If your LinkedIn or podcast feed is anything like mine, you’ll have noticed ‘brand’ being hailed as “the next big thing.” But the real question is: why was it ignored in the first place, and how do we make the case for bringing it back?

Brand’s comeback tour

WARC's recent report, "Multiplier Effect", seems to be the catalyst behind this new wave of interest, and it shows that top companies balance performance and brand.

But this isn't a new story. Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science's How Brands Grow and Binet and Field's The Long and Short of It made the same point over a decade ago.

One problem is that the companies typically featured in these studies have access to category data, budgets and a pre-performance corporate memory that many of us don’t. Those of us with smaller budgets were drawn to the ROI promised by the performance and MarTech industry. Put simply, the message was drowned out.

So if you, like many, have fallen down the performance marketing rabbit hole, how do you convince your execs to embrace brand?

Everything was measurable, until it wasn’t

To grossly oversimplify the Marketing Science, a plateau occurs when performance marketing reaches peak saturation because all the people currently in the market have converted, and we can’t make them buy more. Growth stagnates because we fail to stimulate future demand through brand building so that our brands are in the consideration set when people enter the market.

It’s an important and logical point, but for marketers not spending at saturation levels, it's a hard one to see when looking at their own data. So why are so many nodding along?

Over the past seven years, the attribution wheels driving our performance addiction have fallen off. GDPR (2018) and Apple's iOS 14.5 update (2021) have poked holes in the 'proof' we once relied on.

In 2023, Google deprecated several attribution models like linear, which marketers understood, replacing it with Data Driven Attribution (which required us to trust that the same company we bought ads from weren’t skewing attribution), and last-touch (which fails to tell the full picture of which channels contribute to growth). This makes implementing a single source of truth hard to navigate. In channel reporting, driven by pixels, inflate conversions because each platform lays claim.

CFOs analysing real sales figures know the data doesn’t add up, and it’s putting more pressure on marketers who feel exposed in the house of cards built by attribution and performance marketing.

Seeing the forest for the trees

Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) are filling the void. They use a signal and response framework to look back at your data, retrofitting incrementality tests to understand channel impact on KPIs.

This zoomed-out view provides fresh insights. Our own exploration proves that marketers operate in an attention economy. We’ve seen a high correlation between engagement and polls campaigns on Meta with revenue, and that optimising for video views out performs reach. This suggests optimising for engagement can build mental availability, and that these ‘vanity’ metrics hold more weight than performance marketing led us to believe.

The problem is that most MMM’s cost a bomb, require several years of clean data and trust in mathematics most of us don’t understand.

Share of search: your secret weapon

Share of search among competitors correlates strongly with market share. To find this data, compare the search volumes of all brands within your category.

For CMOs building the case for brand investment, tracking share of search over time can create a compelling narrative that tracks with increased sales in the medium to long term. But this takes time and some faith to get started.

If you work for an FMCG company, your category sales data should expose this trend. All you need is the search volumes for all brands in your category, and then calculate the correlation between branded search volumes and sales.

*Demist Consulting, Redacted Category Analysis, 2025*

However, not all industries are blessed with this data. So, what can you do without it?

Searching for clues

Here's the good news: you probably already have access to basic data that can help build your business case for Brand without category data or expensive modelling.

Two key traffic sources tell an interesting story:

Branded search traffic: The portion of your organic traffic arriving at your site on branded search terms.
Direct traffic: Visitors navigating straight to your website demonstrate brand awareness and intent.

Putting our performance hat back on for a second, these users typically convert at the highest rates. So, optimising for these traffic sources makes sense.

The critical insight is that to grow traffic from these sources, you need to invest in Brand. Just keep an eye new vs returning customers to be sure you're reaching new people.

Brand baby steps

Channels already in your performance mix, such as Google and Meta, offer cost-effective ways to take your first steps into brand building. With CPMs as low as $7 and audience penetration of 80–90%, they represent strong value, allowing brands to run these channels consistently - just like the Marketing Science recommends.

In our experience, optimising for light engagement offers better results than reach alone, but equally important is how you leverage algorithmic targeting.

As privacy policies tighten, interest-based and demographic targeting become less helpful. The most effective way to leverage the ‘black box’ of algorithmic targeting is to make creative (not targeting) the key variable in your campaigns.

The idea is to structure campaigns so that audiences are built around your content pillars based on engagement, and then allow the algorithm to find more users who exhibit this behaviour.

These low-cost channels are also an ideal testbed for messaging and creative before scaling into higher-investment media such as Connected TV.

AI won't kill brand (but will change it)

Some argue that AI will diminish the role of brands, that future decisions will rely purely on product attributes, with AI scraping user-generated and published content to make recommendations. But this view misses a critical point: we need to influence the content AI draws from.

Think of MMMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude as the next generation of search engines. Gemini’s link to Google is obvious and relies on pages in search as well as Google reviews; less obvious is that ChatGPT leans heavily on Bing, forums and online discussions, whereas Perplexity draws more from academia.

That’s why early adopters, influencers and publishers remain vital: they generate the reviews, ratings and thought leadership that AI surfaces.

But it is increasingly true that your product is your brand. So, also optimise your customer experience for strong Net Promoter Scores, and actively encourage user-generated content such as reviews.

Build brand inertia, not just awareness

To succeed in AI search, you therefore need to build credibility and some groundswell. The channels we recommend if you want to take your brand campaigns further are:

Public relations: Leverage established publications' credibility for trust with reach.
Podcast voice reads: Borrow credibility from trusted industry voices to reach a highly engaged audience of early adopters.
Influencer partnerships: Empower carefully selected partners to drive your brand's authenticity with key segments.

These channels provide the social proof and credibility that creates inertia - the momentum a brand builds over time when awareness becomes self-perpetuating through consumer sharing, recommendations and retargeting. Once established, this positive brand inertia requires less energy to maintain than to create, delivering a sustainable competitive advantage. Brand building is the gift that keeps on giving as long as you have the customer experience to match.

Building preference early through brand puts you in the consideration set long before someone is ready to buy - confirmation bias does the rest. After all, how often have you trawled reviews or asked AI questions seeking a rational justification for a choice you’ve already made?

Finding harmony

The most effective marketers aren't choosing. They're orchestrating brand and performance in harmony, building mental availability while efficiently converting existing demand. Growth in our hyperconnected world comes from truly integrated marketing.

The resurgence of Brand harkens back to a simpler time when advertising and marketing contained a more balanced blend of art and science. The real path forward is to stay curious: ask “what if?”, test boldly, avoid measurement perfectionism, and don’t hand every decision over to optimisation algorithms. Use the data clues you have to build trust in the process - you’ll produce more effective work and have more fun.

Trapped in a Performance Marketing loop? How to make the case for Brand on a budget