The debate isn't brand versus performance anymore. It's who can be trusted to deliver both. Ask a marketer whether brand or performance matters more, and you'll usually get a diplomatic answer. Ask what their budget actually says, and you'll get an argument.
Research by IAS shows that increasingly, marketers don't see brand and performance marketing as two separate jobs; but as one job with two halves.(Image source: @ photo: Julia Gartland; food styling: Barrett Washburne; prop styling; Anne Eastman
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One job with two halves
For years, the two disciplines have run on separate tracks: brand focused on building awareness and trust over time, performance chasing leads, sales and sign-ups right now.
Ninety-five per cent of the marketers IAS spoke to still use both. But increasingly, they don't see them as two separate jobs. They see them as one job with two halves.
Brand creates the conditions performance needs to work. Performance turns that investment into something measurable.
The most sophisticated marketers in the study didn't talk about choosing between the two — they talked about the join between them.
"The interesting shift is that marketers are no longer necessarily seeing brand and performance as two separate conversations," says Johanna McDowell, CEO of IAS.
"They may still measure them differently, but they increasingly expect the work to connect."
That expectation is starting to change how performance work itself gets judged.
It's still measured on immediate results. But now it also has to contribute to building the brand, not just borrow from it.
A straight split
Where the money actually goes
Here's the argument hiding in the data. Left to design their ideal budget, marketers in the study would put 61% into brand and 39% into performance.
What they actually spend is close to a straight split: 52% brand, 48% performance.
That's not a change of heart. It's the gravity of short-term targets.
Economic uncertainty, competitive noise and a CEO who wants to know what a campaign did last Tuesday all pull spend toward the channels that can prove themselves fastest.
So, marketers are compensating the only way they can: asking performance to do more than perform.
To convert, yes — but also to look, sound and feel like the brand it's supposed to be building.
Can one agency actually do both?
This is where consensus breaks down.
Fifty-eight per cent of respondents said no single agency can do brand and performance well.
Thirty-seven per cent said yes.
Five per cent aren't sure, which, in a 40-person study, is really one or two people still weighing the scars of a past agency relationship.
The sceptics have a point, and it's not abstract: brand and performance draw on genuinely different skills, and plenty of marketers have watched an agency claim both and deliver neither particularly well. Specialist expertise still counts for something.
But that's exactly what makes the finding interesting rather than obvious.
One integrated system
Marketers want their marketing to behave like one integrated system, but doubt that any single agency has the range to run it that way.
“I don't think the opportunity for agencies is to insist they can do everything under one roof.
“It's to show they can actually make brand and performance talk to each other, whatever the structure looks like,” says McDowell.
The debate isn't brand versus performance anymore. It's who can be trusted to deliver both.
