The MediaPost article "Dumbest Fight in Marketing: Brand versus Performance" by Michael Farasciano is exactly the kind of article our industry needs:
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/416645/dumbest-fight-in-marketing-brand-vs-performance.html
I'll be daring and take his provocative title one step further: The dumbest fight in marketing is deeper than "Brand versus Performance" ... it is "Investments versus Customers".
For decades we've organized our measurement around channels, campaigns, agencies, budgets, and the now decried ROAS. AI can optimize every one of those. Customers don't care.
They experience the overall brand, make a buying decision, and respond to every investment we make along their decision journey.
That's why at Provalytics we've built Agile Insights Modeling (AIM) around a different question.
We need to migrate the conversation from which channel worked?" to "how did our multiple investments create the multiple customer responses that ultimately produced the desired business outcomes?".
- Advertising the brand may build mental availability
- Distribution may assure physical availability
- Retail media may improve "findability"
- Performance based promotions may trigger urgency
- Pricing may change affordability
However, none of these work in isolation.
They all interact to influence the different customer conversions on the journey and those interactions are what creates immediate incrementality as well as longer-term organic growth.
AI is potentially making this shift even more important.
The biggest opportunity isn't using AI to optimize media faster. It's using AI to understand how customers respond across an entire decision journey so every investment can be optimized as part of one connected system.
That's the difference between optimizing marketing and optimizing enterprise performance.
Excellent perspective, Michael! I believe the next evolution isn't ending the brand versus performance debate.
It's replacing it with a customer response system that measures growth the way customers actually experience it.
The future won't be won by optimizing channels against a single outcome.
It will be won by understanding those many different points of engagement we can share with customers and maximizing the probability of conversion to the next stage.
Cheers
Todd