocation. Optimising investment requires both.

Widening reach drives incremental sales that high-frequency targeting misses

Reach typically drives 14% of incremental sales, a multiplier effect that highlights the untapped potential of a wider audience. In a meta-analysis of 21 EMEA CPG brands advertising on YouTube, weekly frequency of more than 2 indexed at 180 against 100 for frequency 1.

Personalising with first-party data doubles what a challenger brand can take from a leader

When those same invented brands tailored their propositions using simulated first-party data, the gain rose to between +10 and +26 percentage points of preference share. In the hotel category the invented brand went from 25% preference to 51%, overtaking the shopper's first choice.

Pure loyalty campaigns nearly disappeared from the IPA case base, falling from about 10% to 3% of cases.

Pure loyalty campaigns collapsed from around 10% to 3% of IPA cases over the 2014-16 period. Loyalty effects still occur, but mostly as a side effect of penetration growth rather than as something a campaign can target directly.

The share of annual market share growth explained by excess share of voice (ESOV) rose from 6% before the digital era to 12% after it.

Share of voice matters more in the digital era, not less: the share of annual market share growth explained by ESOV rose from 6% (1998-2006) to 12% (2008-2016), at an unchanged efficiency of 0.6 share points per 10 points of ESOV.

Online video beats every other online display format, and works far better as a paid medium than an owned one.

Online video outperforms every other online display format (21% uplift against 7% for online non-video), and it works far better as a paid medium than an owned one (27% against 18%).

Activation's share of comms budget jumped in just two years, from 31% to 45% of IPA campaign spend.

Activation is now over-funded relative to the evidence: its share of comms budget in IPA cases rose from 31% (2014) to 45% (2016), reaching 54% in short-term campaigns and 43% even in long-term ones. Enders Analysis put direct response at 49% of all UK advertising spend in 2016, against 39% in 2000.

Mattessons Fridge Raiders: the pure-social campaign left no measurable effect six weeks after it ended, while the TV-broadened version delivered 70% greater net profit growth.

Mattessons Fridge Raiders ran the same brand both ways: the 2013 pure-play social campaign returned just over 100% ROMI but had no measurable residual effect six weeks after it ended, while the 2014-15 version broadened with TV over seven months returned 87% long-term ROMI and 70% greater net profit growth.

Distinctive and emotional work multiplies profit hardest on the smallest budgets

When advertising is both above-average distinctive and above-average positive in emotion, profit reporting jumps at every spend level. At small budgets it goes from 2% to 14%, a seven-fold multiplier, and at large budgets from 9% to 19%.

Campaigns that deliver several business outcomes are dramatically more likely to deliver profit

Business Results compound. A campaign reporting no other business result has a 1% chance of reporting profit growth and 8% for market share. A campaign reporting five has a 50% chance of profit and 67% of market share.

Revenue is the easy result, profit is the rare one

Revenue growth is common and profit growth is rare. Across award-winning campaigns, 77% report revenue growth, 49% new customer penetration, 36% market share, 14% loyalty, 9% profit and just 5% reduced price sensitivity.

Brand consistency has fallen by a quarter over the past decade

Brands are getting less consistent. The Compound Creativity Score across 139 US and UK brands fell from 65% in 2010 to 49% in 2022, meaning brands are around a quarter less consistent than a decade ago. Average reported Brand Effects per campaign fell from 3.3 in 2011 to 2.1 in 2023.

The dullest advertising returns around 40% less than the least dull

Dull advertising costs money directly. The dullest campaigns in the dataset average $4.40 ROI against $7.10 for the least dull, roughly 40% lower. Neutrality is highest in pharmaceutical, healthcare and B2B at 46%, and lowest in food and drink at 35%.

Emotional and distinctive work pays more the longer it runs, dull work barely improves

Emotional and distinctive campaigns report profit growth 8% of the time under six months and 45% of the time after three years. Campaigns that are not emotional move from 2% to 6% over the same span. Creative quality needs time to pay, and time does almost nothing for work without it.

Entertainment makes media budget work harder at every spend level

Showmanship pays at every budget level and pays most at the largest. Market share reporting rises from 20% to 35% at small spend and from 35% to 57% at extra-large spend when comparing the least to the most showmanship. In short-form, the most showmanship-heavy TikTok ads delivered +39% ad recall lift, twice the brand awareness lift and 2.8x the brand image lift.

Challenger brands convert loyalty into profit more reliably than penetration

Challenger brands are six times more likely to report profit growth when they also report loyalty gains (21%) than when they report neither (3.5%), and roughly twice as likely as when they report new customer penetration (10.9%). For challengers, being chosen repeatedly by a smaller group comes before being familiar to everyone.

Aldi and Kevin the Carrot - what six years of one character is worth

Aldi committed to Kevin the Carrot as a Fluent Device across six Christmases. The character's System1 Star Rating rose from 3.0 in 2016 to 5.8 by 2020, and the platform delivered £618m in incremental revenue, 54% value share growth, £2.63 net profit per £1 spent and a 263% ROMI on £42.52m of advertising, winning the Global Grand Effie in 2023.

Brands with strong pricing power are measurably more resilient to price increases

Pricing power is a Kantar Brand Equity metric predicting whether consumers are predisposed to pay a higher price relative to competitors. Modelled against price elasticity across ten brands in an example FMCG category, the relationship has an R squared of 0.76.

Channels differ on two axes that have to be read together: how much brand building they contribute and how cost effectively they do it. TV and point of sale deliver high contribution, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube deliver high cost effectiveness, and cinema, outdoor and newspapers sit low on both.

Three charts in this deck carry no numeric labels on their marks: the performance overemphasis case, the going dark comparison and the channel positioning map. They communicate a shape, not a measurement, and should be used as illustrations rather than quoted as data.

Share of Search moves 6 to 12 months before market share does

Share of Search works as a leading indicator rather than a report card. The study cites Les Binet's finding that Share of Search correlates strongly with market share, and that changes in Share of Search often precede shifts in market share by 6 to 12 months.

For brands at the lower to mid end of the awareness scale, every point of awareness growth translates into measurable behavioural change in search and ultimately in market share. Growth-stage and disruptor brands have the most to gain, which makes brand investment at that stage one of the most commercially efficient moves available.

The argument for why AI search raises the stakes rather than lowering them: AI search surfaces one or two answers rather than a page of options. As the report puts it, there is no second page and no consolation prize for being the second-most-familiar brand in the category.

Thirty years of downsizing has left agencies staffed mostly with junior people. That is workable for programmatic execution and inadequate for the top-of-funnel strategy and problem solving that brand growth requires.

Pruning scope of work while holding fees flat could lift the effective price per unit of work from $110k toward $175k, at no extra client cost.

The realistic fix is not higher fees, it is pruning the scope of work: cut the deliverables that add nothing, hold the fee flat, and the price per unit of real work rises from $110k toward $175k at no extra cost to the client.

TV and CTV CPMs run about $32 versus under $10 for typical programmatic, yet buyers treat all reach as equal.

Roughly $32 CPMs for over-the-air TV or CTV against under $10 for typical programmatic, with buyers behaving as though all reach is equal - the cheap-reach reflex that hollowed out top-of-funnel advertising.

Banks with 96% awareness still lose product lines to competitors because awareness data hides category-entry-point gaps: satisfied customers who 'love' their bank simply didn't think of it when buying house insurance.

Distinctiveness (a brand that looks like itself) is most of the job; Ritson's 'double-D' adds relative differentiation on top. Porter's error was conflating being different with being unique - relative differentiation (slightly taller bottle, perceived-safer Volvo) is achievable; uniqueness rarely is.

The 95/5 rule: at any moment, roughly 95% of category buyers are not in the market to buy.

The 95/5 rule: at any moment roughly 95% of category buyers are not in market. It was coined by John Dawes from B2B negative binomial distributions - so 'does it apply to B2B?' has it backwards; it came from B2B.

Lucozade's real penetration nearly doubled from 26% at 12 months to 46% at three years - not the 8 weeks it was given to prove itself.

Lucozade's relaunch lesson: 12-month penetration was 26% but three-year penetration was 46% - typical for consumer brands (it roughly doubles over three years). The team had been given an eight-week relaunch objective; the honest timeline was eight years.

Long drives short, but short doesn't drive long: the best brand-building campaigns also correlate with short-term sales spikes, while highly targeted promotional campaigns spike sales and do nothing for the brand (System1 data).

Challenger playbook: too small for mass? Take a segment or subcategory not because you don't want everything but because you can't afford everything yet - Fever Tree took premium territory Schweppes abandoned; Chobani built scale inside Greek yogurt then grew the category around itself.

Brands earn the right to playfully reinvent their distinctive assets only after roughly 40 years of consistent enforcement.

Distinctive brand assets earn the right to be played with only after decades of enforcement - '40 years of enforcement, then you can play': KFC's Colonel, Louis Vuitton x Murakami's neon monogram, Barilla's spaghetti fireworks. Playing before the codes are drilled just destroys them.

Where select short-form video formats win is efficiency, not effect size: they achieve a lower cost per 1% of long-term sales lift than Linear TV. The size of the lift and the price of the lift are two different arguments, and short form only wins the second one.

dentsu's own caveat on its CTV finding, printed beside it: "While CTV is delivering more than it used to, Linear TV is still guaranteeing high brand effects." The shift is in what CTV can now be trusted to do, not in Linear TV becoming replaceable.

The reason voluntary attention pays is agency: a viewer who keeps watching a skippable ad is choosing to give it attention. dentsu argues this voluntary attention lives in the same space as earned attention, and that this is where brand equity actually gets built.

Attention stops paying its way after about twenty seconds

More attention does produce greater brand-building effects, but the return flattens: after roughly 20 attentive seconds, additional attention delivers little extra impact. It contradicts the assumption that more attention is always better.

Brands do not plan against a composite score, so The Brand Reset breaks its findings out for Meaningful, Different and Salient separately, each with its own attention curve. That lets a planner match media and creative to the actual objective - awareness, consideration or differentiation - rather than to an average of all three.

Three quarters of young consumers want a hand in shaping the brands they buy

75% of gen Z and millennials say they are interested in getting more involved with their favourite brands, from co-creation to influencing innovation. The audience for co-creation is not a niche of superfans - it is three quarters of the young market.

Five in six consumers want their money going to brands that reflect their values

84% of people want their money to go to brands that reflect their values, 79% say brands have a responsibility to take care of the planet and its people, and 74% say brands should make more effort to speak to people like them. The brand mandate skews to values and representation over price.

Seven in ten shoppers plan to buy off-price even if their budget grows

Value retail is booming alongside experience retail: 70% of customers plan to buy from outlets or off-price retailers in the next 12 months even if their budget increases (BoF-McKinsey), and US warehouse clubs grew revenue roughly 50% from 2020 to 2024. The middle of the market is what's emptying.

Seven in ten people now call loneliness an epidemic

70% of people globally now see loneliness as an epidemic, up from 67% a year earlier; WHO reports one in six people experienced loneliness. VML frames 'social health' - connection as a wellness category - as one of the biggest white spaces for brands in 2026.

Culture has gone multipolar: China ranks second on soft power, Bad Bunny was Spotify's most-streamed global artist (19.8bn streams), China's Ne Zha 2 became the highest-grossing animated film ever (~$2.2bn), and 76% of people say their cultural tastes are becoming more international. The reference points now come from Seoul, Shenzhen and San Juan as often as from LA.

The agency-tenure effect does not repeat for CMO tenure: brands with multiple CMO changes in five years reported as many very large effects (2.2 brand / 2.3 business) as brands with none reported fewer (0.8 / 1.2). The institutional memory that compounds sits in the brand-agency relationship, not in the CMO's chair.

Loop Earplugs doubled orders in a quarter by tripling creative testing volume

Loop Earplugs, working with agency TRGT, went from 5 to 20 A/B tests and from 45 to 120 creatives tested in three months, plus a conversion lift study. Revenue rose 119% and orders doubled quarter on quarter.

Storytelling is instrumental to performance, not the opposite of it. The idea that brand is storytelling and performance is not comes from the banner-ad and DCO era; short-form video performance advertising is now one of the best ways to tell a brand's story at scale to exactly the right people, and it is how younger audiences form affinity with brands.

Pilot, Eucalyptus's men's health brand, put up a provocative billboard that was pulled after roughly a day. The buy itself was cheap and modest, but the photo of it ran through performance and organic channels, the takedown became a story about men's health, and the attention outlived the placement many times over.

Eucalyptus stopped trusting in-platform conversion numbers and rallied its team around creative efficiency instead: scaling spend into ads with strong hook rates, hold rates, click-through rates and top-of-funnel conversion, then triangulating with backend results to confirm that more efficient creative really produces more conversions.

Eucalyptus sets a standard media mix each month but treats it as a starting point: everyone who touches a media dollar owns the whole budget pool, a weekly all-brands review asks where money went, whether it was incremental, and where to pull from, and every month a no-strings pool is reserved for a new channel or a creative or brand bet that is allowed to flop.

For brand building without a Super Bowl budget, Eucalyptus finds broadcaster video on demand (BVOD) and YouTube the most reliable placements: both grow awareness and the customers they bring in convert at a rate that works for the business.

Binet & Field's master principle of budget balance: when activation is easy, spend MORE on brand (and vice versa) - you are balancing two sets of effects, so money flows to the harder job. Most marketers instinctively do the opposite.

Across more than 1,000 IPA cases, no brand has ever reduced price sensitivity through short-term activation alone, and premium brands need an optimal split of around 64/36 or more toward brand.

In over 1,000 IPA cases there is not a single example of a brand reducing price sensitivity through short-term activation - premium pricing power can only be built through long-term brand building (premium brands: ~64/36+ toward brand).

Price promotions rarely build anything: for most brands they simply sell to the people who would have bought anyway, at a lower price. Activation-driven growth is easy to poach because no enduring memory is created.

Businesses that structurally protect marketing from short-term financial pressure (partnerships like John Lewis, family/foundation-owned retailers) consistently outperform - short-termism is an ownership-structure problem as much as a marketing one.

Peter Field puts the erosion of creativity's effectiveness advantage down to the rise of short-termism, driven by the proliferation of metric-led marketing. He told Campaign: "these 'hit and run' campaigns simply don't deliver long-term responses."

Creativity was found to have a particularly beneficial influence on price sensitivity, and therefore on profitability. Thanks to sharing on social media it also boosts the kind of brand saliency and fame that in turn leads to harder metrics.

Only a tiny fraction of all campaigns are creative enough to win any creative award

The IPA estimates that as little as one in every 7,000 campaigns is creative enough to win a creative award. The base rate for genuinely outstanding creative work is brutal.

When a buyer enters a buying situation, they first draw on existing memories to identify candidate brands. Search engines and colleagues are usually only consulted if the memory-generated options are insufficient, and even then buyers show a bias for brands they already know.

The fewer buying situations a customer links to your brand, the more likely they are to leave

Regression modelling across 17 business insurance products found a significant relationship between a customer's probability of defection and the number of CEPs they link to the brand in 16 of the 17 categories, at p<0.05. The single exception was travel insurance, which just failed to meet the threshold at p=0.10.

CEPs are not only a retention lever. The number of CEPs a buyer links to a brand also increases the likelihood that brand is the one selected when a company does switch supplier, replicating earlier findings in B2C telecommunications and B2B banking.

To test whether customers already credit your brand with a CEP, build a brand by CEP matrix from a pick-any survey and calculate an expected score for every cell as (column total x row total) / grand total. Actual minus expected, converted to percentage points, is the size of the brand's mental advantage or disadvantage on that cue.

What a real mental advantage looks like in a brand-by-CEP matrix

In the worked example, the largest mental advantage was LinkedIn on the CEP 'the board/senior management would approve' at +9 percentage points, alongside Company G on 'reach a tightly defined/very specific target' at +7pp. The single mental disadvantage was a brand scoring -6pp on 'confident your advertising will be noticed/cut through'.

Two CEPs can be used by the same number of customers to retrieve brands and still be worth very different amounts. For categories where order value varies widely, size up each buying situation on purchase frequency and deal size, using a 'currency' approach rather than incidence alone.

The funnel survived because it made ad inventory easy to sell, not because it was ever accurate

The funnel first appears around 1924 as a teaching aid for door-to-door salespeople - hook them, create desire, add facts, close. It came back from about 2000 onward because Google and Meta needed a simple way to lay their ad inventory out on a slide and differentiate formats by intent level.

Awareness as a funnel layer is, in Roach's words, correct but insufficient. The richer version is mental availability: familiarity, distinctive brand assets and their uniqueness, salience, and how many category entry points you are associated with and how strongly, versus your competitors.

Creative fragmentation is the phrase behind lots of littles. Media fragmentation had been documented for years; when Roach searched WARC in 2024, nobody had written about the creative equivalent - the same splintering applied to the number of executions, styles and treatments a brand now has to produce.

The practical conclusion Roach draws is dual-purpose communication: make content for humans that builds mental availability, then ask whether and how the same content can reach the models. Reddit keeps coming up as unusually present in the training data, so a campaign that creates genuine Reddit conversation can move LLM visibility more directly than most other platforms.

The average US brand loses money on every new customer it acquires.

US brands now lose an average of $29 for every new customer acquired - the acquisition machine costs more than it returns.

Creating future demand requires creativity (to earn attention of out-of-market people), emotion (implicit memory stores feelings for months while explicit memory forgets facts - Robert Heath), and broad reach. Converting current demand needs the opposite: rational information, tight targeting, clear CTA - and much of it can be automated with AI.

Most organisations have no agreed definition of what marketing effectiveness means

Only 40% of senior marketing decision-makers believe their organisation has a clear marketing effectiveness goal, and just 20% strongly agree there is a common understanding between marketing and the rest of the business on how to measure it.

Half of advertising's sales effect arrives after the fourth month

Analysis of hundreds of effectiveness studies shows that the long-term sales impact of media investment during months 5-24 typically equals that of the first four months. Measuring only the short window means ignoring half the value a campaign creates.

Winning back share costs nearly twice what cutting the budget saved

Regaining lost market share typically requires a disproportionate reinvestment: approximately $1.85 for every $1 initially saved through marketing cuts. Cutting is not a pause, it is a retreat that has to be bought back at a premium.

A competitor took 15% more awareness in six months while the brand went quiet

When one major footwear brand reduced marketing spend by 40% during economic uncertainty, its main competitor held investment and launched an aggressive growth campaign. Within six months the competitor had increased brand awareness by 15% and consideration by 11%. Absence creates a vacuum competitors fill.

Finance thinks the relationship with marketing is going better than marketing does

Finance rates the quality of collaboration with marketing higher than marketing does, on every single measure. Shared understanding of marketing strategy: 61% finance against 43% marketing. Joint assessment of campaign effectiveness: 53% against 36%. Regular data sharing: 68% against 48%.

Response curves are S-shaped, so the point of maximum marginal ROI comes early and the point of maximum total ROI comes later. Stopping investment at maximum total ROI often leaves substantial value on the table: as long as returns exceed the business's acceptable profitability threshold, additional investment keeps improving overall returns.

Unknown brands can take preference from category leaders on behavioural principles alone

In an experiment across eleven categories, invented brands using superior expressions of social proof and power of now took between 9% and 27% preference share from shoppers' first-choice brands, without any personalisation.

Brand website visitors spend more on the category than on the brand itself, showing they're deal-hunting category buyers rather than loyalists the website created.

The online loyalty correlation trap: visitors to a brand's website spend 37% more on the brand but 53% more on the category, with 10% lower brand share of category spend and 7% lower price per unit. They are heavy category buyers hunting deals, not loyalists created by the website.

Pure viral transmission drove only about 4% of IPA campaigns' success - roughly a one-in-twenty-five hit rate.

Only about 4% of IPA campaigns worked through pure viral transmission. Hosting great content and hoping it spreads is a strategy with a roughly one-in-twenty-five hit rate.

Measure on six months and you will defund brand building without noticing. Brand TV looks weak on short-term activation (46% versus 48% without it) yet strong on long-term business effects (1.7 versus 1.3); DRTV is the exact mirror image (100% versus 53% short term, 1.5 versus 1.7 long term).

Distinctiveness turns spend into revenue, emotion turns revenue into profit

Distinctiveness makes media spend more likely to turn into revenue, but barely moves profit on its own. Positive emotion is what converts that revenue into profit. At extra-large budgets, above-average distinctiveness lifts revenue reporting from 58% to 87%, a 29 point gap.

The rise of short-term campaign objectives tracks platform revenue almost perfectly

The average number of short-term objectives per campaign rose from 0.3 in 2013 to 1.3 in 2023. Over the same period that count correlates 91% with Meta's global revenue, which grew from $7bn to $155.6bn. Correlation, not proof, but the timing is exact.

Creative quality compounds for consistent brands and decays for inconsistent ones

Consistent brands do not just hold their creative quality, they grow it. Over five years, the most consistent third of brands lifted average positive emotion from 3.1 to 4.0 and distinctiveness from 89 to 99, while the least consistent third went backwards on emotion, from 2.6 to 2.3.

Narrow targeting plus dull creative produced zero profit reports over a year

No campaign running for over a year with narrow targeting and low positive emotion reported incremental profit. Broad targeting combined with high positive emotion took profit reporting from 8% under three months to 33% beyond three years.

Advertising Planning Matrix - Growth Engine, Cult Hit, Paid Noise, Busy Work

The Advertising Planning Matrix crosses Creative Dividend against media support. Growth Engine (invest and protect) is 17% of campaigns and reports profit 14% of the time. Busy Work (below average on both) is the most common landing spot at 38% of campaigns and reports profit 5% of the time. Cult Hit needs scale; Paid Noise needs better work before more media.

Workday - emotional B2B advertising against a dull category benchmark

Workday scored a 3.3 System1 Star Rating against a B2B category average of 1.8 by treating a business audience as a cultural one. The work generated 4.35bn earned impressions, moved consideration among finance and HR decision-makers from 36% to 63%, and reversed five years of declining pipeline with 50% year-on-year growth in a single quarter.

Consumer predisposition pays in volume, growth and price simultaneously

Brands that people are strongly predisposed to have 9x higher volume share, 4x the likelihood of growing value share and 2x higher price paid than brands with weaker predisposition. Predisposition pays in volume, in growth and in margin at the same time.

Nearly three quarters of creator content fails to link back to the brand paying for it

Only 27% of creator content links to the intended brand. Nearly three quarters of what brands pay creators to make does not connect back to the brand that paid for it.

Kantar's Blueprint for Brand Growth in one sentence: brands grow by being meaningfully different to more people. Three growth accelerators operationalise it - predispose more people, be more present, find new space - supported by three behaviours: consistent, connected, optimised.

The study's chart is built to be misread. Brand Awareness Increase sits on the vertical axis and Share of Search Gain on the horizontal, which inverts the usual reading: the steep line belonging to high-awareness brands looks like the winner and is the opposite. A shallow line means each point of awareness bought more search demand.

The practical case for brand awareness as a metric: it is not what people saw or what they clicked, it is what they actively went looking for. As the report puts it, when people know and trust a brand they do not search the category, they search for the brand - and that is demand rather than a vanity number.

For brands with established fame the job changes rather than ends: from getting known to staying front of mind, defending salience and keeping memory structures fresh at buying moments. The operational trigger is specific - when Share of Search stops rising in line with awareness, shift investment down the funnel toward consideration and preference.

Google's planning benchmarks are 40% weekly on-target reach and 2.7x weekly frequency

Brands with higher awareness were more likely to be following established media planning principles, which in turn correlated with greater Share of Search. Google's two published numbers for these Golden Rules: a minimum 40% weekly on-target reach for peak campaign effectiveness, and a median optimal weekly frequency of 2.7x on YouTube.

Google puts its own search volume at over five trillion queries a year and says AI is growing it

Google states it processes over 5 trillion searches annually, that commercial queries are rising year over year even at that scale, and that AI features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are growing the overall search pie rather than shrinking it. This is Google's own claim inside a Google co-authored report.

A procurement executive who came to advertising from buying axles cut agency fees 10% a year for five years to force cooperation, and admitted it changed nothing. In automotive, the same function fixes suppliers rather than punishing them, because switching suppliers is disruptive.

Farmer's proposed AI bargain: automate low-funnel deliverables, then split the savings - half to the client as a fee cut, half reinvested in senior agency talent.

Farmer's proposed AI bargain: automate the low-funnel deliverables, but let the client take only half the saving as a fee reduction while the agency keeps the other half to reinvest in senior strategic people.

Unbundling media from creative let media agencies work for 5% of the old 15% commission, but clients wouldn't pay the remaining 10% for creative, pushing creative onto labor-based fees that procurement then halved again.

Splitting media from creative freed media agencies to chase any client but hung creative out to dry: media offered to do the work for 5% of the 15% commission, clients refused to pay the remaining 10% for creative, and labour-based fees followed - which procurement then halved again.

Marketers systematically overestimate how distinctive their brand assets are compared to actual customer recognition (Ehrenberg-Bass research) - the professional version of 'you are not the customer'.

Kit Kat and Volvo have each repeated a single positioning idea for roughly 40 years.

Position on one or two things at most, then say them more often, more consistently and for longer than competitors: Kit Kat and Volvo have each spent roughly 40 years repeating a single idea. If assets plus positioning don't fit one page, it's already over.

In B2B pitches, about 80% of the buying decision is effectively made before the process starts.

In B2B pitches, ~80% of buying decisions are effectively made before the pitch process starts - the brand that comes to mind first wins. Being on the shortlist of three or four is 70% of the battle.

Brand advertising works immediately, but only about 5% of buyers can act on it each week, so effects appear spread out rather than delayed.

Both Sharp and Ritson reject the phrase 'long-term' with CFOs - it implies waiting. The truth per 95/5: brand advertising works immediately, but each week only ~5% of buyers can act, so effects are spread out and lasting, not delayed.

Ehrenberg-Bass mass marketing means sophisticated mass marketing: reach everyone in the category (everyone who owns a dog), don't treat everyone the same. You must reach everyone; you needn't message them identically.

The 'best purpose campaigns outperform' defence is a statistical sleight: they beat the AVERAGE of non-purpose campaigns, but the best non-purpose campaigns are much better still. And the philosopher's checkmate: if purpose is justified by profit, the logic endorses anything profitable - 'the purpose of purpose is purpose.'

Two in five CMOs cannot measure the efficiency of next-gen video at all

43% of CMOs say they are struggling to measure the efficiency of next-gen video formats - the measurement gap that pushes budgets back toward whatever can be counted immediately.

The planning distinction dentsu wants to replace the old ones with is skippable versus non-skippable - not linear versus digital, big screen versus small screen, or platform A versus platform B.

The advertising Doom Loop: budgets shift to "performance" formats, advertising playback plateaus, teams optimise against faulty metrics, and the cycle repeats. Relentless optimisation for clicks and conversions diminishes effectiveness while eroding brand trust, and marketers default to short-term investment because it is what can be quantified immediately.

High demand power comes with nine times the volume share and four times the odds of growing

Kantar's Meaningful, Different, Salient framework, externally validated by the Marketing Accountability Standards Board, finds that brands with high demand power have 9x higher volume share and are 4x more likely to grow.

The Brand Reset is agency research whose platform partners are the platforms being tested - Snap, Pinterest, Teads, Spotify and TikTok among the ten. The methodology is serious, the consultants are independent names, and the commercial interest is real. Cite the findings with the partnership named.

Four in five shoppers still prefer a human over a bot

80% of people still prefer speaking with a human representative when shopping, and 87% value experiences that foster connection with themselves or others. The more synthetic the landscape gets, the more the human touchpoint differentiates.

People map the division of labour with AI by skill: AI is seen ahead on logic, strategy and operating machinery, humans ahead on empathy, caregiving, creativity, critical thinking and negotiation. 75% agree technology will never take creativity away from humanity - it's part of who we are.

Most people don't care if an ad was made by AI - but music gets judged harder

When an ad is primarily made by AI, 56% of people say it makes no difference to how they feel, 23% would like it more and 21% less. Music is judged more harshly: 32% would like an AI-made song less. Acceptance of AI creative varies by medium, not by principle.

Branded characters raise the odds of very large share gain by a quarter

Campaigns featuring branded characters ('fluent devices') are 23% more likely to generate very large share gain and 22% more likely to generate very large profit gain than the average campaign. The report pairs this with a revival of brand mascots as durable, ownable creator alternatives.

A White Lotus appearance lifted resort interest four-fold and dress sales seven-fold

Entertainment IP moves real commerce: after appearing in The White Lotus, Four Seasons Maui saw online interest jump 425%, and a Jim Thompson kimono dress worn on the show sold up 671% in four days. Placement inside story worlds now outperforms placement beside them.

Fewer than half strongly trust brands to tell the truth - and trust commands a premium

Only 44% of people strongly trust the brands they use to share accurate information, and 87% of customers will pay more for products from trusted brands (Salsify). Trust is scarce and priced accordingly - honesty is a competitive advantage, not a compliance line.

Gen alpha already influences four in ten dollars of US household spending

Gen alpha already steers 42% of US household spending - 49% in households earning over $100k - and 61% of gen alpha parents say their kids have the final say on which car they buy. Their own spending power exceeds $100 billion a year.

Ten years of McCain consistency added £79m of profit, mostly through pricing power

McCain held its 'We Are Family' real-teatimes platform consistently across media for ten years, sustaining investment through the pandemic and inflation. Advertising added £79m of profit, price elasticity halved, and the big payback came through the price effect - protected margins as costs rose. It became the most awarded IPA paper of all time.

Creative commitment scales business effects almost linearly

Creative commitment - the combination of campaign duration, number of media and budget - scales business effects almost linearly: campaigns scoring 12-15 on Hurman & Field's commitment scale average 1.8 very large business effects against 1.0 for those scoring 3-7.

The most entertaining short-form ads double the awareness lift

Brands that commit to showmanship - entertainment-led creative - earn more attention and awareness: in 847 TikTok ads with brand-lift data, the most entertaining quartile delivered +45% emotional response, +54% five-second view rates and twice the brand awareness lift of the least entertaining.

Brand adds commercial value in three ways a CFO already tracks: customer acquisition gets easier (trusted brands convert faster and cheaper, less discounting, better CAC:LTV), more value is realised per customer over time (pricing power, repeat purchase, margin), and brand plus community becomes a moat that is hard to replicate and insulates against downturns.

HexClad noticed in its Meta account that ads featuring Gordon Ramsay were its top performers, turned that insight into a formal partnership (Ramsay later invested in the company), scaled it up to a 2025 Super Bowl ad, and then cut the Super Bowl spot back into a range of Facebook ads so the celebrity credibility could be targeted at cooking fans and Ramsay fans.

Creative graduation: use performance channels, where data is cheap and immediate, to test as many angles, creators and messages as possible; graduate the winners to a higher-production YouTube ad, another channel with reliable metrics; once it works there, commit the budget to TV and extend the same message into PR, the website and organic. Every step adds confidence, and the result is one unified message across channels.

A pre-purchase 'how did you hear about us?' survey lets Eucalyptus pair each referral channel (TV, radio, out-of-home) with its spend, conversion and LTV, turning brand channels into something that can be compared on efficiency. It is imperfect self-reported data, so it is triangulated with brand tracking, ad-account creative data and GA first-party data.

Eucalyptus replaced its siloed brand and performance teams with a full-stack team per brand (growth or creative lead, growth marketer, creatives, producer) that owns its budget and targets across everything from TV to Meta ads. Hire storytellers in every role, not just copywriters, and cover three ownerships: an allocator of capital, an allocator of ideas and an allocator of time, because a TVC can consume the whole team for weeks and kill performance creative velocity.

Brand effects build and decay slowly while activation effects spike and fade fast, and brand only overtakes activation as the growth driver around 6 months into a campaign.

Brand building and activation are two different speed mechanisms: brand effects build slowly and decay slowly (memory/emotion based), activation spikes immediately and decays fast (information based). The crossover where brand overtakes activation as the growth driver is ~6 months into a campaign - and many campaigns no longer run that long.

Overspending on brand costs about 20% of effectiveness and is easily corrected, but overspending on activation costs over half of effectiveness and cannot be quickly corrected.

The budget-balance mistake is asymmetric: overshooting toward brand costs ~20% effectiveness and is instantly correctable by adding activation; overshooting toward activation loses over half the effectiveness, weakens the brand, and has no quick comeback. If you must err, err toward brand.

New brands at launch should split budget close to 56/44 toward brand, but as brands mature the optimal split shifts back to around 76/24 for brand leaders.

New brands in the launch phase are the exception to brand-heavy splits: ~56/44, because brand metrics move easily from zero - so make the product easy to buy first. As brands grow and mature the balance tilts back: brand leaders sit around 76/24.

Not-for-profit causes nearly invert the standard rule, with an optimal split of around 44/56 toward activation because their emotional brand effect already comes easily.

Not-for-profit nearly inverts the 60/40 rule (~44/56 toward activation): causes are inherently emotive, so brand effects come easily and the money should flow to activation - the same balancing logic in reverse.

The AA cut brand spend to near zero over 8 years while chasing short-term ROI, ending up with 6% of Britons never having heard of the brand and an internal warning that it would go out of business within five years.

The AA cut brand spend to ~zero over ~8 years for pure price-promotion activation: short-term ROIs looked fantastic while 6% of Britons had never heard of the AA, searches went generic, comparison sites commoditized the category and churn spiralled. Internal projection: 'Our ROIs are fantastic and in five years we will be out of business.'

Relying on activation alone means rising costs just to stand still - especially in search bidding wars against competitors. Brand strength is the only durable escape: EasyJet's brand became strong enough that they stopped bidding on their own branded search terms entirely.

All activity does a bit of both: short-term effects trigger existing demand, brand effects create NEW demand. Judging a campaign only by the demand it triggers systematically undervalues the demand it creates.

The effect is dose-dependent, not binary: the more major creative awards a campaign wins, the greater its measured effectiveness. And at equal investment, creatively-awarded campaigns also outperform on sales volume gain, market penetration, customer acquisition and loyalty.

In each advertising execution, a single clear message is remembered more easily than multiple or complex ones, so build one CEP per execution. But over time the brand needs links to many CEPs, so the long-term message strategy must rotate across different CEPs rather than repeating one.

The with/for Whom cue matters most in B2B because buying committees dominate. Four groups shape the decision: senior management (the 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' effect), peers (both a support network and competitors for promotion), junior staff (who bear adoption and training), and the buyer's own customers.

Building CEPs means moving three dials at once: more decision-makers (through improved reach, cut-through and branding), more CEPs (by varying messaging and product range across campaigns), and doing both relative to competitors, because retrieval from memory is a competitive process.

Roach's estimate of how far the brand-performance balance has actually moved: something like 80-90% of global spend still goes to short-term direct response, with a tiny share on recognisably brand activity. He flags it as a guess rather than a measurement, and adds that he still sees household-name brands running at roughly 90% performance with small, disconnected brand teams.

The fault in the funnel is linearity: the belief that you can sort people into groups, make the unaware aware, then force those people to become considerers and then converters. Roach's counter is simply that the world is not like that - people ping-pong around, and the elaborate customer journey maps of that era looked impressive on a wall and lost the room the moment anyone read the detail.

Most performance advertising is not converting anyone. Click-through on display is very low, and what the bottom of the funnel actually does is remind and direct - connecting people to brands they already favour. Byron Sharp goes further and treats search as effectively physical availability.

The volume demand is a platform behaviour, not a general trend. TV channels could have asked brands for a new execution every week and never did. The platforms do, and that turns communications into a logistical exercise with production bottlenecks, cost implications and a brand-coherence risk on top.

Fragmentation raises the value of a central brand idea, but not of centralised control - what is needed is a centralised understanding of what the brand is and how it acts. In practice that means distinctive assets that are sonic, stylistic, photographic and cinematic, because those are what creators and influencers can actually use, and many brands simply do not have them.

In Brandtech's work with INSEAD on the US auto market, published in Harvard Business Review, human brand awareness was plotted against share of model. Rivian showed strong LLM awareness and weaker human awareness. Roach's reading: it found its way into the training data better than onto the roads, and in automotive, cars on the road are how human awareness gets built.

Roach deliberately stops short of calling AI visibility a new definition of brand. Most purchase is still mediated by humans, the extent of agentic buying is a live debate rather than a fact, and he raises the endpoint - brands built for agents and effectively invisible to people - as a weird possibility rather than a forecast.

A roughly even 50/50 split between brand and performance spend delivers the highest total marketing ROI.

Brands splitting budget roughly 50/50 between brand and performance achieve the highest total marketing ROI - a generalizable pattern found independently by Google's Effectiveness Equation (2025, e-commerce), Analytic Partners, IPA's 60/40 (Binet & Field 2013) and Peter Kim (1992).

Coca-Cola's ubiquitous branding is 'familiarity infrastructure' - not a reminder to buy now, but continuous topping-up of familiarity so the brand never becomes unfamiliar to anyone.

Advertising conversion rates - about 1% typically, 15% at best - have not changed in 100 years despite a century of advances in creativity, targeting and testing.

Advertising conversion rates (~1% typical, ~15% ceiling) have not changed in 100 years despite creativity, targeting technology, planning and testing disciplines - evidence that advertising does not work by persuading people to buy.

Without continuously creating future demand, sales hit a demand ceiling: growth is fast beneath the ceiling, then plateaus no matter how much more is spent on performance - the pattern behind both startup plateaus and today's large-brand performance trap.

Emotional campaigns are more profitable because of the affect heuristic: when people feel good about a brand they judge it as more valuable and accept paying more - pricing power lives in emotion, not discounts.

Small brands don't need big budgets to build future demand: the discipline is doing creative, emotional work that reaches an audience bigger than your current customer base, at whatever scale you can afford. Every big brand started this way.

Even the most aggressive forecasts put AI agentic commerce at only 10-14% of total consumer spend, leaving 86-90% of buying to happen the traditional way.

Even the most aggressive forecasts put agentic commerce at 10-14% of total consumer spend - agents will help shortlist, but humans still pick, and the remaining ~86-90% of buying continues the traditional way. Brand becomes no less important in an AI future.

Pricing power and resistance to price rises correlate strongly and measurably

The link between pricing power and price elasticity is measurable: correlation coefficients of 0.76 in the UK and 0.65 in Germany in the skincare category. Brands with strong pricing power see less volume decline when prices rise.

Shifting a shrinking budget into performance can destroy the returns performance depends on

Cutting the budget is one mistake; reallocating what remains to performance is another. One brand with a strong marketing history pivoted sharply to performance channels under economic pressure and saw marketing ROI drop 44% within two quarters, because the brand building that made performance effective had been removed.

Finance considers marketing budgets flexible, which means the constraint is the argument

Marketing budgets are more movable than marketers assume. 72% of finance decision-makers describe the marketing budget as at least moderately flexible, and 81% say reallocating budget between channels is at least moderately easy. The constraint is usually the business case, not the budget line.

Incrementality is what separates marketing's contribution from baseline demand. If a hotel would run at 70% occupancy on location demand alone and marketing pushes it to 80%, the true incremental value is the extra 10%, not the revenue from all booked rooms.

TV builds awareness while YouTube and social skew toward purchase intent

Different channels do different jobs across the funnel. Of TV's brand impact, 59% lands on awareness and only 9% on purchase intent. For YouTube the split is 41% awareness and 35% purchase intent, and for social media 34% awareness and 41% purchase intent.

First-party data is the one area of measurement that does not structurally favour incumbents. Success depends less on the volume of data collected than on the speed and completeness with which it is activated, so a challenger that moves faster can gain an advantage over an established leader.

Wall's Ice Cream: social media drove nearly half of campaign sales, and almost all of that social effect came from paid advertising, not organic or viral spread.

Wall's Ice Cream case: social media drove nearly half the campaign's sales, and 99% of that social effect came from paid advertising rather than organic or viral spread.

John Lewis's Christmas ad reputation for going viral was mostly manufactured by paid TV - online views made up only about 3% of its total exposure.

John Lewis's Christmas campaigns generated 2,453 million views across four years for £16.5m, at 0.7 pence per view - but online views were only about 3% of total exposure. The earned effect was manufactured by paid TV, not by letting the ad go viral.

Short-termism biases budgets in three directions at once: short-term campaigns put 38% of budget into video against 58% for long-term ones, 12% into unpaid media against 4%, and favour rational, non-creatively-awarded work that outperforms only on short-term activation.

Optimising for ROMI rewards spending less - bigger-budget campaigns average a lower ROMI than smaller ones, and average excess share of voice has fallen accordingly.

Optimising ROMI shrinks budgets: campaigns with above-median ESOV averaged 312% ROMI against 386% for smaller-budget campaigns, so the metric systematically rewards spending less. Average ESOV fell from roughly 12% in 2006-2008 to around 4% by 2016.

Specsavers' long-term campaign generated over £600m of incremental net profit across 20 years, with returns growing five-fold as long-term effects built up.

Specsavers ran the long-term case to its conclusion: over £600m of incremental net profit across 20 years at 129% ROMI, with returns growing five-fold as long-term effects accumulated - a scale of growth no sequence of short-term activation campaigns could produce.

Some customer touchpoints capture in-market demand and others build future demand, and channels usually trade one against the other. Super Touchpoints beat that trade-off, delivering more lasting Brand Effects than their short-term revenue contribution would predict: on pack, direct, in-store, radio and podcast, events, public relations, TV, OOH and creators.

For challenger brands differentiation beats distinctiveness, the opposite of the general rule

Challenger brands should chase differentiation rather than distinctiveness. Challenger campaigns reporting perceived differentiation growth are more than twice as likely to also report share growth (56%) as those reporting distinctiveness growth (25%), which reverses the pattern for the dataset as a whole.

Well-funded campaigns that underperform are usually dull rather than unbranded

Paid Noise campaigns, those with plenty of media behind weak creative, are below average on distinctiveness only 30% of the time but below average on positive emotion and showmanship over 70% of the time. The problem with well-funded underperformers is usually that the work is dull, not that the brand is unrecognisable.

Strong creative content returns four times the marketing investment behind it

Strong creative content delivers a 4x return on marketing investment across short and long-term impact combined.

When budgets tighten, reducing spend produces far better brand outcomes than going dark. In a German telecoms case, an actual 100% spend cut sent communications awareness down further and required a visible burst of extra investment to recover, while a simulated 50% cut held the line.

Over-indexing on performance spend erodes the base. A case from Kantar's MMM normative database tracks brand building shrinking as a share of marketing spend across four years, with base sales declining in step.

Two Kantar sources put slightly different numbers on the same pricing power finding. This deck gives Different 49%, Meaningful 45%, Salient 6%. The Google/Kantar Effectiveness Equation gives Differentiation 52%, Meaningfulness 44%, Salience 4% in Germany and 51/46/3 in the UK. The conclusion is identical; the cut is not. Cite one, never a blend.

Brand marketers have a structural disadvantage that performance marketers do not: their most important work is the hardest to prove. So the metrics that win budget meetings end up being the ones easiest to measure - impressions, clicks, reach - rather than the ones that indicate whether anything is being built.

For mature high-awareness brands the growth is at the fringes rather than in the middle: new category entrants, lapsed users and low-frequency buyers. The recommended combination is distinctive assets and category cues paired with expansive targeting and scaled reach.

The study deliberately uses traditional search data rather than AI-powered discovery, because traditional search provides a long, consistent, measurable record of how consumer intent behaves over time. The authors state plainly that the data to quantify the AI shift at scale is still maturing.

Google co-authored a study concluding that Google Search volume is a good proxy for brand health and that Google's own YouTube planning rules correlate with success. The base is stated and the method is transparent, and the commercial interest is real. Cite the finding with the authorship attached.