The Performance Treadmill

“I’m going to be talking about why I hate ‘performance marketing’,” Les Binet announced ahead of next week’s PMW Unlocked conference. 

Over a decade has passed since IPA’s ‘godfathers of effectiveness’ published their seminal work, yet the long and short of it is—we’re still not getting the balance right.

“The term ‘performance’ implies that everything else—brand advertising, PR and sponsorship—is wasteful and unproductive. ‘Non-working media,’ as they are sometimes called. That’s just nonsense,” Binet says. 

“Research shows that those long-term activities are the main drivers of sales and profit in the long term. Not only that, but they also make ‘performance’ work harder.”

The 60:40 rule remains a marketing tenet, but in reality, The CMO Survey finds “the actual ratio is 31.2% (long-term) and 68.8% (short-term). 

Binet suspects this is down to shrewd packaging: “Performance marketing has done a very good job of selling itself. Too good. It needs to be taken down a peg or two.”

The pitfalls of pitting brand against performance

To clarify, Binet’s not suggesting we torch short-term tactics. “Direct marketing, paid search [and] promotions are crucial to business success in the short term, and you’d be an idiot not to use them,” he says.

Eric Seufert—whose 2021 blog on the subject sparked so much discussion, he revisited it in a podcast episode last year—similarly views brand and performance as a false dichotomy. “What primarily causes the confusion that leads to inappropriate investments is the notion that brand and performance marketing sit at the same hierarchical height. But they don’t.” 

Seufert views brand as another tool in the performance arsenal: “Brand and performance marketing aren’t both taxonomy categories; performance marketing is a category, and brand marketing is a tactic that can sit within the performance marketing category.” So there’s no need to swaddle brand in mysticism—nor toss it in a silo. “Optimally,” he says, “the brand function should sit within the performance marketing team and be guided by a unified measurement model.”

The neatest summary came from Seufert’s co-host, Stewart Johnson, who likened brand and performance to left hand vs. right hand, and that “the CMO—the brain—needs to be able to coordinate both hands, strategies, tactics for successful marketing.”

Can CFOs and CMOs ever speak the same language?

Finance has spent 11 straight quarters tightening budgets, with 57% of CFOs admitting they default to short-term targets over long-term bets. Three-quarters of finance leaders are in risk-containment mode for 2025, which means marketers must prove effectiveness instantly—or watch their budgets vanish. 

“Firms keep cutting research budgets in favour of cheap, quick research techniques that give the wrong answers,” Binet laments, adding “AI and tech is making good research quicker and cheaper [...] or at least it should be.”

No wonder 61% of marketers now rank performance-driven paid media as their most critical channel (up from 52% in 2022). Not because it’s the best approach, but rather, it’s the easiest to justify. A campaign goes live, the dashboard lights up, and marketing buys itself another quarter. 

But behind those instant wins lies a growing demand for clarity—“one lens” to prove how each pound, whether brand or performance, pays off. 

Our latest deep dive makes it clear that transparency can corrall CFOs from side eyeing brand budgets. As Ian Whittaker told us, “CFOs are looking for intellectual rigour for how you’ve gone about inputs [...] What are the assumptions you’ve made? What’s the process you’ve gone through to get that end result?” 

Helen Southwell, finance director at Yorkshire Tea, reminds us that objective analysis matters. “Finance professionals value [...] facts and figures. Having a third party corroborate internal viewpoints strengthens the case; it provides a good level of rigour,” she notes—an approach that reassures CFOs of the methodology behind the seeming madness attached to brand building.

“Winning CMOs work hand in hand with CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, and CROs,” according to WARC. Perhaps the secret is to build a real connection with your CFO. Find “someone who is your ‘bridge’ to the finance teams,” suggests Rocket Companies’ Jonathan Mildenhall, and task them with “joining up the languages of marketing and finance.” John Hills, VP of marketing at Crowdcube says getting personal—say, knowing your CFO’s into cycling—can help reframe brand building from an abstract cost to a strategic asset. 

Meanwhile, the role of the CMO is quietly morphing to bridge the gap. In January, Kimberly-Clarke announced “a new model centered on market-leading creative,” that sees brand and performance elevated in tandem through roles like chief growth officer and chief creative and design officer. 

“They’ve always been seen as combative forces between the magical and the measurable,” says Chris Plating, CSO at EP+Co. “The humanity of marketing is essential as is the measurability of impact to shareholders.”

A path off the performance treadmill

“One of the biggest outtakes of (effectiveness) awards season last year was that brand consistency is key,” Hannah Jones-Walters, MD at KesselsKramer London advocates. “From McCain to Specsavers, we saw how long term investment in brand positioning paid off. That’s an approach we champion ourselves: a consistent, holistic approach to branding and communication.”

Another Digiday piece published this week hints at how better metrics can help brand reclaim its seat at the table. Mark Myers, chief commercial officer at iSpot, told Digiday: “If you [take] 1% of your media budget and put it towards measurement, you can justify the other 99%.” 

That lines up with Binet’s suggestion that if brand is dismissed as intangible, the solution is to invest in more precise ways of gauging its impact. 

Econometrician Dr Grace Kite tells us that in brand building, it’s the little things that count. “You get 35-65% more sales for the same budget if you use 5 media channels instead of one, and up to X2 the effect on brand metrics,” she wrote last month.

Kite argues that brand building is no longer a monolithic event, but a cumulative process—a new count of small, coordinated synergies that, when aggregated, drive significant shifts in consumer perception. Rather than relying solely on big, headline-grabbing metrics, marketers must measure the incremental impact of every touchpoint across multiple channels.

Jellyfish’s Tom Roach seconds this sentiment. “We’re in a third age of effectiveness [...] when we win by combining long-term brand efforts with short-term performance efforts. In this era, brands will get and stay big via a collection of smalls - simultaneously reaching and finding relevance with multiple audiences in a highly fragmented media ecosystem.”

He continues, “We now need creative metrics that scale. It’s no longer enough to pre-test one execution and believe the score is representative of the value you’ll create.” 

Where does that leave the marketing majority?

If you’re caught between CFOs demanding immediate ROI and the quiet promise of lasting brand equity, it’s tempting to pour every dollar into short-term, “performance” marketing.

But Binet’s crusade to rename it (or at least deflate its superiority complex) stems from a real problem: we keep calling short-term stuff “performance” as though brand-building doesn’t perform. And we keep letting CFOs assume that brand isn’t pulling its weight because it doesn’t deliver next-week conversions.

The real challenge isn’t choosing between brand and performance; it’s integrating them so that short-term activations and enduring brand equity work in concert. Emerging shifts in C-suite roles hint that the old divide is more myth than reality. 

“We see brand and performance not as opposites but as fuel for each other. For our clients, it pays off,” Jones-Walters added. “With citizenM hotels, who we’ve worked with for 18 years, a consistent brand awareness investment has taken them up to 24% awareness in the US over 2-3 years.”

For a closer look at how mid-market brands can navigate this balancing act, we spoke to CFOs, practitioners and successful brands on how to achieve scale without traditional mass media approaches—or breaking the budget. Read our latest deep dive in full.

Natasha Randhawa, newsletter editor.