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And here’s why: The two aren’t disparate approaches to the same problem. They are complementary tactics that, when done right, boost each other’s impact to deliver an even greater ROAS. We get that you might be skeptical, because it’s easy to see exactly how performance drives results, but nearly impossible to tie brand efforts back to revenue. But it’s not impossible.
What brand media actually does
Performance is pay-to-play marketing. With a good agency partner, the more money you put in, the better your return should be. Brand media is more amorphous; its impact is less measurable. While both can be used to drive awareness and reach, brand marketing builds a relationship with consumers over time. It’s this long-term investment that inspires a customer to recommend your brand to a friend. That builds trust with consumers who haven’t converted yet. It sparks conversations and conversions that performance marketing simply can’t. It is the foundation upon which performance media is built.
Investing in one without investing in the other is a losing game. Here’s why you need to change the way you look at brand marketing.
Why 95% of your market doesn’t know you yet
At this moment, roughly 5% of your market is actively looking to buy. And they’re going to get caught up in the lower-funnel performance media tactics that are designed specifically for them. The other 95%? They are living their lives and might not even know that your brand exists. This is why brand media matters.
Real-Life Example: A national pet brand relied heavily on performance for a new product launch. Despite a good media strategy and flawless execution, consumers didn’t show up to buy. Using cross-channel data, we identified the core constraint as low brand awareness, not poor media efficiency. So we shifted to a brand-first, full-funnel strategy, prioritizing awareness and familiarity before scaling performance. Once consumers knew who the brand was, they drove a +72% YoY revenue increase.
Growth doesn’t happen at the bottom of the funnel. It happens at the top where the 95% are forming opinions about the brands they’ll actually consider when the time comes to act. And this is where most brands are failing.
Brand and performance aren’t competing priorities. One feeds the other. Full-funnel marketing should be an integrated system where brand and performance work together to create demand, not just capture what already exists.
The importance of brand investment
There are a few common barriers to brand investment, and we’re going to address the biggest two head-on.
Investment Shortfalls
With performance driving strong, immediate results, it can feel like there isn’t enough investment to prioritize brand efforts. So oftentimes they exclude those efforts altogether. In WARC’s 2025 “The Multiplier Effect” report, researchers showed that allocating just 30% of total investment to branding efforts improves holistic ROI.
And that’s exactly what we saw with a healthcare client in a highly competitive market. By investing in brand awareness and trust before scaling performance, our strategy delivered 20% YoY revenue growth and a 10% increase in market share within 12 months.
Results Metrics
Thanks to technological advancements, performance media efficiency is table stakes. And that’s a good thing, but it also means strong performance media won’t set you apart from your competition for much longer.
Brand is where growth happens, but it’s a long-term investment with a measurement horizon that most organizations aren’t set up for. Connecting brand spend to business outcomes has been genuinely hard to do. Until now.
When the data finally tells the whole story
Wpromote built Polaris IQ specifically to close the gap between brand investment and revenue outcomes. Here’s a real-life example:
A YouTube campaign’s ROAS was below one, making it a prime target to get cut. But brand lift data told a different story: YouTube was driving the strongest brand equity gains across all channels, with unaided awareness up five points and purchase intent up eight among exposed audiences in just month one of tracking. The campaign was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. The attribution model just wasn’t built to show it.
That kind of visibility changes everything.
Polaris IQ takes in a plethora of data points to build a unified view across brand and performance, showing how they work together. Partners with Tracksuit and Lucid for brand lift studies, we track awareness, consideration, and favorability among exposed audiences, giving clients an external validated signal alongside our own data. Reach and frequency analysis, incrementality testing, and attention tracking expand the aperture. More data isn’t the point here; it’s having data that accurately ties back specific efforts to exact results.
Brand and performance, planned as one
At Wpromote, we solve problems. While we start with the business problem, that inevitably leads us to the client problem. It’s the ingenious solution to both problems that informs our media plans, creative briefs, and consumer strategy. Brand objectives and performance objectives aren’t separate workstreams that get reconciled at the QBR. They’re part of the same conversation from the beginning.
Our difference-maker: We fix the data gap between brand marketing and performance metrics. Using the Care Index, our proprietary framework that determines a brand’s unique opportunity for growth, we hold the brand portion accountable. Combined with Polaris IQ, we get a holistic view of channel performance and know where to push forward and where to pull back. The result? Revenue we can directly tie back to performance and brand.
Your performance gets better when brand does too
Performance marketing delivers important, short-term results. But the longer a business goes without investing in brand, the sooner the performance market begins to dry up. If consumers aren’t learning about your brand and building trust, then no amount of performance marketing is going to bridge that gap.
Real-Life Example: An ecommerce client had already optimized core performance channels and was looking for incremental growth, not just more efficiency from the same audiences. We expanded their strategy by introducing immersive, brand-led formats, including AR on social and OTT activations. These channels were designed to reach and influence audiences earlier in the journey and raise brand awareness. The impact was clear: 4.5x increase in brand lift and 7.3x increase in purchase lift. By investing in brand, the client captured demand more efficiently and created new demand that performance channels could convert in the future.
What it all means
If 95% of your potential consumers are forming opinions and are unaware of you right now, and you’re only focused on the 5% ready to convert today, you’re winning a smaller game than you could be. Brand investment isn’t a bet against performance. It makes performance work harder over time.
Wpromote has the measurement infrastructure to prove it. Talk to a strategist today to learn how you can begin leveraging brand and performance to win the big game.
