Performance marketing has fundamentally changed how marketers define success. Better targeting, attribution and optimization finally give marketing leaders what they’ve always wanted, which is a concrete way to prove that advertising works, expressed through performance metrics that CFOs understand.
Yet the tremendous success of performance marketing now presents a growth ceiling for many organizations. We see this challenge every day. Brands have become extraordinarily good at measuring demand capture, but far fewer have access to continuous, real-time signals that explain how consumer attitudes, preferences and purchase intent are evolving before those changes in mindset and behavior show up in the funnel.
The ability to track short-term performance outcomes has naturally trained marketers to prioritize what they can reliably measure. It’s also reinforced longstanding skepticism in the C-suite about the fuzzier ROI of brand campaigns.
But even the best demand capture will eventually stall without solid demand creation.
Forward-thinking marketers need to address this growing blind spot in ad strategy. Moreover, it’s time for the industry to rethink how we measure brand campaigns. Marketers can now find smarter ways to measure awareness, perception and consideration lift and use those insights to build the same kind of optimization engine that makes performance marketing so successful through a cycle of measuring, understanding and refining to drive better outcomes.
