Brand vs Performance

Edition #463

A great example of brand vs performance from ANZ, AI fraud on Spotify and 007.

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How could I not touch on this Mark Ritson piece, featuring ANZ bank in New Zealand. It lifts the veil on how a brand campaign, got stretched into other areas and lost its way.

“And you try to build brand and achieve customer acquisition all within the same ad, you end up not doing either one particularly well.”

Not that this is news to those in the hot seat. But that’s the point of the post, to some on the adtech side of the equation this is news. As he says “we are beset with experts telling us that brand and performance is a false dichotomy.“.

He goes on,

“Clearly, you can sell product in the same ad that builds brand. It is not impossible. It might be unavoidable. And it happens all the time. But what you will find, just as ANZ found, is that usually these ‘double-duty’ ads don’t deliver as well as campaigns that split up their budgets and approach the two missions of brand and sales in a separate but contiguous fashion.“

Give the whole piece a read, it mirrors a chat I had with a friend at the start of summer. Brand is about building, performance is harvesting things that brand has built. An ad designed to do one thing well, is going to do better at that than one trying to do two things. It’s not rocket science.

But where it gets blurred, is us, the humans in the equation. Our measly decision making and balancing internal company objectives, and trying to keep competing priorities happy. In this continual theme of AI, maybe this is a problem AI will help solve for us ha.

But save this, put it in your Evernote, Google Notebook, Notes. You’ll probably reference it at some point in the next few years.

And this segues into another little story, in the US, someone has been charged for driving up fake listens on Spotify, and collecting $10m in royalties.

What’s not touched on in any of the discourse (and maybe it has been dealt with elsewhere) is that surely on the other side of that $10m, some portion of that was advertisers, who had their ads play to AI bots.

About 10% of Spotify revenue in 2017 was ad supported. Did those advertisers get recourse? Credits? A new threat with advertisers which had maybe not considered, ad fraud, for an audio platform, requiring logged into authenticated users.

Question is, did the AI bots prefer the performance or brand ads? :D.

Also coming up week after next, on the 23rd, getting advertisers together and then on the Thursday, folks in the attention space. Please do come along, say hi.

Notable stories this week

• Walmart leverages Fubo’s takeover ad format to connect content, commerce.
• OffBall launches as new sports culture brand.
• Amplitude unveils new experience to make digital analytics easy for everyone.
• The Guardian US hires Sara Sadler as new Advertising Chief.
• Taylor Swift drove nearly 338k people to Vote.gov with Kamala Harris endorsement post.
• Amazon is quietly bringing ads to Rufus, its Gen AI search engine.
• Media leaders, philanthropists raise $15M for local news initiative in LA.
• Advertisers plan to withdraw from X in record numbers.
• Coca-Cola commits to ‘critical’ open web advertising through curation.
• Publishers are likely to pay more for ad costs if Google spins off its adtech.
• Streaming media’s body count.
• Peter Kafka’s podcast returns to Vox.
• The CEO of $50 billion adtech giant The Trade Desk is calling for Google to be broken up.
• Unraveling the mystery of PubMatic’s $5m loss from a “first-price auction switch”.
• Why holding companies are taking a ‘platform’ approach to pitch more cohesively.
• Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective?
• A case for new metrics in B2B marketing.
• How innovation is ushering in the next phase of advertising post-Oracle.
• Google will automatically opt new advertiser out of controversial parked domains.
• Google’s response to DOJ trial this week – Google competes by offering tools that deliver for both buyers and sellers.
• OMD Worldwide’s Ben Hovaness on what we’re getting wrong about the open web.
• How publishers can protect their businesses from the threat of AI.
• Media’s version of Founder Mode.

Deals/M&A

• InMobi Secures $100 Million in Debt Financing to Fuel AI Expansion.
• WPP returns to acquisitions with UK creative agency New Commercial Arts.
• WSC Sports partnered with Snap to enhance the flow of content for sports teams.
• Crackle Technologies raises $1.7m to boost publisher advertising revenues.

Campaign of the week 

• Pierce Brosnan as The Traveler for Kith & Giorgio Armani.

• Switzerland Tourism is back again this year, promoting Autumn, this time pairing Mads Mikkelsen with Roger Federer.
• How Stacker distributes sponsored content to thousands of publishers. Great example of direct influencer voice to a specific community the company wants to get in front of.
• Making Generative AI accessible to every business. AWS with Wired.

View all 2024 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

• “Clearly, you can sell product in the same ad that builds brand. It is not impossible. It might be unavoidable. And it happens all the time. But what you will find, just as ANZ found, is that usually these ‘double-duty’ ads don’t deliver as well as campaigns that split up their budgets and approach the two missions of brand and sales in a separate but contiguous fashion.” –Mark Ritson.

Datapoints of note

• 64% of brands are planning to sustain or increase their podcast investment in 2024.
• In Q2 Snap upper funnel brand revenue declined by 1%, lower funnel direct response revenue grew by 16%.
• 67m watch the Trump Harris debate.
• 90% of 110mm+ active PlayStation users play single player games, they’re consistently 60% of time.

Events

• Attention Happy Hour, next one coming up end of this month.

View all 2024 datapoints of note.

That’s it for this week.