This week, we're digging into why so many marketers know how to craft a healthy media mix, but don’t. Plus, we dig into building a mix that actually balances brand and performance.
—Elena
63% of a brand's visibility inside large language models comes from long-term brand equity.
AI has been proven to reward brands that are well-known and well-associated in the world. Mental availability is now a factor in whether your brand gets surfaced at all.
Build a media mix you can actually defend.
If marketers know the 60/40 principle works, why aren't more of them doing it?
It's a measurement infrastructure problem. Performance channels show up in budget reviews with clean ROAS numbers. Brand investment shows up with a regression model nobody fully trusts. So budgets go where they're easiest to defend.
What are the warning signs that a brand has over-indexed on performance?
Watch for the activation that performs so well you start thinking you could build your whole business around it. Red Lobster's all-you-can-eat shrimp serves as a cautionary tale. It went off the charts, then the brand filed for bankruptcy. Brand equity erodes quietly while the promotion celebrates loudly.
If a brand wants to rebalance, where do they start?
Treat it as a multi-year shift, not a sudden reallocation. Carve out budget for reach-oriented TV that puts you in front of people who aren't yet in-market. Then ask what percentage of your media budget is reaching completely new audiences?
How should measurement change if you're running both brand and performance?
No single model tells the whole truth. Run marketing mix modeling continuously and refit it quarterly. Layer in geo testing for causal proof and run brand tracking as a leading indicator of future revenue.
“What’s Stopping CMOs from Investing in Brand Building”
WARC's David Tiltman identifies the structural, procedural and cultural blockers keeping marketers from acting on what they already know, from C-suite misalignment to measurement systems built for short-term metrics.
Not everything shows up in a dashboard.
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
— William Bruce Cameron, sociologist
This newsletter comes from the hosts of The Marketing Architects, a research-first show answering your biggest marketing questions. Find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.