As performance marketing matures and AI transforms how we buy attention, brand value is reasserting itself as the true long game.

I’ve been in this business long enough to remember when branding was everything. When marketing folk talked about disruption and distinctiveness and memory structures. When strategy led creative, creative led culture, and culture sold product. Then came the revolution. Suddenly, performance marketing—with its dashboards and acronyms and unholy obsession with “the funnel”—shoved branding into the passenger seat. 

At first, it felt like progress. Real-time results. Conversion at scale. Who could argue with that? And don’t get me wrong—we still embrace this efficiency-and-effectiveness model. But the pendulum swung too far, and something got lost: the soul.

Because here’s the thing: eventually, the driver gets tired. The car slows down. And someone has to reach over, grab the wheel, and remember where the hell we are going.

That someone, it turns out, is brand.

When the clicks stop clicking

Between 2018 and 2022, global performance marketing spend ballooned by 85%. It was the era of optimization euphoria—cheap CPMs, attribution tools, and the dopamine rush of watching ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) climb before lunch. Every CFO’s dream. Every marketing director’s new addiction.

Then came the crash. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency flipped the script on ad platforms. Meta’s costs rose 18% last year, while average conversion rates? Flat. TikTok made us all chase relevancy like lab rats in a marketing maze. And suddenly, performance wasn’t so… performant.

French skincare darling Typology, a model of minimalist cool, quietly scaled back performance in 2023 after watching their cost-per-acquisition soar 37%—with no lift in customer lifetime value. Across the world, Southeast Asian super-app Grab realized that luring new users with discount codes was no match for brand loyalty and local relevance. They slowed their acquisition treadmill and started storytelling.

And that’s the point. Performance can get you traffic. But if your brand isn’t worth returning to, you’re just buying one-night stands.

The Rebrandening

This isn’t some nostalgic swing back to Mad Men-era sentimentality. This is a correction—a realization that brand and performance aren’t enemies, they’re estranged siblings who forgot they grew up in the same house.

And while performance marketing was hogging the spotlight, brand didn’t disappear. It just shapeshifted—into PR hits, surprise-and-delight stunts, strategic sponsorships, collabs, partnerships, podcasts, product placements, and physical moments that made people look up from their phones and pay attention. The formats changed. The job stayed the same: build meaning, memory, and trust.

In 2024, Kantar’s BrandZ report showed that brands in the top quartile for equity outperformed the S&P 500 by 137% over the last decade. So no, storytelling isn’t a soft metric. It’s compounding interest.

Look at Tanishq, a mass-premium Indian jewelry brand. In 2023, they launched an emotionally charged Diwali campaign focused on interfaith marriage—bold, controversial, unmistakably human. They didn’t run a single promo. Favorability jumped 22%. And their share of conversation skyrocketed.

Over in Spain, delivery platform Glovo—the local hero fighting Uber Eats—ran a campaign featuring neighborhood restaurants. No influencers, no discounts. Just real people and real places. They saw repeat orders rise 19% in a single quarter.

This isn’t the death of performance. It’s the rediscovery of balance.

The AI Arms Race—and the Homogenization of Everything

Let’s talk about the giant algorithmic elephant in the room.

Generative AI has revolutionized performance marketing. You can now produce 1,000 banner variations before your morning coffee cools. Launch 10,000 A/B tests before lunch. Scale personalization across every channel. And still somehow serve the same ad everyone else is serving.

Consumers are drowning in lookalike content. Eighty-eight percent say ads “all feel the same,” and nearly two-thirds skip them automatically (Ipsos, 2024). And they’re right. We’ve made performance so efficient, we’ve stripped it of flavor. The algorithm is winning. The audience is yawning.

Brazilian fintech Nubank, one of the most advanced digital banks in Latin America, ran AI-personalized campaigns in 2024, tailoring messages down to the individual. But their best-performing ads weren’t the most personalized. They were the ones that remembered the brand’s original promise: banking that actually felt human.

Automation is incredible. But it can’t fall in love with your brand. That still takes craft.

Brand Is the Moat

You can outbid your competitors. You can mimic their UX. You can match their discounts. But you can’t fake meaning.

According to McKinsey, strong brands deliver three times the shareholder returns of weaker ones. And not because they talk louder, but because people believe them. They’re remembered. Shared. Sought out.

Dr. Oetker—the unassuming German food brand best known for baking powder and frozen pizza—became a Gen Z TikTok favorite in 2024, not by buying its way into feeds, but by leaning into absurd, self-aware content that no performance dashboard would’ve greenlit. They didn’t target youth. They amused them.

In Australia, ME Bank—a modest regional player—rebranded around the idea of “a bank for people, not profits.” They skipped the discounts and leaned into values. Deposits spiked. Turns out, values convert too.

And brand isn’t confined to comms. It’s in product design, customer experience, community strategy, even which event you show up at and how. The best campaigns now use every tool in the marketing kit—paid, earned, shared, and owned—not just to sell, but to mean something.

Brand and Performance Are Finally Talking Again

The smartest marketers aren’t picking sides anymore. They’re building systems. Performance is the engine. Brand is the fuel.

Campaigns that blend emotional resonance with activation logic deliver 60% better business results (IPA, 2023). In Kenya, ecommerce platform Jumia timed brand-first campaigns around national holidays, followed by precision retargeting. Click-through rates surged 34%.

And let’s be honest—much of the brand work that drives performance doesn’t show up on a media plan. It’s the podcast guest spot that sparked word of mouth. The experiential moment that became a social post. The earned article that reminded people why they liked you in the first place.

This isn’t about a new channel. It’s about orchestrating them all in service of one coherent idea.

What Brands Should Do Next—Especially With AI Agents in the Driver’s Seat

Now the plot thickens. Because the next customer you need to impress may not be human at all.

AI agents—those digital concierges baked into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Amazon—are already parsing product options, placing orders, and filtering choices. They won’t fall for your emotional arc. They’ll scan for trust, structure, clarity. And if your brand doesn’t show up cleanly and consistently, you’re not getting picked.

So what now?

• Get your story straight. AI agents rely on structured content and coherence. If your brand is muddled, you’re invisible.
• Be machine-readable. Your values, positioning, proof points—they all need to be published, tagged, and searchable.
• Be emotionally remembered. Because when humans do intervene, they’ll choose the name they recall with warmth.
• Run two playbooks. One for humans (story, feeling, trust). One for machines (clarity, consistency, metadata). The magic happens where they intersect.

The offline world still matters too. Every panel appearance, surprise-and-delight gesture, and physical interaction builds the brand that algorithms end up referencing. The machines are watching us watch each other.

Final Thought: Attention Is Cheap. Affection Is Not.

As AI floods the landscape with infinite options, real human connection becomes the only scarcity that matters.

Performance marketing isn’t going anywhere. But it’s not enough. Brand is how people—and algorithms—decide who to trust, who to remember, and who to choose again.

You can buy impressions. You can win the bid. You can win the moment. But you can’t performance-market your way into someone’s heart.

Sources:

• Statista
• Deloitte Global CMO Survey (2024)
• Kantar BrandZ Report (2024)
• McKinsey & Company
• IPA (Binet & Field, 2023)
• Ipsos Global Trends (2024)
• YouGov India (2023)
• Meta Ad Trends (2024)
• WARC Global Marketing Index (2024)