Brand Advertising vs. Performance Advertising: Which Is Right For You?

What is Brand and Performance Advertising?

According to Joel Rubinson, the goal of Brand Advertising is to drive brand favorability by leading people to think or feel something new about your brand while the goal of Performance Advertising is to drive Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) by reminding people of the positive things they already know about the brand.

See the below table from Joel’s “Framework for Managing Brand vs Performance Advertising” compares Performance advertising with Brand advertising.

	Performance advertising (harvesting)	Brand advertising (planting)
Goal	Drive ROAS	Drive brand favorability
Mechanism	remind people of what they already know about your brand	lead people to think or feel something new about your brand
Theory	Recency theory as articulated by Erwin Ephron	Classic brand funnel; salience, memory structures
Measurement	focused on behavior…digital conversions and sales	focused on surveys that document brand lift (improved awareness, brand equity, consideration, etc.)
How	Target existing heavy and medium users: preferably when they are ACTIVE (i.e. ready to buy)	Reach needs to be broader than current users. The distinction between active and dormant consumers becomes irrelevant.
Drivers	Efficient CPMs and targeting are more important than creative.	Creative and brand narrative matter most. Plays to the strengths of video.
Evidence	targeting the right consumers with higher media weight levels can produce 20 TIMES the ROAS (e.g. vs. mass market), as documented in my white papers and case studies.	Conversion rates of brand favorables are 2-5 times higher than non-favorables but is this difference sustainable over time?

 

How are Brand and Performance Advertising conducted?

Methods

• Advertising Tracking
• Concept Testing
• Qualitative research
• Quantitative Research
• Market Segmentation Studies
• Sentiment Testing
• Social Listening
• Surveys
• Focus Groups
• In-depth telephone interviews

 

Techniques

• Ad Guidance Framework
• Ad Effectiveness Score
• Customer Acquisition Forecast™ and Customer Commitment Persuasion™ (CCPersuasion™)

 

Software used

• Brand Trackers
• Data Management Platforms (DMPs)

 

 

Key Metrics that are tracked with Brand Advertising and Performance Advertising

Brand Advertising

• Brand Awareness
• Advertising Awareness
• Purchase Consideration
• Brand Attribution association
• Purchase Intent
• Recall
• Persuasion

 

Performance Advertising

• Number of conversions made
• Number of Sales
• Value of Sales
• (Return of Advertising) ROAS

 

What kind of questions are best answered by Brand Advertising and Performance Advertising surveys

Brand Advertising

• Is this campaign effective at highlighting the benefits of our service over our competitors?
• How are the advertisements impacting brand awareness?
• Is our current media spend driving awareness?
• What is our current brand awareness compared to the competition?
• How do customers shop for similar products?
• Who is our ideal target?

 

Performance Advertising

• Are customers being inspired to purchase after seeing our ad?
• How can we improve our ad targeting so customers remember our product when they make a purchase?

 

Brand Advertising Or Performance Advertising Which Should You Invest In?

The answer depends on the stage in the life cycle and current performance. According to Joel Rubinson’s GreenBook article, “Framework for Managing Brand vs Performance Advertising” marketers should focus on Brand advertising in the Introduction and Growth stages of the product life cycle when “advertising elasticity for new brands is 2-3 times greater than the elasticity for mature brands.”

Marketers should focus on Performance advertising during the Maturity and Decline stages of the product life cycle to “reminding people of what they already know…use a healthy dose of performance approaches to reinvigorate ROAS. You can even still use brand messaging in long-form but in all cases, delivered via precision-targeting to users…harvesting.”

 

How else would a marketer know when to shift money between brand and performance marketing?

Marketers would benefit from an ad guidance system that tracks performance in two areas:

• Brand intender score (a composite measure of digital upstream behaviors and survey-based brand favorability measures)
• Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) performance score

The stronger the brand intender score, the more latitude you have to shift towards performance marketing.  As long as the brand intender score is high, you are not hurting the brand by harvesting super-high ROAS.

If the brand intender score is declining, a continued focus on performance advertising can create a death spiral…you get a high ROAS from fewer and fewer consumers.

 

 

Additional Tips

Joel Rubinson has tips for that researchers create an ad guidance framework “that will enable Marketers to dynamically shift ad spend allocations between performance and brand advertising in a fact-based way.”

 

Companies with excellent Brand Advertising and Performance Advertising strategies

Orbitz

Orbitz was seeking to distinguish itself on an emotional level and create a distinct and memorable brand personality from the other online travel agencies.  It developed an integrated marketing campaign with three objectives: differentiate from competitors, resonate with consumers and spark conversation. Orbitz came to Invoke in the early stages of concept testing to evaluate three potential creative campaigns. After analyzing the data, Invoke was able to identify one concept as a clear frontrunner.

The “Take Vacation Back” advertising campaign yielded 11MM PR impressions in print and online, including coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, Forbes, and AdWeek. Facebook effectiveness also spiked – yielding 2.2MM+ impressions and nearly 92K referrals back to Orbitz.com. And, its YouTube view counts exceeded all previous commercial performance over a 2-week window. Despite having the lowest advertising spend among the top online travel agencies in 2012, Orbitz generated an awareness level 50% higher than the category norm (36% vs 23%).

 

Coca-Cola

On Superbowl Sunday, February 2nd, 2014, Coca-Cola aired an ad where people of various ethnicities were singing ‘America the Beautiful’ in their own languages. Immediately after the airing of the ad, all hell broke loose on Twitter and other social media platforms as some audience members were offended that the song was being sung in languages other than English. Digital MR had initially harvested the posts to analyze them and show brands the importance of high sentiment accuracy in social analytics in social listening, competitive analysis, and crisis management.

During the 8 days before the Superbowl, there were 139,997 posts about Coca-Cola in the English language; 22% Negative, 7% Positive and 71% Neutral. During the 8 days following the airing of the ad, the number increased by 169% to 376,382 posts. The interesting fact here is that although the number of posts increased by 169% after the campaign airing, the number of negative posts still accounted for 22% of the total while positive posts jumped to 51%. The number of neutral comments dropped to 1/3 of what it was; from 71% to 27%. Digital MR concluded that the negative reaction to the ad prompted a group of passive social media readers to express their disagreement with the racist comments, which indirectly was positive support for Coca-Cola.

 

 

The original version of this article appeared here.

 

Our best resources for learning more about Brand Advertising and Performance Advertising

Blog Articles

An Insider Look At Reinventing Brand Equity Tracking

New Paradigm for Advertising Effectiveness Research & Measurement

Customer Acquisition Forecast

Brand Tracking Meets Behavioral Science" href="https://www.greenbook.org/insights/research-methodologies/fame-feeling-and-fluency-when-brand-tracking-meets-behavioral-science" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Fame, Feeling and Fluency: When Brand Tracking Meets Behavioral Science

The Myth of Millennial Ad Responsiveness

 

Case Studies

Brand Tracker in Financial Services

How to Plan & Track Your Way to a Successful Campaign

Ad Testing Helped a National Auto Company to Create More Effective Ad campaigns

Research to Develop a B2B Ad Campaign for a Leading Rental Truck Company

The Amazing Paradox of Negative PR for Coca-Cola

Research Now & Carat track Cross-Media Campaign Effectiveness for Three Power Brands

 

Webinars

[Webinar Recording] Stop Tracking Trends. Start Measuring Their Volatility.

[Webinar] Rethink Your Tracker: Get More From Your Tracking System

 

Additional resources for learning more about Brand Advertising and Performance Advertising

Why you are getting the wrong answer on advertising effectiveness

 

Find a company that specializes in Brand Advertising and Performance Advertising

 

Photo by patricia serna on Unsplash