The Multiplier Effect: Brand x Performance Advertising.
The False Choice Costing CMOs Real Money
Marketing leaders continue to divide budgets between "brand" and "performance" as though these were competing priorities. This separation has become so ingrained that many organizations maintain entirely different teams, agencies, and measurement frameworks for each. The logic seems sound: brand builds awareness over time, performance drives immediate sales, and each requires distinct expertise.
The logic is also wrong. A 2025 study from WARC, conducted with four US data partners including Analytic Partners, found that the relationship between brand and performance advertising is multiplicative rather than additive. Brand equity does not simply contribute to results alongside performance tactics. It amplifies them. Stronger brand equity makes every performance dollar work harder, driving greater efficiency and higher returns from conversion-focused activity.
Balanced Budgets Deliver Measurably Higher Returns
Analytic Partners' ROI Genome database quantifies exactly what happens when companies shift their advertising mix. Brands that moved from a performance-dominated strategy to a balanced approach saw median revenue ROI increase by 90%. The data reveals an equally stark finding in the opposite direction: companies that shifted from a balanced mix toward performance-only saw median revenue ROI drop by 40%.
The pattern holds across categories and markets. Performance advertising harvests existing demand, but that demand must be created somewhere. Brand investment generates the mental availability that performance tactics then convert. Strip away the brand building, and performance campaigns gradually exhaust their pool of persuadable buyers. This creates what researchers describe as a "doom loop" where declining returns prompt further cuts to brand investment, which accelerates the decline.
Instacart demonstrated this dynamic at Cannes Lions 2025, presenting how the grocery delivery platform restructured its marketing to pursue both brand salience and conversion simultaneously. Rather than treating upper-funnel and lower-funnel as sequential phases, Instacart built integrated creative platforms that reinforced brand distinctiveness while driving immediate action. The company reported improved customer acquisition costs alongside stronger brand metrics.
Siloed Teams Create Structural Inefficiency
The problem extends beyond budget allocation into organizational design. When brand and performance sit in separate departments with different objectives, neither team optimizes for total business impact. Brand teams chase awareness metrics without accountability for sales. Performance teams optimize click-through rates without considering whether they are depleting brand equity to hit quarterly targets.
WARC's research recommends planning brand and performance together as components of a unified growth strategy. The suggested starting point is a 50/50 budget split between equity-building and activation work, adjusted based on category dynamics and competitive position. More significantly, the research advises CMOs to abandon the concept of isolated "brand campaigns" entirely. The alternative is integrated creative platforms that serve multiple objectives through consistent strategic ideas executed across touchpoints.
This integration requires different briefing processes, different agency relationships, and different success metrics. It also requires CMOs to make a coherent case to CFOs who have grown comfortable with the apparent accountability of performance marketing. Short-term performance metrics are easier to track and attribute, which has driven the steady budget migration toward digital activation over the past decade. Reversing that migration demands evidence that brand investment pays back, which the Multiplier Effect research now provides.
Recommendations
"Retire the brand-versus-performance debate in your next planning cycle and build unified briefs that demand both memory-building and sales activation from every campaign."
"Present your CFO with the 90% ROI uplift data from Analytic Partners when defending brand investment, finance leaders respond to evidence of compounding returns."
"Audit your current agency structure for artificial separations between brand and performance disciplines, then consolidate briefings around integrated creative platforms."
"Measure brand and performance outcomes on the same dashboard with shared accountability, eliminating the organizational incentive to optimize one at the expense of the other."
Bottom Line: Brand Equity Multiplies Performance Returns.
CMOs who continue treating brand and performance as separate budget lines are leaving measurable revenue on the table. The data confirms what effective marketers have long suspected: these disciplines compound each other's impact when planned together. T
he brands gaining competitive advantage in 2025 are those dismantling the artificial walls between awareness and activation, replacing siloed teams with integrated strategies that pursue both objectives simultaneously.
Start by killing the false choice, and the multiplier effect follows.
