Performance Branding: The Disciplines That Should Never Have Been Separated

When digital advertising appeared multinational advertising agencies around the world faced a major problem. As these are corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees, training all of them—especially in technology aspects, such as pixels, programming, and cybersecurity—for about three years, so they could understand digital advertising, represented an extremely high cost.

Instead of training all staff, particularly in the technological side—like SEO, how to use it, and even how to exploit it—they began to take branding campaigns and simply publish them on social media. In fact, they never made a true transition to digital advertising. You can see this because creative directors and executives don't know how to use the tools, don't know SEO, and never consider it when solving problems; they treat everything like traditional media, posted on social networks. Thus, a gap emerged of all these people who were needed for digital campaigns but did not exist, and what we call performance marketing began to appear.

The Business Decision That Created the Gap

Performance marketing is mainly made up of programmers who took it upon themselves to learn how advertising tools work, and they began to produce much better results than the branding teams publishing campaigns. Thus, this was called performance marketing because it delivered results. In reality, it's not that these are two separate disciplines; rather, they were separated by a business decision.

Why Content Flooded Social Media

In the world of traditional advertising—like TV, billboards, and radio—these media were extremely expensive. You would spend tens of millions on a 30-second TV ad, plus hundreds of thousands on placement. Thus, we used to spend a lot of time perfecting the idea, because once it was produced, you couldn't go back. When digital advertising came, these once-expensive media became almost free. What happened is that agencies began to think, "How can we still charge the same hours we used to spend crafting a big idea if now it costs less than 1% of what it used to?" Thus, the idea arose of creating content to fill all the hours that disappeared when you no longer needed so much time for idea generation, since, in digital advertising, you can do small tests and scale from there.

What happened was that a wrong perception of how digital advertising should be done was created: one, because teams are not trained, and two, because the idea of constantly producing content was a business decision by the agency to keep charging the same hours. It had nothing to do with how digital advertising actually works. Thus, this separation between branding and performance was a business decision, not necessarily a real separation that must exist.

Branding should be something that generates results; it should be a key part of generating outcomes, just like a value proposition, changing perceptions, and segmenting audiences.

We, at The Wow Agency, bring these two disciplines together because we know they should never have been separated. There are many problems that can be solved with technology or with a combination of technology and creativity, and this turns out to be much more efficient than just doing content campaigns that simply flood social media with content nobody sees and nobody wants to see—creating a very wrong perception and, at the same time, saturating the market with very low-quality content. The perfect balance should be specialized branding creatives who fully understand the programming tools needed to create a successful campaign—such as SEO, generative engine optimization, strategies like click fraud, scraping, lead generation, and many other tools that exist in the digital world and are used to shorten the time needed to generate results in sales.