Brand Health Re-Emerges as Strategic Imperative Amidst Performance Decline

The marketing world is grappling with a fundamental shift, moving beyond the hyper-focused performance metrics that dominated the COVID era. This conversation reveals a hidden consequence: the very tools designed to prove immediate ROI are now creating a blind spot for long-term brand building. As performance returns diminish and AI reshapes search, marketers are being forced to rediscover the value of brand health, a concept previously relegated to traditional advertisers. This analysis is crucial for brand marketers, agency leaders, and publishers who need to navigate this "brandformance" correction and understand why investing in brand awareness is no longer optional but a strategic imperative for future relevance and competitive advantage.

The Performance Trap: Why Immediate Gratification Undermines Lasting Value

The marketing landscape is experiencing a correction, a necessary recalibration after years of prioritizing immediate conversions. During the digital boom, particularly the COVID-era surge in e-commerce, the mantra for many brands became direct response: "Are people clicking my ads, coming to my websites, and buying my products now?" This laser focus on metrics like cost per acquisition (CAC) and return on ad spend (ROAS) created a generation of marketers, dubbed "the iPad kids of advertising" by Tim Peterson, who grew accustomed to instant gratification. Publishers, in turn, hired sales teams trained solely on this performance-driven approach.

The non-obvious implication? This relentless pursuit of immediate results, while seemingly productive, has inadvertently hollowed out long-term brand equity. As Kimeko McCoy notes, "Everybody's haunted by return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, last click, in-platform metrics..." This obsession with the bottom of the funnel has left many brands ill-equipped to articulate or even measure value beyond direct sales. The challenge for publishers, as highlighted at the Digiday Publishing Summit, is the need to retrain these sales teams from performance pitchers to brand awareness advocates. This isn't just a skill gap; it's a fundamental reorientation of how value is perceived and communicated. The immediate benefit of a direct sale obscures the downstream cost of neglecting brand perception, a cost that compounds over time.

"Everybody's got to figure out how to tie their brand performance. I'm so sorry to have to bring up the funnel here if anybody's going to get PTSD from this."

-- Tim Peterson

The AI Imperative: Brand Health as a New Frontier

The resurgence of brand health metrics is not merely a cyclical trend; it's a strategic adaptation driven by seismic shifts in the digital ecosystem, most notably the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). Brands are realizing that their presence and perception within AI-driven search and content generation are becoming critical. As McCoy explains, brands are now concerned about "creating a synonymous digital presence and have like a healthy brand... to be pulled into these LLMs, to be considered for ChatGPT ads." This means brand health metrics--awareness, consideration, intent, and "softer metrics" like new customer acquisition--are regaining prominence not as abstract concepts, but as essential components for ensuring visibility and relevance in an AI-first world.

The delayed payoff here is significant. While immediate performance metrics offer a clear, albeit narrow, view of ROI, investing in brand health is a longer game. It builds a foundation that ensures a brand is discoverable and positively perceived by AI systems, which are increasingly becoming the gatekeepers of information and consumer attention. This requires a different kind of measurement, moving beyond simple conversion rates to understanding how consumers perceive the brand and how that perception influences purchasing behavior over time. The systems thinking here is that a brand's reputation becomes a critical input for AI, directly impacting its discoverability and, subsequently, its performance.

"We're looking at brand health metrics... with new channels creeping up, OpenAI, LLMs, and things like that, that's like part of the fold where brands are now like, 'Oh, shit, we've got to create a synonymous digital presence and have like a healthy brand,' right, 'to be pulled into these LLMs, to be considered for ChatGPT ads, yada, yada, yada.'"

-- Kimeko McCoy

Media Mix Modeling: The Bridge Between Brand and Performance

The increased sophistication and accessibility of Media Mix Modeling (MMM) are providing the crucial bridge between the nebulous world of brand health and the tangible demands of performance. Historically, MMM was an expensive, enterprise-level tool, accessible only to the largest corporations. However, as Peterson points out, "Now it can be obtained for, hypothetically speaking, $10,000 a year, in some use cases, or even built internally." This democratization of MMM, further aided by open-source initiatives like Google's Meridian, allows brands to finally connect the dots between their brand-building efforts and actual sales outcomes.

This is where the concept of "brandformance"--the fusion of brand and performance marketing--finds its analytical backbone. MMM provides the framework to demonstrate the value of brand awareness and consideration to CFOs, justifying investments that don't yield immediate, direct conversions. For instance, Media by Mother's experience with clients hesitant about live sports marketing--where immediate ROI is not apparent--highlights this challenge. They needed brand health metrics to convince clients that the value, though delayed, was real. The systems implication is that MMM allows for a more holistic view, showing how brand investments create a feedback loop that eventually drives performance, even if the causal chain is longer and more complex than a direct response ad. This is precisely where conventional wisdom, focused solely on immediate returns, fails when extended forward into a complex media environment.

"The tricky part about MMM is like things change so much. Like, immediately after COVID, it's just like, do MMM, do media mix models even hold up anymore when you have this like, hopefully once in a generation, once in a lifetime event that just kind of scraps everything?"

-- Tim Peterson

The Long Game: Building Durable Advantage Through Brand

The core takeaway is that the pendulum is swinging back from pure performance to a more integrated approach that values brand health. This shift is not about abandoning performance but about recognizing its limitations and understanding how brand building creates a more durable competitive advantage. The "iPad kids of advertising" are learning that instant gratification can lead to a plateau, as many D2C brands discovered when they hit customer caps and realized the need to build genuine brand loyalty.

The challenge lies in patience. Investing in brand health is a long-term play, often requiring months or even years to fully materialize. This is precisely why it creates separation. As McCoy notes when discussing the hesitation around Super Bowl advertising: "their clients were like, 'Well, we can't prove the efficacy of it immediately, so no thanks.'" This immediate discomfort--the inability to prove immediate ROI--is the very barrier that creates lasting advantage for those willing to invest in brand building. The insights gleaned from brand health metrics, when properly analyzed through MMM, can inform strategies that build enduring customer relationships and market presence, a stark contrast to the ephemeral gains of performance-only tactics.

• Retrain Sales Teams: Immediately equip publisher and agency sales teams with the language and frameworks to pitch brand awareness and brand health metrics, not just performance outcomes. This requires dedicated training sessions and role-playing exercises.
• Invest in Brand Health Metrics: Prioritize the measurement of brand awareness, consideration, and intent. This involves adopting or expanding the use of tools and methodologies that can track these "softer" but critical indicators.
• Embrace Media Mix Modeling (MMM): Leverage accessible MMM tools to connect brand investments to sales outcomes. Dedicate a portion of the marketing budget (e.g., 1-5%) to MMM analysis to build a data-driven case for brand spending.
• Develop AI Visibility Strategies: Actively monitor and strategize around how brands appear and are perceived within AI chatbots and LLMs. This is a new, but rapidly growing, area of brand health that requires proactive attention.
• Accept Delayed Payoffs: Shift organizational mindset to value long-term brand building over immediate conversion metrics. This requires buy-in from senior leadership and a willingness to invest in strategies with longer time horizons.
• Reframe "Brandformance": Understand "brandformance" not as a buzzword, but as the strategic integration of brand and performance, enabled by robust measurement like MMM. This requires a nuanced understanding of how brand perception influences the entire customer journey.
• Longer-Term Investment (12-18 months+): Focus on building genuine brand loyalty and recognition, which pays off in sustained customer acquisition and reduced reliance on costly performance channels. This investment creates a more resilient business model.