Most brands don't fail at performance marketing. They fail at what makes performance marketing work.

WARC's Multiplier Effect research has quantified it: brands running an integrated brand-plus-performance strategy see a median 90% uplift in revenue returns compared to performance-only approaches. 

The difference isn't media spend or targeting sophistication. It's whether the brand has done the upstream work that makes downstream conversion efficient.

Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer Adrian Tennant explored this tension in a recent webinar alongside Dr. Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, CEO of Neurons Inc. and a neuropsychologist who has spent his career studying how brands live in the brain. 

The conversation reinforced a pattern Adrian has watched play out across categories: the brands that win at performance are almost always the ones that have invested seriously in brand. The sequence matters. 

Here's Adrian’s six-point framework.

1. Protect excess share of voice (ESOV)

Share of voice (SOV) relative to share of market (SOM) is the most powerful leading indicator in marketing econometrics. If SOV falls below SOM, the math works against you. It's a documented structural tendency: brands below SOV parity tend to lose market share over time. Brands above it tend to gain.

The problem is that share of voice rarely comes up at budget time. Teams focus on channel allocation, creative production, and performance targets. By the time numbers are finalized, the ratio is already wrong.

"Build this check into your planning process before budgets are locked," Adrian said. "If you're below parity, make the case for closing the gap early. Changing it after the fact is far harder."

2. Deploy distinctive assets in every execution

Logo, brand colors, sonic signature, visual characters: these are not decoration; they are memory architecture. Every time a distinctive asset appears in context, it reinforces the neural pathways that make a brand easier to recall at a buying moment. 

Dr. Ramsøy described this through the brain's convergence zones: multimodal areas that consolidate all sensory associations around a brand. The more consistently those inputs fire together, the stronger the memory encoding and the more positive the brand associations attached to it.

Which means the performance ad that strips out brand assets to focus on the offer is doing two things simultaneously: capturing some demand today, and quietly weakening the infrastructure that generates demand tomorrow.

"Consumers don't tire of brand assets nearly as quickly as the internal team does," Adrian noted. "What feels worn-out internally often still has significant equity externally."

3. Use 60/40 as a default, then reason your way to the right ratio

Les Binet and Peter Field's 60/40 rule (60% brand, 40% activation) from their report, The Long and the Short of It, is the most widely cited heuristic in brand planning. It's also frequently misapplied: either ignored entirely or treated as a fixed rule regardless of context.

It's a starting point that requires adjustment. New brands need more brand investment. Mature market leaders can often activate more aggressively. Categories with long purchase cycles need more brand than high-frequency repurchase categories.

WARC's Multiplier Effect research adds a useful floor and a useful ceiling. Their recommended floor: at minimum, 30% of budget on brand equity work, with 40 to 60% as best practice. The ceiling signal: if search spend exceeds 25% of total budget, the brand is likely over-harvesting,  activating against demand it's no longer adequately replenishing.

"When you adjust from the default, document your reasoning explicitly," Adrian said. "Stakeholders are far more likely to hold the line on brand investment when they understand the logic behind the allocation."

4. Validate creative before buying media

This is the recommendation that meets the most resistance and has the clearest ROI.

Predictive attention testing can tell marketers, before a dollar is spent on media, whether creative is achieving brand registration, whether distinctive assets are landing in the right attention hotspots, and whether cognitive load is appropriate for the environment.

"Think of it as quality control before shipping," Adrian said. "Manufacturers don't skip QC because they're behind schedule. The same discipline applies to creative. A campaign that looks right internally but fails the attention test in market is expensive to discover after the fact."

The shift this enables: from "we believe this works" to "we know how this is being processed." In a high-cost media environment, that certainty is worth building into standard process.

5. Separate brand and performance on the scorecard

Short-term metrics (e.g., ROAS, CPA, conversion rate) measure activation efficiency. Long-term metrics (brand health, mental availability, distinctive asset recognition, category entry point associations) measure brand equity. 

These are different things. They should live in different reports, reviewed on different cadences by different stakeholders.

"When they're mixed together, short-term always wins," Adrian said. "The numbers are cleaner, the cycles are faster, and the urgency is more immediate. Brand metrics that take months to move can't compete in a quarterly review against conversion data that updates daily."

Separating the scorecard ensures both conversations happen and prevents the slow substitution of brand health for activation efficiency, a trade that's often invisible until the base has eroded significantly.

6. Make brand equity erosion visible with MMM data

The strongest argument for brand investment is not conceptual. It's empirical, and it's already sitting in the data.

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) separates base sales (the demand that exists without paid marketing) from incremental sales driven by current spend. If the base is declining, brand equity is eroding. The brand is running activation campaigns against a shrinking foundation.

"Present the trend to budget holders," Adrian said. "The conversation about brand investment changes completely when you're not asking anyone to take the long view on faith, when you can show them, in their own numbers, exactly what's happening to the demand they haven't yet paid to capture."

Final thoughts

The through-line across all six points is the same insight: brand building and performance marketing are not competing priorities. Brand investment is what makes performance marketing efficient. Mental availability built upstream lowers conversion costs, reduces price sensitivity, and raises the share of search downstream.

As Adrian put it: "You can't harvest demand that you haven't created."

Source: This article is adapted from a Neurons Inc. webinar: Brand Building in a Performance-Driven World. Adrian Tennant is Chief Strategy Officer at Bigeye, a strategy-led creative agency based in Orlando, Florida.