Balancing Brand and Performance: Navigating Traceable Revenue

As marketers, there is an unending debate between brand and performance. This is not a blog post to answer the unanswerable. Instead, it is about how we get closer to the transactional layer and how we assign value to that layer.

As retail media explodes and new technologies enable safe and enhanced identification, we are developing tools and processes that provide clients with deeper visibility into transactional metrics. I call it traceable revenue. Can we draw a line back from spend to performance in both digital and analog categories? Increasingly, the answer is yes.

It is at moments like these that I put myself in the CFO’s chair. Many marketers are still stuck on vanity metrics. But the one person in your organization who places little value on those numbers is the one cutting the checks.

This is not easy work. Transactional measurement efforts take longer. They cost incrementally more. But the marketing department, the C-Suite, and the board can look at each other and say, “These efforts are growing our business.” That is a good feeling.

My new favorite podcast, The Rebooting Show, is ostensibly a media podcast. However, any marketer can listen to glean insights and better understand the complexities of building a brand while driving revenue.

If there is one thread that weaves through each episode, it is the ever-present, unanswerable tension between brand and performance. The internet has enabled what I refer to as the N=1. Almost all our work and media experimentation now revolve around identifying very discrete audiences—often one at a time. This applies to both B2B and B2C efforts.

If you and your agency are not asking the right questions and demanding actionable insights, you are already behind the curve. I don’t know the magic formula. More to the point, I don’t think one exists. That is where we—the last of the humans—come in. Judgment matters. You don’t need to know everything, but you need to surround yourself with colleagues who want to keep learning. You know where your brand is in its life cycle—so what tools do you need to be better? You are not playing the impressions and clicks game anymore. You are a revenue driver.

This is my pitch to you: Keep studying. Keep asking the next question. And, if you don’t listen to The Rebooting Show, you are missing out on great dialogues about modern issues that you live and breathe every day.