Kevin Krim is President & CEO at EDO, the TV outcomes company.
As the advertising world grapples with a tough economy and a pair of transformative Hollywood strikes, many marketers have chosen to shield themselves from uncertainty by shifting their resources from brand advertising tactics toward “sure-bet” performance channels like search, social and retail media.
But while some advertisers see these down-funnel channels as delivering a return on investment that is almost guaranteed, the truth is that abandoning TV and other so-called “top-of-funnel” channels actually undermines your efforts to maximize return on investment. That’s because great brand advertising drives performance outcomes.
Indeed, despite the common misconception that there’s a hard and fast boundary between brand and performance marketing, leading researchers have found time and again that upper-funnel advertising and lower-funnel results are intrinsically intertwined. When advertisers turn away from upper-funnel advertising during an economic downturn, they’re not just dialing back investment in the long-term health of their brands—they’re also throwing away valuable performance outcomes that will improve the bottom line right now.
Even in a tough economy, marketers succeed when they use data science to employ a mix of brand and performance tactics that reinforce one another and drive results all across the funnel.
How Modelo And Data-Driven Brand Advertising
If you want to understand how smart, data-driven brand advertising tactics can deliver real performance at the bottom of the funnel, all you have to do is look at the U.S. beer industry’s new market leader: Modelo.
For years, brands in this space have been in a dogfight to out-shout each other—driven by the thinking that the last beer ad one hears will be the one that is top of mind when drinkers head to the convenience store or bar. Based on the data we’ve observed, this not only diminishes these beers’ actual brand value but also ignores performance altogether.
By contrast, Modelo invested savvily in a strong brand campaign that drove strong engagement activity in the form of consideration and intent-indicating behaviors like branded searches, site visits and app usage. In highlighting the stories of tenacious and relatable beer drinkers, the brand successfully positioned itself as the drink of choice among a wide range of Americans who are fighting to make it.
Studies have shown that when a brand increases consumer engagement behaviors as Modelo did, they are also likely to increase their share of search—a metric that is closely linked to a brand’s market share.
Given these insights, it’s clear that many beverage brands are stuck in dated thinking that often limits their effectiveness. Rather than treating branding and performance tactics as diametrically opposed, smart advertisers in the beer industry and other verticals will look to use them in a complementary fashion.
Look Beyond The Last Touch And Find What’s Really Working
In our zest for getting every dollar as “close to the cash register” as possible, I’m concerned that our industry is responding to economic uncertainty by repeating past mistakes.
Just as was the case during our prior obsession with last-click attribution, marketers are at risk of overinvesting in vehicles that feel like pure ROI. But just because a channel happens to capture demand doesn’t mean that it actually generates it—either now or in the future. Instead, marketers will be far better off looking at the channels, networks and content that have consistently delivered engagement for them in the past.
The more that we as an industry lean on predictive tools powered by these kinds of data insights, the more we’ll be able to reset how we, as an industry, track attribution. Instead of blunt-force econometric modeling, we’ll increasingly rely on objective, big-data conclusions. Already, leading marketers are using predictive models that analyze data from thousands of advertisers and millions of creatives to determine the ideal media mix throughout the planning and execution cycle.
Rather than setting goals based merely on what you can measure in a silo, the future of our industry will belong to the advertisers that build comprehensive brand and performance strategies based on the measurable business outcomes they actually need to achieve.
In other words, today’s cutting-edge marketers don’t waste time worrying about whether their ad buy is going to “brand channels” or “performance channels.” When you know what’s really driving your advertising performance, everything you buy is “performance media.”
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