What I had wrong about brand

For most of ten years I treated brand as the soft half of marketing. The part with the mood boards. The part that could not show its work.

I came up through media and performance, and in those rooms brand was the line that got cut first, because it was the line that could not defend itself. Performance had a dashboard. Brand had a feeling and a deck. When the budget conversation got hard, I knew which side I was on, and I was usually right in the short run, which is the most dangerous way to be wrong.

What changed my mind was not a book or a conversation. It was watching the same thing happen to enough accounts that I stopped being able to explain it any other way.

An account spends on performance only. It works. Then it works less. Then it costs more for the same result, and more again, and every fix at the performance layer, the creative, the audience, the bid, buys a few weeks and then the slope returns. From the outside it looks like the channel is tired. From the inside, once you have seen enough of them, it looks like something else: the account has run out of people who already had a reason to care, and performance media is very good at finding those people and very bad at making them.

The making is the thing I had filed under soft.

I still think most brand work is badly done and worse measured, and I still cut the mood board first. But I no longer believe the two halves are a choice. Performance spends the reason. Something has to be earning it, and if nothing is, the dashboard will look wonderful right up until the week it does not.

I had the halves the wrong way round. Brand is not the part that cannot show its work. It is the part whose work shows up on someone else's dashboard.